I don't know why they call you "The Hedgehog" either, Ron. |
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I'll never forget the day that I had my biggest laugh at a friend's innocent expense. Looking for some quality adult movies that she could watch with her husband, my friend Sam called in to my previous radio show and started taking notes as I spouted off some titles. Around the time that I got to naming my all-time favorite porn flick, THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES PART 3, I began to go through one of those moments where I talk to myself. I was trying to determine if it was part 3 or part 4 that starred Ron Jeremy as the man in hell wearing the diaper.
Sam stopped me at that point and asked who Ron Jeremy was. I thought she was joking. But in her porn naivety, she'd apparently managed to not figure out that Jeremy is the most well known man in the industry. She was unaware of the 996 titles of his that are currently in his imdb.com resume. It was at that moment I got one of my best laughs in the last couple of years, and later realized that I am either a really in-depth porn movie geek or just a horny bitch with too much time on her hands.
I remember the first time that I stumbled upon a porn flick. It was hidden away in my dad's stash, an unmarked VHS tape that I mistakenly popped into the VCR thinking that I would find some R rated movie that my parents didn't want me to see. When a woman wearing nothing but a sheer, frilly camisole appeared on the screen, I watched transfixed. I was around 11 or 12 at the time, already 99% of the way through puberty (yeah, I started young) and fascinated by other women's bodies. Females have a tendency to look at tits and ass more than males do at that age. Some of us because we're budding lesbians and most of us because we're creating that monumental chip on our shoulder of always thinking that someone else is better looking, thinner, or more sexy.
After a couple of minutes of watching this woman walk in a haze between what looked like tables in a nightclub, I noticed one man reach out and stroke her ass. Then there was a shot of her face, mouth pursed in that late '70's, early '80's porn "Ahhh... Ooooo!" look. When the camera cut to her bottom again, it showed the guy slipping a finger in and out of her vagina.
I realized then that this was more than just an illicit R rated movie hidden away from my nosy pre-teen eyes. This was one of those "porno" movies that my buddy Andy down the street was always talking about. His brother supposedly owned a good number of them and Andy bragged about being able to watch them when his brother was away at work. Being that I always hung out with guys, the next time that I saw Andy, I mentioned what I had found in my dad's stash. I then requested an opportunity to watch some different titles that his brother had in his collection. Little did I fully comprehend, my watching XXX rated movies with my 12 year old male buddy was not necessarily "normal" behavior for a girl.
I snuck porn all the time after that. I was absolutely enthralled by the actresses, their bodies and what they could do with them. I never watched porn from the sexual standpoint that teen boys did. This was not my stroke off material. I felt that it was the sex-ed information that had been kept hidden from me. I didn't realize that the women might have been faking, nor did I appreciate that it was a movie. For some reason, it always stuck in my head that this was what sex was supposed to look like and that anything other than this wasn't up to par.
To make a long story short, my boyfriends really liked me when I was growing up.
As I got older and more frustrated with my sexual encounters, I started to reevaluate porn. After high school I got a job working for Video Super Shops, this small chain of independently owned and operated video rental stores. The initial store that I was hired in had a very small XXX rated section that I mostly stayed clear of. The barrier was low and there were few shelves to contain the titles that we carried. Whenever a movie needed to be put away, there was no point in trying to alphabetize it when the tape would get rented by a new customer within hours. So the majority of the time I just threw the tapes wherever was most convenient.
A few months into my employment I was promoted to assistant manager and transferred to a different location. This was the largest of the stores in 
Peter North secret? 2 bushels of celery, boys. |
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the chain and each section of the store was triple the size of the first place that I'd been working at. That included the porn section. A large, quartered off area that was marked by one small red plastic sign (as opposed to the multiple red plastic signs affixed to the tops of the other "normal" genres throughout the store) marked "Adult." There were volumes of shelves in that portion of the store, all of the boxes displayed prominently and their accompanying plain plastic boxes with the VHS tapes lined up behind them.
While I'm not the most anal-retentive of people, there is one thing in life that can calm my borderline ADD nerves. I love to alphabetize. At a video store, this little soothing habit of mine is a valuable asset. By the time that I had been working at that store for 2 weeks, all of the catalog sections (that's what they refer to the "comedy," "horror," "drama," etc sections as) were exactly to our inventory lists.
It took me awhile to work my way up to the porn section. I spent 3 hours in that little quartered off room the first day that I worked on getting it organized and alphabetized. My teenaged coworkers found hilarity in taping a hand written sign reading "Zara's Place" over the small plastic red sign. But by the end of the night I'd not only gotten the section in perfect order, I'd also given myself a pre-imdb/google education in porn.
I studied the names of the actresses and actors on the boxes, learning that most of them were repeated over and over. I figured out who the higher paid actresses were based on their fancy, almost soft-core porn looking covers and excessive make-up and hair. I figured out that you were more respected if you were on Vivid or Wicked's roster. If the actress wasn't as pretty, the boxes of her movies would be more graphic, often with her holes gaping open to entice potential viewers to give an unknown girl a chance.
I figured out that you were more likely to be on the Vivid roster if you were blonde, had DD or larger implants and were Caucasian. I could name all of the well-known black and Asian actresses on one hand (Heather Hunter & Asia Carrera, respectively) and could only place Mexican actresses on the gaping-hole titles, although it was hard to tell that they were Hispanic based on their blonde highlights and blue contacts. Well, unless they were on the cover of "Latin Honeys" or some other blatantly titled flick.
I started to take home these movies and watch them late at night in my room. By this point I'd earned enough money for my own television and VCR and was putting them to good use. (Well, whenever I wasn't over at my boyfriend's house re-enacting scenes from SEX TREK.) Men in porn, I discovered, weren't as valuable as the women and yet there was a smaller pool of them working in the industry. There needed to be a talent that they possessed in order to stay popular, although most of their talents weren't ones that could go down in any record book sanitized enough for the generalized public.
Peter North was fairly good looking, athletic in appearance and could produce more bodily fluid than an average newborn. TT Boy was another stud, this time one who didn't stand out due to size or appearance but well-appreciated in the industry for his stamina. I stumbled onto Ron Jeremy later on, mainly after I identified him in a tape that was filled with porn "bloopers." One of the scenes featured a co-star of Jeremy's being filmed expelling bodily fluid on Jeremy's face while he napped on a couch and a film crew catching his "Well, gee... there's egg on my face!" expression.
I learned which porn stars dated rock stars and movie stars, from Savannah screwing Slash (attack of the singularly named "stars") in a bar during his G'N'R days to Ginger Lynn buying condoms with Charlie Sheen at the Thrifty's my dad worked at in Santa Barbara in the early '90's. I found out which of the classics were still floating around (Sharon Mitchell, Annie Sprinkle, and Seka amongst others) as well as discovering that there was a Zara who was popular as well. (Zara Whites. She actually started out as a Penthouse model before transitioning into porn movies.)
By the time that I was 20, I was burnt out on porn. I'd watched so many titles, I'd managed to completely desensitize myself to the sex as the kids of 
She's skinny because she's got cancer. Real enough for you? |
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today are desensitized to bloody, mindless violence. When a beau would pull out a tape, I would critique its direction style, the quality of the actresses' boob jobs and ponder over how much editing was done to get it to look like the guy maintained his erection for the entire shoot. I could do everything that was being done onscreen. The mystique was completely lost for me.
Not that there ever really was a grand mystique to bust. As a female, I knew that these women went home and took shits, farted and ate too much food after starving themselves all day long. By the time that I was 20 I had friends who worked as strippers and nude models. I was never a girlie-girl who applied a ton of make-up or wore tight anything (unless it so suited me to do it). But watching my friends taught me that these women went home, took off their stilettos, used a heaping handful of Pond's to chisel away the eyeliner and slumped down on their couches in their sweats to fall asleep while watching "Mad About You."
Many of them had grown so desensitized to working in the sex industry that they no longer desired to have sex when they got home. What they put on display was 100% an act, a personality that they designed for the sole purpose of earning money with the most valuable asset that they possessed: their body. The service that they were providing to the community was lost on that same community. They were designed to get men riled up, go home to their wives and still maintain a healthy lust for sex.
My problem with porn and the sex industry in general isn't with these women. It's not with any of the people who work in the industry. They're doing their jobs, what they are good at, just as certain people are cops and others are doctors or lawyers. My problem is with the patrons of this line of work.
See, unlike cops or doctors, women in the industry don't go home and be porn stars. They don't wear the thick make-up and the skin-tight clothes. They prefer to f*ck in beds with the lights off after spending 12 hours trying to get the perfect shot of their vaginas being penetrated while they're standing with one foot on a fake rock and one hand propping them up against a fake waterfall. Porn actresses are just that: ACTRESSES.
Too many of the men who buy their tapes (pardon me, DVDs) really live for the mystique of the porn star. They truly believe that if they pray to the right gods, send in enough letters to Santa Claus and help enough old ladies across the street that they'll get to go home with one of these girls. That she'll really be the living, breathing embodiment of the chick who giggles while telling you that her turn-on is "confident guys with a sense of humour and a little bit of a tummy!" They close their eyes and think that when they open them, a blonde Barbie is going to be bent over on their bed, batting her fully made-up eyes at them and beckoning with a come hither statement like, "Come on... Ride me, cowboy!"
Women in porn aren't getting misused. They're not being taken advantage of. They're not leading to the decay of our society. They're simply the underappreciated Angelina Jolie's of this world. They are actresses who will never be seen as such. They're performers who will always be stared at in the grocery store by the horny bagger who manages to place their face when they come in without make-up.
What we need to start doing is treating our little boys the way that we do when they watch a scary movie. As parents, it's not uncommon to lecture our children after a bloody or traumatic scene in a flick with a cautionary, "You understand that this is fake, right?"
Well, it's time to step up to the plate and do the same with porn. Instead of pretending that it's something to be hidden (a feat practically impossible in a world when the average 14 year old has visited a few dozen porn sites and seen more action than most of us VHS dinosaurs ever could have dreamed of), we need to act as aloof as we do after a movie starring whichever World Wrestling Whatever is popular these days. We need to point to the pretty blondes with the fake tits and calmly explain that, "you know that's all fake, right?"
Then that way we might actually get to enjoy porn again.
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| Neglected Foster Child of Hollywood |
Every other Wednesday
Not-so-gentle musings from the girl who is saving room in her uterus for Tarantino's spawn.
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| AwesomeZara |
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