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Sex Industry Insiders: Notes from the Catwalk, et al

  
 
grant
19:13 / 09.05.02
I found this piece thanks to a mutual friend. it's so good:

When you’re out in the daytime and you see another dancer on the street, you don’t always acknowledge each other. Your eyes will meet, and often there will be an almost imperceptible shake of the head, an indication that you shouldn’t approach. Maybe she’s with family, or a guy who doesn’t know what she does. And even if she can think fast enough to invent another context for knowing you, the two of you probably don’t know each other’s real names. You don’t want to unthinkingly say, "Hey, Bambi," or "Amber," or "Gemini," or "Venus." So it’s best to not even speak to each other; you’ll see her later, maybe even tonight. Still, there’s an excitement in this silent communique, a sense of two spies exchanging signals in enemy territory.
 
 
The Monkey
22:05 / 09.05.02
A very well-written article. Thanks for posting it, grant. If you found this interesting, you would probably enjoy (is that the right word under the circumstances? Perhaps "appreciate" or "find value in" would be more apt...) the documentary "Live Nude Girls Unite!" At a later date I might have more pithy thoughts, but right now I just feel sort of sad and dumbfounded in a distinct misandrogenic fashion.
 
 
grant
14:42 / 13.05.02
Apparently, there's other short pieces on the internet by the same writer. Am looking now.

Interesting to think of the stripper as inherently a spy; the disrobing being a way to create secrets and a secret life.
 
 
grant
13:43 / 14.05.02
Here, Elissa Wald defends her novel about firemen, Holding Fire, which is unabashedly erotic, and coincidentally hit the shelves on the 11th of September, 2001. Part of it, she admits, is based on her own relationships with different firemen.

http://www.nerve.com/Opinions/Wald/flameWar/

There's an excerpt too.

It was her rape fantasy that made her give him her keys in the first place. A set of keys along with her work schedule of the next several months. He could only use them once, she said. She didn't want to know when.
And in fact it was so many weeks before he did that she had no longer believed he would. She was no longer mounting the stairs with trepidation; her heart wasn't pounding as she unlocked the apartment door. By the time he used them, she would have screamed had his powerful arm not cut off her air, coming around her throat in the dark. She had a moment of unadulterated terror as her hand flew to claw at that arm. In that first second of contact -- as soon as her fingertips touched his muscle -- she knew exactly who it was and it made sense but even in the wake of relief her heart hammered on with leftover adrenaline, exactly as she had fantasized....

That's just the middle part.

The end part involves a change of role and a strap-on.

Not that this has all that much to do with the politics of stripping. Although the power relations are there, and the gaze, too, I suppose, in the reading of it.
 
 
grant
18:26 / 06.06.02
Here, another woman talks about her experience in the sex industry:

I Was 19, a Virgin, And Penthouse’s First Summer Intern
, Suzanne Sherman, New York Observer.

quote:
After dinner, I stashed the magazine under my bed. Penthouse deserved a dark, dusty and secretive space, despite my parents’ peculiar acceptance of porn. Every night I opened it wide to the center, exposing the three metal staples securing the pages. The Pets, with their perfectly feathered hair, seemed to coo in silent ecstasy, their parted lips revealing a bit of tooth or tongue. Their nails were long and perfectly painted, unlike my own bitten-down stubs that ran over the magazine’s cool gloss, smudging the pages. Their breasts seemed inflated, like water balloons near bursting, and their pudenda were swollen and shaved to a thin swatch of heart-shaped fuzz. I was both disgusted and fascinated by this pornographic perfection. I attempted to mirror their droopy bedroom eyes and parted lips before I went to sleep in my twin bed.
 
 
grant
22:33 / 18.07.02
Here's another sex industry piece that's hysterical.
It was featured (excerpted and read by the author) on "This American Life" last weekend.

True Porn Clerk Stories
by Ali Davis


Excerpt:
One of my favorite concepts in anthropology is that of the polite fiction. It's something nobody believes, but we all pretend to because it makes life so much easier. My favorite example was of a Pygmy couple. Pygmy divorce involves quite literally breaking up the home: the couple tears apart their house (it's easy - the houses are made of leaves) and once it's down, the union is dissolved. One anthropologist was watching a long-married couple have a fight. It escalated until the wife threatened to leave, and the husband yelled something along the lines of "Fine!" and there was nothing the wife could do but start tearing down the house. She began tearing the roof off, clearly miserable. The husband looked wretched too, but at this point neither could back down without losing face and by now the whole village was watching.

Finally, the husband called out the Pygmy equivalent of "You're right, honey! The roof is dirty! It'll look much better once we get those leaves washed!" The two of them started carrying leaves down to the river, soon with the help of the whole village, and then washed and rebuilt the whole roof. When the anthropologist later discreetly asked how often one washes the roof, everyone looked at him like he was a complete doofus.

The polite fiction of the porn section is that, while people do generally use porn for the purpose of masturbation, there is no reason to believe that this particular customer will be doing so. He could be using them for his Master's thesis. Hell, he may not get around to watching them at all. We all like to believe that. When it becomes all too clear to everyone involved that said customer did, in fact, not only lube up, watch the tape, stroke himself to orgasm, and then grab the goddamned thing without even taking the basic courtesy of washing his goddamned hands first, we all get uncomfortable.

On the other hand, he gets angry because he's ashamed of something that was entirely avoidable and his own fault. I'm supposed to keep my temper even though I've just put my hand in a wad of his semen.

The destruction of the polite fiction is what creeps me out about one of my weekend regulars. He comes in when I open at nine, then chooses and rents two movies. He leaves for exactly two movies' worth of time, then returns them before four to get the matinee special. I hate it because there's no way to pretend he's been doing anything else. I just hope to God there's been a hand washing between him and me. I think there is, because his tapes are always clean, but it still gives me the shivvers and sends me straight to the hand sanitizer. It's just too much to know.
 
 
grant
16:19 / 19.07.02
One more quote, because I can't help myself:

Finally we got tired of our visitor and decided we'd rather roust him than catch him in the act and call the cops. (Catching a customer vandalizing, stealing, or masturbating and getting him arrested means a bonus because word gets out in the dirtball network that we prosecute. So waiting to catch a guy in the act is a temptation, but then it also carries the risk that he might finish before the police arrive.) Which meant that I got to roust him - for some reason the other people at the store, including management, have decided I'm good at flushing people out of the porn section. I'm not sure why, but I have two theories. The first is simply that I am pretty much the polar opposite of the women on the porn boxes. I don't know if I am a harsh dose of reality or if I remind them of their moms or their girlfriends or their wives or just the archetypical Feminine Principal or what, but straight guys hate it when I'm down there putting away tags. They just can't seem to deal with me, so sometimes just simply going downstairs is enough to clear the area of dirtbags and legitimate customers alike.

I do like to think I'm pretty good at it when I actually have to card them and/or ask them to leave. I try to make it a face-saving situation for everyone and acknowledge that yeah, the store's 21-and-over policy really sucks. I try to be as easygoing about it as possible, especially when I have to throw out a bunch of kids.

I get sort of conflicted about throwing kids and teenagers out of the porn section. I really don't want them down there, not because I think sex is dirty or bad, but because I don't want them to think that that's what sex is about. The stuff on our boxes is sex in the basest, sometimes most brutal terms - naked women spreading their relevant orifices and making that Porn Face. Unless you're talking about the Max Hardcore series, which involves women with "SLUT" and "WHORE" written across their foreheads in lipstick. And besides - do we really need to raise another generation of men who can't deal with pubic hair?

So I don't feel bad about getting them out of there, except that I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm a woman while I'm doing it. I worry that I'm either setting up or reinforcing the idea that there are fun, bad women who like sex and good, boring women who restrict access to sex.

I always want to debrief them. "Hey, guys, it's cool that you're curious, but this isn't the way to find out. Porn is fine, but it's not real sex. Real sex is great, and even good girls love it, but it has to be a two-way street..." But I always just end up with "Sorry, guys - come back when you're 21." Perhaps I should write a children's book. Porn Is Healthy and Fine, but Only as a Temporary Physical Release.
 
 
grant
18:25 / 06.09.02
Don't read this if you're easily depressed or at work.

A struggling porn filmmaker's diary - trying to break into the business to make "smart" porn films.

In some of the entries he does devastating deconstruction of his own porn shorts, shot by shot. Such that the aura of sexiness is totally deflated, and you're left with a business transaction. A rather unsatisfactory business transaction for all concerned.

In others, he complains about the difficulties in dating "porn girls" - buying movie tickets & dinner for "spoiled 20-year-olds" who, in front of the camera, make more than 5 times what he does behind the camera.

Recently featured on memepool.com .
 
 
Papess
20:28 / 08.09.02
grant, I was directed here from another thread.

Thank you for the links to the catwalk, it is like reading my own thoughts, my own life.

Makes me want to live my whole life over, exactly the same way. ahh...

~MT
 
  
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