Huffington Post Interview

Rachel Kramer Bussel has interviewed me for the Huffington Post.

"There's no 'one answer' in sex industries, and I would hope that these stories serve as a testament to that and underscore that black and white debates over sex work serve no one and only perpetuate a fantasy that certain kinds of men pay for sex and certain kinds of women become sex workers. The guy you work with pays for sex, and the girl next door sells it. If you see yourself in these stories, the players gets humanized, rather than stigmatized."

Read "Best Sex Writing 2009 Interview: Susannah Breslin on Eliot Spitzer and prostitution."

The Letters Project

On January 3, 2008, I started Letters from Johns to find out why men pay for sex. Some 50 anonymous stories later, the project is almost a year old. The original idea was that the project was an experiment, and I imagined that I would only do it for a year. So, on January 3, 2009, I'm going to close submissions for the project. The site will stay online, but no new stories will appear on the site.

The same will hold true for Letters from Working Girls, which I started on January 14, 2008, and will turn a year old on January 14, 2009. Starting on January 14, I will no longer be accepting submissions for this project, although this site will also stay online.

If you're a john or a working girl who wants to tell your story, now is the time. Thank you to all the johns and working girls who submitted their stories. It was an experiment, nothing more and nothing less, and you were the only part of it that mattered.

The Reverse Cowgirl Year in Review

In honor of the year that I pulled my life out of the gutter coming to an end, I thought I would highlight some of the highs and lows of this blog. Ready yourself for the bitchy, the obscene, and the random. Consider this a virtual look back on a year that will, thankfully, never return.

1. In January, I launched a new online project, Letters from Johns, which was followed by Letters from Working Girls. This raised some hackles, which I responded to by wondering "So, It Would Be OK If I Fucked For Money?" Later, I wrote a longer, theoretically more thoughtful response to the Great Working Girl Debate of 2008. The lesson learned? If you publish emails written by prostitutes, some other prostitutes will get angry.

2. In February, I posted an essay I wrote in early 2005 when I was totally out of my mind. It's called "A Porn Valley Story." It's in Best Sex Writing 2006, if you're totally into paper.

3. In March, I wrote a sassy, superficial, and flip review of Charles Bock's Beautiful Children, for which I only bothered to read and review the sexy parts. No doubt a great use of my degree from Berkeley. Then I read the book. Then I asked Bock if I could interview him. Then he agreed. Then I posted the interview. If I'd done the whole thing high on cocaine, it probably would have been more exciting. Hindsight, 20/20, etc.

4. In April, I wrote another bitchy screed in which I said feminists were stupid because they declared the new Grand Theft Auto misogynist. This won me no friends and got me invited to no parties. Sadly, I spent the rest of the month crying into my soup and wondering why no one likes me.

5. In May, I reviewed Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel, Snuff, which I thought totally sucked ass. Really, it was just horrible. I want to throw up right now, just thinking about it. Speaking of puking, that month I also interviewed a scat video director. Strangely, this was one of my proudest moments of the year. Go figure! I'm nuts.

6. In June, some asshat plagiarized me.

7. In July, I got signed by Endeavor. I also got some Fox Searchlight Anal Beads (TM) in the mail. These two things are not related. I don't think.

8. In August, I went to New York. It was superfuckingawesome.

9. In September, a story I wrote about Spitzergate for Newsweek got selected for Best Sex Writing 2009. Go buy it.

10. In October, I got declared King Shit of Turd Hill, I started contributing to Slate's XX Factor, and I wrote an essay on Max Hardcore that got a lot of attention. If life is like the Special Olympics, I'm a fucking front-runner.

11. For two blissful weeks in November, I guestblogged on Boing Boing. This was one of the highest of the highest of the highlights of this year for me. It was everything I ever wanted to do. And then it was over.

12. In December, I wrote about my new American Apparel ad. A lot of people seem to like it. A lot of those people are women. Women = enigmatic.

Well, that was my year online. From porn to pooping, it's clear that I'm a real class act. Unfortunately, the best story of the year I am not allowed to tell. And it's really good. I wanted to write about it and pretend it was a dream, but I know if I told it, my agent would track me down and shoot me with a Taser, which would be not fun for me. So, someday, maybe. That's all she wrote.

My New American Apparel Ad [Updated]

If you haven't noticed it already, I've got a new American Apparel ad up on the site. The model is adult film star turned star of Steven Soderbergh's upcoming call girl movie "The Girlfriend Experience" Sasha Grey. Won't you welcome Sasha?

The ads are part of a new campaign that only appears here, at my friend Debauchette's site, and on Last Night's Party. Debauchette's model is adult film star Charlotte Stokely, and LNP's model demonstrates the fun that can be had with personal electronics.

While some feminists like to spend their time caterwauling about the supposed sexism of AA ads, it bears mentioning these ads were conceptualized and shot by Kyung Chung, who, it also bears mentioning, is a woman. Previously, Chung got feminist knickers in a crack-splitting twist when she shot herself for a Manhattan AA billboard. Gee, it's a good thing feminists are ripping their hair out and clawing at their eyes and pulling down the drapes over supposedly sexist ads shot by a woman, or I'd have, like, no self-esteem.

According to AA's Shawn Shahani the new ads are "definitely our most racy web ads that we've ever created." And if you're confused as to what's being sold here, Shahani explains: "We're selling socks. Thigh-highs because it gets cold when you're otherwise naked."

You can read about my first ad here, find out what Fast Company has to say about the new campaign here, or buy some thigh-high socks here.

Update 1: Debauchette: "Two things I love about Susannah’s new AA ad. (1) It’s hot. And (2) Sasha Grey has pubic hair."

Update 2: Fimoculous: "In addition to that Sodebergh flick, Sasha Grey is also appearing naked in skyscraper ads for American Apparel around the internet."

Update 3: Gala Darling: "American Apparel have taken the leap to totally naked advertisements — well, except for the socks."

Update 4: Molly Crabapple: "Not a huge fan of AA ads, but oh the lovely Sasha Grey one one me over."

Update 5: Buzzfeed: "A young porn star lands a Hollywood Role and appears nude (like, totally nude) in a new American Apparel ad."

Update 6: Fleshbot: "As far as we're concerned, American Apparel can use sex to sell whatever they want—as long as 'sex' means 'naked Sasha Grey.'"

Update 7: Nerdy Grrl: "Let me just say I can’t think of an ad campaign in the history of ad campaigns that would make me want to buy socks, but, by golly I think I need to go and get me some socks."

Update 8: Nerve: "We always wondered when advertisements would feature nothing but naked woman and the name of the product ... "

Update 9: There are some rumors floating around that the ads are fake. They're not. They're real.

Update 10: SlackerTalk: "Sasha Grey does for pubic hair, what Justin Timberlake did for sexy."

Update 11: Pipeline: "Somehow, Charney's ads, which double as cheeky send ups of exploitation chic and clear examples of actual exploitation, have become targets for post-Feminist love and ire."

Update 12: URB: "However, they've pushed it to the limit this time and decided to just let it all hang out."

Update 13: Scanner commenter Lawston Found points to an amusing and relevant Bill Hicks bit on sex and advertising: "Drink Coke!"

Update 14: Examiner: "This isn't just some sexy model wearing some socks, after all: Sasha Grey is one of the most foul-mouthed females in hardcore porn, and she's somehow managed to take ownership of her own exploitation and twist it around into something like a feminist statement."

Update 15: NBC: "In a move that should not surprise anyone anywhere the latest (NSFW) ads from American Apparel feature a model wearing little to nothing at all."

Update 16: XBIZ: "The ad marks a continuing trend for Los Angeles-based American Apparel, which features many scantily clad models in its advertisements."

Update 17: AVN: "Is it still a 'mainstream crossover' if you're showing bush?"

Update 18: Portland Mercury: "Sex and youth selling clothes is ubiquitous, AA is just not bothering to 'beat around the bush' if you'll excuse the pun."

Update 19: LA Pretty: "And I also love how their ads at least attempt to deviate from the norm by actually portraying real-looking people, which is probably why they're so erotic and unnerving because that's something that we rarely get to see."

Update 20: mashKULTURE: "It was really the only logical next step in the evermore controversial ads that make up American Apparel’s marketing strategy that full-frontal nudity, and the use of porn stars would be inevitable."

Update 21: Debauchette: "If we’re talking about depictions of women, I want to see more of this, of women looking you in the eye and fucking owning their sex."

BSW09

I got my contributor's copy of Best Sex Writing 2009 in the mail yesterday. Thank you, editor Rachel Kramer Bussel. (You can read my essay online.) I am sure this fine book would make for a most delightful, last-minute holiday gift if you are in need, although it probably wouldn't be a good one for your grandmother.

The Best Male Bloggers of 2008

Read my list of the Best Male Bloggers of 2008.

Relatedly, read my list of the Best Female Bloggers of 2008.

Boy, this Best Transgendered Bloggers of 2008 is going to take forever.

Give of Yourself

Since getting a decent job mid-year, in recent months I've been making a monthly donation to charity.

In October, I donated to the Young Women's Empowerment Project, a Chicago-based nonprofit that offers support, information, and counseling to girls and young women who are involved in sex work and street economies.

In November, I donated to Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource, Power to Women and Girls of DRC, a project that provides help to girls and women in Congo who are impacted by the country's ongoing civil war in which rape is used as a war tactic.

In December, inspired by Maud Newton, I donated to Girls Write Now, a New York City nonprofit that pairs at-risk high school girls who aspire to be writers with working women writer mentors. (Maud sits on their board of directors.)

If you think you don't have a lot, there's always someone else who has less. If you help any of these organizations or any others, I think you are awesome. Have a great weekend because it's too late in the year to have anything less.

Are You Not Men?

This photo was sent to me by photographer extraordinaire Greg Watermann. The image file is titled: "PullEmDown." Thank you, Greg, for allowing me to republish it.

I feel like I've been neglecting this blog, for some reason. Even though that isn't really true. I'm working, and when I'm not working, I'm working on the novel. I'm editing and revising and rewriting it. Recently, I hit a bit of a slowwwwww spot. I had to reintroduce my antihero, and I had to rewrite a scene on a porn movie set that was my definitive flashpoint in my personal reality, and I had to re-present a character who used to be me, which was tricky, as you might imagine.

So far this week on the XX Factor, I've written about stilettos and Spitzer. I like writing for Slate. It stretches my braiiiiiiiins.

I like my editor there very much. Her name is Hanna Rosin. I like her because she is a smart cookie, and a great writer, but also because she's about the only editor I've ever met who seems to see me as something other than ... a ... sex writer.

In the not too distant future, I may do some longer features for Slate. And Hanna asked me what did I maybe want to do, if I do that, and I sort of told her what I had in mind, and then she said something back to me that made me think, Oh. That's what I meant.

I told her I want to write about The New Manliness, and manhood in the 21st century, or something like that, and she said something about updating "the Susan Faludi book," by which she meant Stiffed, and I thought, Yes, well, that, exactly.

There's a place I want to go as a possible start for that project, somewhere in Kentucky. So maybe this will take me there. It's too soon to tell. But almost more interesting is the idea that although I'm knee deep in Porn Valley at this moment, it may be that when I'm done with this book, I'll be done with that subject, and then I can write about something else. Which sounds both wildly attractive and totally impossible. Who knows what 2009 will bring?

Porn, Like Sausages, Ceases To Inspire Respect In Proportion As We Know How It Is Made

"Generally I didn't feel sorry for the women in these pictures, but to tell the truth I didn't really think of them all that much — the naked bodies blurred together." -- "The New Face Of Porn"

"Porn has always existed in one form or another. It always will. What consenting adults do for pleasure is really none of my business unless I'm one of them. Arguments over what is obscene and porn policing are a tremendous waste of time." -- Newsvine

"Say what you will about pornography, objectification and exploitation, the growing legitimization of the pornography industry — which led to much more government- and self-regulation — also led to a significant decrease in the kind of exploitation described by those performers as well as increased opportunities for women to participate in the higher-earning aspects of the production." -- Jezebel

"It is not surprising that pornography is not the most pleasant job. It is not really like having sex. But it does not follow that it is less pleasant for the money than many other jobs we don't object to people taking." -- Huffington Post

"Sure that stuff is pretty pathetic and shocking, but I don't feel a lot of sympathy for the women in it." -- Web of Mimicry

Women in Prison

I pulled this photograph off one of my CDs the other day. I went digging for it because I was rewriting a part of my novel where I wanted to use this scene, so I looked at this series of photos that I had taken to remember. The girls were pretending to be in prison. I think the blond was speaking German. The brunette was nice and more submissive. I had met her boyfriend/husband on another shoot. He was very thin. I believe they broke up. The girls were nice to each other. The rest of us stood in the doorway. Me and the director and the photographer. And there was a lighting guy who had a nickname I wish I could remember. And in the room opposite this one, there was this. And it was in the back of a soundstage. In North Hollywood. And it was nighttime. And I came alone. And afterward or before this scene or on another day but at the same location, I watched the same thing happen but with a midget pretending to be a warden and a woodsman pretending to be a prisoner. He had a tattoo on his ass that had an arrow pointing to his asshole, but I can't remember what the message next to it said. Later on he went to prison. Or jail. It's hard to recall when you're trying to turn your head around to see what's behind you. The strange thing is that all the stuff that happened in between fucked up my head in such a way that memory isn't what it's used to be. Mourning in reverse. That's a phrase of my father's. And grief like a slideshow. Only now, from when everything got short-circuited, it's like all the slides got all mixed up. I'll recall one thing, and another unrelated one will surface, and it's like a puzzle that I don't know if I want to put back together again. If you know what I'm saying.

Susie Bright Is Guestblogging On Boing Boing!

Well, the headline kind of said it all, didn't it? See and enjoy the woman who is surely in some part responsible for whatever the hell it is I am today. Last time I interviewed her is here.

A Meat Grinder Amongst Meat Grinders

Yesterday, I posted "What Does Obama's Attorney General Pick Mean For The Adult Movie Industry?" Later, reader Dwayne Monroe emailed me his perspective on the matter. (Title by Dwayne; video via Boing Boing.)

"You wrote:

This is not say that I'm not a staunch supporter of free speech. This is to say that porn, to paraphrase Martin Amis, is a rough trade, indeed. More succinctly put, it's not easy to get fucked for a living. While liberals would like to believe a hands-off approach to porn by the Obama administration is what's best for America's collective free speech, it may be of interest for the new party coming into office to note that the last time Porn Valley was left to its own devices, life was hard, really hard, in Porn Valley.

Excellent point (even if you pressed that clever idiot Martin Amis into service to make it).

It leads to a question: how do you suppress Porn Valley's tendency towards making life hell for its workers? My answer is that you consider that tendency to be only one expression of a general capitalist habit of abuse. In polite society (and the most feverish segments of the 'gender difference' school of feminism -- wherein the difference is that men are pint sized Mephistopheles and women their relentless victims) porn is seen as other, as totally outside of normal discourse.

So, if you're a nutter like me who insists that a crazy and abusive porn director -- and the crazy and abusive world he helps create and inhabits -- is not crazier or more abusive than, say, the CEO of a coal mining firm which pays little attention to worker safety and the hard living that often develops when people know their situation is precarious, you're looked at as if you've announced you're marrying the cat. To most people, porn is the big 'Other' whose abuses are somehow even more spiritually destructive than the spiritually destructive practices of other 'rough trade' industries (or life itself under capitalism, with its never far away threat of destitution).

To bring it back to the point, to 'tame' Porn Valley you treat it as a business -- with all that entails, including the aforementioned tendency towards excess and seeing people solely as means to an end -- and put worker safety regulations in place.

As far as I know, the government's only interventions are verifying performers are of age and that obscenity statutes and 'community standards' are more or less obeyed. More is needed. Auto workers, for example, gained some amount of protection from once common dangers such as losing limbs and employers using head busting tactics by organizing and lobbying for labor friendly regs. This is a model worth following.

Instead of being seen as a business, porn is treated as an emergency -- or, to quote Giorgio Agamben, a 'state of exception' -- requiring crisis tactics. Even people who openly acknowledge the business-ness of the thing tend to slide into emergency descriptions.

The language of censorship vs. free speech is fed from and feeds back into this rhetorical state of perpetual emergency. I think the only way out is to accept that porn, in one form or another, will always be with us (and indeed, may be a necessary niche inasmuch as loneliness, sexual dissatisfaction or simply the need for some visual stimulation now and again are also permanent fixtures).

People appearing on camera for our pleasure are workers in need of protective structures which restrain owner behavior. If workers feel more secure, perhaps less crazy shit will be common.

The 'gonzo' craze can be interpreted as being both a response to falling sales (due to free or nearly so media available via the Internet) and also as a desperate effort by workers to maintain their usefulness to the industry. That is, you can see why the business wanted it and why performers consented.

On the surface, this may seem to be dramatically different from, for example, Walmart compelling its workers to do unpaid overtime (after all, no bodily fluids or filmed records are involved...well, maybe the filming) but my argument is that they're cut from the same cloth if differently shaped."

On that note, have a great weekend, because you're a homo sacer living in a state of exception, and there's no other kind of weekend to have.

What Does Obama's Attorney General Pick Mean For The Adult Movie Industry?

In a nutshell, the answer's not clear yet. While the 80's pitted a conservative administration against the adult movie industry in a battle over obscenity, Clinton's liberal reign of the 90's ushered the porn business into a period of unprecedented, explosive growth. Thanks to Slick Willie's mostly hands-off approach to obscenity prosecutions, Porn Valley became the Wild, Wild West of sex. Just as the internet was growing exponentially, the sex industry, faced with unbridled and uncensored competition online and no longer hobbled by the looming threat of obscenity busts, became increasingly more extreme. From sex stunts ("The World's Biggest Gang Bang" series, in which one woman has sex with over 100 men) to freak shows ("American Bukkake," in which as many as 100 men masturbate onto the face of one kneeling woman) to the truly hardcore ("Rough Sex," in which women were physically assaulted and which was subsequently pulled from the shelves), porn took sex to the outer limits.

As the century turned, the LAPD attempted an extreme porn crackdown that went nowhere. The Bush administration's early attempts to crackdown on obscenity were derailed when 9/11 made it clear pornographers were no longer America's Public Enemy No. 1. By 2005, Ashcroft was out and Gonzales was in, and the new attorney general took it upon himself to refocus government efforts on obscenity related busts. That year saw the formation of the DoJ's Obscenity Prosecution Task Force and the formation of the FBI's Adult Obscenity Squad.

But Gonzales, the OPTF, and the AOS found their task was more complicated than they'd expected. OPTF director Brent Ward discovered state US attorneys were disinclined to spend their time and budgets on hard to win obscenity cases, a tug-of-war that played a part in the US attorneys firings scandal. A year ago, the OPTF's first at bat in a Phoenix, Arizona, courtroom saw the US government go up against a pornographer best known for producing bukkake videos and resulted in the pornographer, Mike Leonard Norton, aka Jeff Mike, aka Jeff Steward, slipping out of the government's grasp on what amounted to a technicality. It was an embarrassment. While the feds won their case against Max Hardcore in a Tampa, Florida, courtroom this October, and 2009 is slated to see the Extreme Associates retrial and the likely trial of John "The Buttman" Stagliano, it remains to be seen what Obama's attorney general pick, Eric Holder, will do when it comes to porn.

Holder, a former DC judge, US attorney, deputy attorney general to Janet Reno during Clinton's tenure, and Obama's current senior legal advisor, is a bit of a mixed bag on free speech matters. Holder's best-known public statement on obscenity dates back to 1998, when the then deputy attorney general issued a memo pushing USA's to pursue obscenity prosecutions. Around the same time, adult industry scribe Mark Kernes reports, Holder met with Paul McGeady, the founder of Morality in Media, a hyper-conservative, rabidly religious outfit zealously dedicated to policing what they perceive to be the pornification of America. In a letter from Holder to McGeady, the deputy attorney general wrote: "...I fully share your concerns about the distribution of obscenity..."

What made this year's presidential election interesting, within this context, was how utterly absent any discussion of obscenity was from the public discourse. Apparently, now that porn has gone mainstream (or so they say), obscenity is no longer a hot button topic. When what was once obscene is everywhere, the once obscene becomes everyday.

For the last decade, I've been covering the adult movie industry. What I find to be most interesting in current discussions of obscenity is how liberals continue to posit virtually any restrictions on adult content are a violation of free speech. Take, for example, Salon's Glenn Greenwald, who asserts the conviction of Max Hardcore is akin to a crime against humanity. As I see it, and as I wrote about at length here, the average American's encounters with porn and the day-to-day realities of Porn Valley are two very, very different things. After several years of visiting porn sets, talking to porn stars and directors, and witnessing the making of some of the most extreme porn out there (including the same bukkake movie the United States deemed obscene in the indictment that led to the Arizona trial), I began to realize the business of making porn is a meat grinder for the human condition. This is not to say that porn should not be made. This is not say that I'm not a staunch supporter of free speech. This is to say that porn, to paraphrase Martin Amis, is a rough trade, indeed. More succinctly put, it's not easy to get fucked for a living. While liberals would like to believe a hands-off approach to porn by the Obama administration is what's best for America's collective free speech, it may be of interest for the new party coming into office to note that the last time Porn Valley was left to its own devices, life was hard, really hard, in Porn Valley.

This post is cross-posted at my blog on the Huffington Post, so if you'd like to comment, you may do so there.

I Do Not Remember My First Trick

I've posted a new letter from a working girl.

"Initially I was pretty and fresh enough in the crack world that all of the drug dealers wanted to take me home with them. On several occasions I found myself living with dealers who would supply my dope habit just to keep me from running the streets. Eventually the dope supply was not enough for me and I went looking for a way to make money so that I could be in control of my dope."

Read "I Do Not Remember My First Trick."

Regarding My Boobs

Last week, I got an unpleasant letter in the mail, stating the results of a mammogram I had were enigmatic. Today I went back for more testing. There was some smooshing and some ultrasounding, and it all went on for several hours, and then in the end the doctor came in and was like: "You're fine." Never has an anti-climactic ending been so enjoyable.

When I was prone on this tilting table that they actually tie you to with a seat belt, I craned my head around to see the live feed from the ultrasound. The nurse jerked the monitor around so I could see it better. It was interesting. All that digital flesh. I tried to think of what it looked like, and I thought: The inside of me looks like waves.

So, I'm not dying of cancer. That kind, anyway. That I'm aware of, anyhow. There may be other things going on in my interior of which I am not aware, of course. But I'm not dead yet.

Little Miss Hood

I uploaded some more photos to Flickr. The first one is LA, Westwood, I believe. The second one is a fetish club outside Amsterdam. The third one is a statue. The fourth one is a guy getting ready for a bukkake. And the fifth one is Hollywood.

Do Not Deliver [Updated]

About a week ago, I got a mammogram, and today I got a letter saying that I need to go back for further testing. According to this, it's probably nothing, but I thought I should post about it, in case this is the start of a slow, horrible, horrifying ride into Deathland. Personally, I'd rather go out in a flaming, high-octane mechanical explosion, but we can't choose everything in life, now can we? I'll be sure and let you know if I'm going to die any time soon.

Update: You are dead. (Via Submarine Channel.)

Update 2: Boobs via Xeni.

Denton And His Uzi [Updated]

Oh no! Mr. Denton has pink-slipped the delightful Sheila McClear. Now Gawker is written only by people Denton may want to have sex with. Things are sad.

Is my Best Female Bloggers 2008 list the kiss of death? I hope not.

I, myself, eagerly await Miss McClear's Times Square peep show memoirs.

Update: Hilarious.

Update 2: Sheila McClear porn!

The End Times

If I have to go through the rest of my life not having seen this show, I don't know that I want to live.

Best Female Bloggers 2008

Over at The Frisky, I created a Best Female Bloggers 2008 list.

"Who are 2008’s best female bloggers? From futurists to postfeminists, octogenarians to mommies, nonbloggers to celebrities, we’ve rounded up the best bloggers who happen to be women."

Find out who they are here.