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ing and “Fuck my tight pink pussy, motherfucker!” coming<br />
from your television. Say goodbye and hang up.<br />
Any family asks, “So, how’s your job?” You answer: “Great!<br />
Yeah, busy as always,” or, “Same old stuff.” My family asks,<br />
“So, how is the porn going?” I answer: “Great! Yeah, busy as<br />
always. Same old stuff.”<br />
This job goes over easy with my folks because they have four<br />
other children with equally unusual careers. One is a brilliant<br />
scientist who deals with some manner of chemistry. One is a<br />
bartender who makes more money than I do. One is a journalist<br />
at a respectable newspaper. And one is a missionary who<br />
made a career of Christianity. My parents are impossible to<br />
shock.<br />
—<br />
1:10 – 1:30 p m : Ten minutes later, receive troubling call<br />
from hysterical friend in need of advice you are not fit to<br />
give. Rearrange weekend plans for a consolation vacation.<br />
My friends are another matter.<br />
When I first started working for Sex World, I made sure everyone<br />
knew about it. Everyone. I’d pass out business cards<br />
to random people for no reason other than to yell, “I TOTALLY<br />
WORK IN PORN!”<br />
I abused the power of these business cards in order to flirt<br />
with men or to get ten friends into the VIP section at every<br />
strip club in town. I was a big hit at my tenth high-school reunion.<br />
People loved my job.<br />
It was novel for a year or two. But then my closest friends<br />
began to show concern.<br />
“So you’re still with Sex World?” they’d ask.<br />
“Yep!” I’d say, with my most compelling grin.<br />
“How long has it been now?”<br />
“A couple of years.”<br />
“And you’re still watching porn all the time?”<br />
“Yep.”<br />
“How much porn do you watch, like on a weekly basis?”<br />
“You don’t want to know.”<br />
“Hasn’t it warped your brain?”<br />
I’ve thought about this a lot. My therapist and I had at least<br />
$1,200 worth of discussions about the effect of viewing an<br />
average of 30 hours of porn per week. That’s 1,560 hours of<br />
porn per year. At this point, I’ve watched at least 6,240 hours<br />
of porn, and that’s just for work.<br />
You’d think I’d be sociopathic or at least burned out. But<br />
I still watch porn for pleasure. If anything, the only noticeable<br />
changes are that my empathy for people has actually<br />
improved, and my porn standards have skyrocketed. I have<br />
pretty stiff requirements these days:<br />
1. I accept videos only from specific companies.<br />
2. The production must be fucking excellent.<br />
3. The female performers must be true sexual dynamos<br />
with no traces of breast augmentation.<br />
4. The male performers must be engaging and aggressive.<br />
5. I don’t like features or storylines or dialogue or contract<br />
stars or comp videos.<br />
6. There must be real heat in every scene.<br />
7. I enjoy sexual humiliation, so long as the performers<br />
truly get off on it.<br />
I’m not a big fan of shock acts like double anal or piss-swallowing<br />
or triple cocksucking, and I absolutely loathe cum- or<br />
spit-swapping. But I do enjoy domination, submission, odd<br />
sexual philias, rape fantasies, and unsanitary acts like ATP or<br />
ATOGM or PTOGA. I’ll let you and my therapist figure those<br />
out.<br />
I take some pride in the fact that I’m a female raincoater and<br />
an inundated sex writer who still enjoys porn. I like watching<br />
it fly in the faces of feminists who still believe that porn is<br />
man-made misogyny made for men. This information, however,<br />
doesn’t impress my friends.<br />
“But don’t you still want to be a writer?” they ask.<br />
Yep.<br />
—<br />
1:30 – 1:45 p m : Another phone call from your friendly bar<br />
owner, forgiving you for doing drugs in the bathroom<br />
and inviting you to the Wet, Hot & Wild dance party on<br />
Friday night. Politely decline this engagement because<br />
you’ll be consoling your troubled friend. Consider dodging<br />
friend in order to attend party. Feel shame and continue<br />
writing copy.<br />
Working in porn is a lot like dealing drugs: You gain a fine lot of<br />
fair-weather friends. The only difference is that my porn buddies<br />
don’t need a fix every week. They come around at sporadic<br />
times like bachelorette parties, dry runs of monogamy,<br />
various sexual crises, and unemployment, when their need<br />
for stimulus beats off their energy for finding a new job.<br />
I also get requests for gay porn, which is expensive, and from<br />
jaded Web junkies who are tired of paying memberships,<br />
short sex clips, or staining their computer desk chairs.<br />
But sometimes I make friends with entire establishments—<br />
THE DAILY SCHEDULE OF A PORNO COPYWRITER 179
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