"How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" by Jenna Jameson

Back when strippers were occasional guests on daytime talk shows (instead of the staple they've become), there were always a few well-appointed middle-class women in the studio audience who rose to chide the guest on her lack of self-respect and ask how she would ever manage to justify her job to her children. Whenever I'd hear a question like that, I always thought, fairly or not, that the person asking it must never have worked a day in her life.

The assumption behind that question is that work is ennobling instead of, for most people, a drudgery they endure to feed and clothe and house themselves and their families. The now-standard glib riposte to people who call porn degrading and exploitive is that you can be degraded working at Wal-Mart or Denny's. There's an obvious problem with the analogy -- people who work retail or wait on tables aren't required to fuck on camera. But the comparison isn't entirely off the mark. You can just as easily lose your self-respect doing something that society doesn't consider scandalous. And while there's a good chance that getting literally screwed will be pleasurable at least some of the time, getting figuratively screwed is never any fun.

What I'm trying to get at here is the class cluelessness that has always seemed part of the knee-jerk reaction against any type of sex work. Sexism is a part of that, too, a belief that any young woman who ventures into the sex trade will wind up either a victim or a whore.

Jameson doesn't settle these arguments; she complicates them. She upsets the easy assumptions of both sides in the debate about whether porn is degrading (damn straight it can be, she says) or empowering (ditto). One of the best and toughest chapters in the book is Jameson's advice to would-be porn stars. She lays out what happens to too many of the girls who arrive at the industry's regular cattle-call auditions:

"In a worst-case scenario, a gonzo director will take a girl to a hotel room and have their friends shoot a cheap scene in which she is humiliated in every orifice possible. She walks home with three thousand dollars, bowed legs, and a terrible impression of the industry. It'll be her first and last movie, and she'll regret it -- to her dying day."

Jameson says porn has more pitfalls "than nearly any other occupation." Drugs is one. Maintaining a boundary between your job and private life is another. The inability to recognize the distinction is shared by many who love porn and many who loathe it -- in other words, they both tend to assume that porn stars are whores who will sleep with anyone.

Even the girls who are lucky enough to land a contract with one of the big adult film companies like Vivid or VCA or Wicked find their battles aren't over. A contract girl gets between $75,000 to $100,000 to appear in 10 movies a year (at probably two to three scenes a movie). They don't own any rights to their screen work, so scenes can be reused in compilations. And because the adult industry isn't unionized and the movies are so cheap to make, the stars make a piddling slice of the overall profits. (The professional in Jameson seems ashamed by the diva behavior she indulged in following her success, though it's tough to read her account of that time and not feel that, for the money they make off her, the producers deserved a little bitchiness in their lives.)

The same is true with photo shoots, where photographers often retain the right to resell the photos for which they've paid models a basic fee. (Jameson calls the most famous adult photographer, Suze Randall, whom she insists she likes, "a shark.") To make more money, many porn stars tour strip clubs as "featured dancers," which can present its own problems, like obnoxious fans and chiseling club owners -- one told Jameson she couldn't keep the tips that patrons tossed her onstage because tips weren't in her contract. (Jameson stays mum on the growing number of adult stars who hire themselves out to escort services.) And none of this touches the difficulty of having sex in front of other people, sometimes with male co-stars too nervous to perform, which isn't exactly balm for a girl's ego.

But Jameson doesn't talk about porn as if it were the white-slave trade, either. She knows how easy it is for the gullible to be taken advantage of but insists that aspiring pornettes have to learn to protect themselves. (That may be a tad easy for her to say. She's right that porn stars have to be firm about what they will not do, though the ones who refuse to perform a certain act, and who don't have her charisma or star power, may find themselves with a lot fewer career options.)

For a long time, Jameson would lie when asked if she had been abused because she didn't want to be seen as a victim. (She also rightly finds the question insulting. When was the last time you heard it asked of a comic or an actor or a musician to explain what they do?) For her, playing the victim is offensively easy. Jameson rejects the idea of using her rapes as an explanation for her career. "Was I in this business because I was victimized or because I wanted to succeed at something?" she asks. "I examined it from every angle I could, and every time came to the same conclusion: that it didn't make a bit of difference. It occurred too late in my development to be formative. Whether it happened to me or not, I still would have become a porn star."

Jenna Jameson's story has a happy ending, but not one that moralists will be able to stomach. She got her happy ending because of porn, not in spite of it. Without it, she might still be Jenna Massoli, a Vegas biker's girlfriend content to get high on crank, perhaps still stripping at a local dive and not going anywhere. The penultimate page of "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" shows a laughing, resplendent Jenna Jameson on her wedding day surrounded by her father, brother, sister-in-law and young nephew. Everyone is wearing white. Even the bride.

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