Despite these assurances, Borden has not always been totally honest about her past. In her early Extreme years, she pretended to have spent her youth in an insane asylum after murdering her family, à la the original Lizzy Borden. But this is the story she tells me now: Lizzy Borden was born in conservative Orange County, Calif. -- "behind the Orange Curtain" as she puts it -- to a "white trash" Italian Catholic family. Her stepfather was an abusive alcoholic, she says, who beat her mother viciously and regularly. Her mother stayed at home to raise Lizzy and her three half-siblings, and took out her own frustrations, says Lizzy, by beating her with her fists and assorted sharp objects. Lizzy moved out of her mother's house when she was 12, and finished high school while living with her conservative grandparents.

When she turned 18, Borden headed off to a local community college on a scholarship. "For the first time in my life I could actually see the world," she says, and the world she chose to see was full of drugs and partying. Frat parties led to raves; acid and Ecstasy led to speed and cocaine use, which led to a job as a stripper, assorted abusive boyfriends and her first lesbian experience.

Borden derives immense pleasure from describing how naive and introverted she once was. "I was an ugly duckling: I had a big Italian nose, the long brown hair. I never ever shaved my cunt until I started to strip! I didn't know anything," she confides, all wide-eyed astonishment. When she got her first job at a strip club, she tells me, "I didn't know how to use a tampon: When I saw someone else do it I was like, 'Oh no, Oh no. My grandma told me that once you do that, you are going to get toxic shock, you are going to die!'"

Nevertheless, Borden made quick work of losing her naiveté. After a brief career dancing at strip clubs, she met a porn star who convinced her that there was good money to be made in the business. She took her mother -- with whom she had reconciled, thanks in part to the drug problem they share and over which they had "bonded" -- to her first porn shoot and sat her outside the front door.

"I told her she had two choices: 'Either you don't go with me, and I get fucking killed and you see it on the news. Or you go with me and make sure no one kills me.' So she sat outside," says Borden. "And I was like, 'OK, my mom's out there just so you know.' I didn't know this world, I thought no one was gonna hurt me if my mom was out there."

Her mother cried over her decision, Borden says, until she saw the money that Borden was making. These days, Mom has a job at Extreme Associates. (Her mom, she says, "has her own fucked-up issues.")

After less than a dozen films, Borden got a job performing in a film for Extreme Associates, which led her to the man who would become her husband -- the porn director Rob Black, who already was gaining notoriety for his no-taboo-unexplored films. But, explains Borden, Rob "can't be with a woman who does porn, he comes from a Catholic Italian family," so she quickly gave up acting and, after assisting on Extreme sets, convinced Black to let her direct instead. It was just a matter of months before the two of them invented Lizzy Borden, the twisted mascot-slash-mistress of the most horrific films in the Extreme catalog.

Rob initially resisted Borden's desire to direct. "He said, 'Women don't make good directors,'" Borden explains. The idea that women don't make good directors is a commonly held belief in the porn industry, she says, because women "shoot all the soft stuff, all the lovey-dovey stuff that there's not a big market for. In the video stores, that's not what you go see: You want to see hardcore ass-fucking, DP [double-penetration], cum, piss, shit, whatever you can."

Borden, in turn, began to see herself as a kind of female challenge to the male-dominated industry: "I said: 'I'm fucked up! I can write something! I can be a man!' My mission after that was to prove everyone wrong."

Around her office, she says, she now acts just like a guy: She describes, with glee, how she recently peed on the chair of a co-worker and then made him sit on it, and how she and her best friend, star Veronica Caine, hid a dead fish in the office of another co-worker. She says that she farts and scratches and takes no grief, and that this means that the men of the porn industry no longer treat her like one of those "fluffy-puffy" porn queens.

"It's a power thing," she says. "These people told me I couldn't do something, and that's the only reason I wanted to do it. Because they told me I can't ... So I started to get more and more hardcore, until now no one can top me. I can get anyone to do anything because I am a woman. I think I've earned that respect."

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