Scenes From My Life in Porn

That so many readers believed models in a porn magazine offered the prospect of authentic human warmth and understanding was all the more bizarre given the crude, over-the-top nature of the girl copy that accompanied their images. I wrote to alleviate the boredom of producing thousands of words of hack copy every week a and strove to make my bios as disturbing as my editor would allow. Fortunately, LFP provided a safe, nurturing environment for disturbed individuals exorcising their personal demons through pornography writing. So long as I stated that the models were at least 18 (a law stringently followed at LFP) and had consented to engage in the acts described, I was free to develop stories with incestuous overtones and strong hints of violence, stalking, mental illness, self-hatred and death.

A typical bio, one for “Dee: Dementia 19,” began: Dee is “now free of the psychiatrist‘s drugs that once made her a complete zombie with no will of her own, nor any control over what she did with her body.” “Natanya: Nice and Nasty” began: “Natanya’s a nice girl most of the time -- except when she‘s nasty. The nice girl plays with Mr. Pookie, the stuffed animal Daddy sent last Christmas before they fried him on Death Row. The nasty girl fingers herself and dreams of a bad man coming to get her. Nice and nasty. Cops are like that too. First they give you a candy bar, then they take Daddy away.”

Not all of them presented sexuality with unrelenting gloom. The bio for “Heather: Holy Sister of Fellatio” was an attempt at the transcendent. Heather, a girl with a beatific smile, was described as a student at a junior college run by nuns. She concluded her treatise on oral sex: “’The sisters in school tell us that all art is God-inspired. My artistry is a means of bringing man closer to the divine. Picture my face with your dick in it and know how it feels to come in the mouth of God.‘”

The most peculiar aspect of the fan letters was not that the men believed the ludicrous sagas of the models, but that they responded to the graphic imagery by seeking intimacy with them. If pornography indeed objectifies women -- and it’s hard to argue that a magazine with an amateur photo section called Beaver Scouts didn‘t -- many readers sought to flesh out the objectified women in their imaginations. Their sexual fixations blurred into romantic dreams.

The most lyrical note, a mixture of hackneyed erotic cliches and poignant expressions of longing, came from a man whose return address was the cryptic “Lock Bag R.” A prison address, a bizarre P.O. box or a location in his head? He wrote to “Dottie: Dirty, Flirty, Delicious,” a girl in a baby-tee with the word FLIRT written across the front.

“Dear Dottie:

”Here is one for you, can we be writing pals? . . .

“I wonder where you are from, only because you seem like to my words, A Hip Hop Hollywood Hootchie . . . Those clothes you had on were very nice. You could get right into my world at a breeze on your perfume or maybe on the regular scent of your body . . .

”I can picture you and I kissing. I would just melt the minute your arms [begin] to wisp about my shoulders. You know the kind of picture that would send my mind into orbit with you. I would get on one knee and ask you to put your leg around my shoulder and those heels to dig into the side of my rib cage. Dam those white heeled shoes are fine . . . I bet when you walk it is a knock-out.

“Can you bring yourself to me for just a day[?] We can get a couple of those strawberry crunch ice creams on a stick and look into each other’s eyes. [I] would softly rub one of your thighs as we sit knee to knee . . .

”You could take me places through letters that would be called Dottie‘s adventures. I would love to send you cards. And I would love to get to know you as a person. I’ve been to the Statue of Liberty twice. My first school trip in the second grade . . . was to a place called the Butterfly Farm.“

Brooke Ashley told me 1997 was her ”favorite year in porn.“ She kept mementos of her career, begun when she was ”fresh 18,“ in a closet in her barely furnished Valley apartment -- a stack of flattened video box covers and ”slicks,“ glossy promotional mini posters. Brooke was Asian and Caucasian, and in photographs her face changed from shot to shot. She was always pretty, always cute, usually costumed in diminutive schoolgirl skirts and ankle socks, with her hair in pigtails. Some of her proudest achievements were making the covers of such XXX videos as Gutter Mouths, Assy #5, Young and Anal #5 and Whoriental. One box cover superimposed a dialogue bubble next to Brooke‘s smiling face, so she appeared to be saying, ”I’m such a filthy slut, I‘m such a pig!“