quizzical pussy

Happy Lady Porn Day!

Fun Porn Fact: My first exposure to porn was when I started working in the industry.

That’s weird, right? I grew up in the age of the internet. I should’ve been sneaking around finding all sorts of ascii boobies in my single digit years, and going up (or down) hill from there. As it was, I was nineteen and I’d never seen a single scene from even so much as a stag film.

And the story should be lurid, I realize. Or at least dramatic. Something about sliding from innocence into prurience. Fanny Hill in the 21st Century.

Yeah, not so much. My then-boyfriend Reginald Sleeth had moved out to Los Angeles to work in movies, which ended up, as these things sometimes do, more like landing in the San Fernando Valley to work in porn.

He signed on with a very fratboy-centric porn studio, doing photography, video editing, and website content. He told me and he told his mother, and we each asked conspiratorially if he was planning on telling the other, while being perfectly fine with it ourselves.

The website had an erotic fiction feature, and Reginald was responsible for providing the stories. For about two weeks. He really wasn’t much of a writer, and he decided to have them hire me to write weekly smut. It wasn’t until then that I finally had full access to the pay site and started discovering the joys of porn.

This will sound hopelessly hackneyed, but I was a fairly hackneyed teenager: The women seemed so empowered! So in charge. I was already obsessed with sex, but the concept of being seductive was miles ahead of me (still is). I was entranced with the confidence I saw in these women. I wanted to be them, but I was afraid.

“You’ve got it wrong,” Reginald told me flatly. “All our girls are either dumb as bricks or on drugs. Or pressured into it by suitcase pimps.”

Maybe he was right. A lot of mainstream porn isn’t actually about empowerment. That’s probably why so many performers left the industry as soon as they could. They got married or went home or dropped off the face of the Earth. A few found Jesus, and decided he wasn’t cool with porn.

A few months after my porn career started, I visited Reginald in L.A. for the summer, and I was invited to work alongside him at the studio.

It sat in a huge white corrugated warehouse, hidden in plain site between two other (less reputable, I was assured) houses of porn. One end of the space was a set for photoshoots and an editing booth. On the other end were the computers, couches for meetings and interviews, and in the middle was a halfpipe.

I was scared to death. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just wrote the stories. I was a technical virgin, for Hymen’s sake! I didn’t know anything about being in a porn studio.

A nice blonde producer handed me a vampire porn DVD and a Kama Sutra Weekender kit. “You can review these while you’re here and later this week we’ll try you on some photo editing. Just color correcting and stuff.” She pointed to a room with a DVD player and television.

“Ooookay. I guess I’m just going to go watch porn now…” I said the opposite of nonchalantly. So we were just going to assume that we were all mature adults comfortable with our sexuality then, huh? Oh good…

For the record, I would learn later that week that I suck at color correcting.

That summer, I saw Eastern European girls nervously ask their swear-I’m-not-their-pimp what double penetration meant. I saw Midwestern ex-cheerleaders have meltdowns before their scheduled camshows. One day, Reginald and I went to Chili’s, and our waitress was a girl I recognized from the website. She blushed and pretended not to know him. Overall, there was a decisive lack of glamor and a dearth of empowerment.

I don’t know if that’s why I’m generally not turned on by mainstream porn, but it may well have something to do with it. I tend to gravitate toward performers who seem to really love the industry, or amateurs who seem to be scratching an exhibitionist itch. Truth is, though, I’m not exactly a connoisseur.

So I’m opening it up to you, readers! What’s your favorite porn? I’m looking for joyous, sincere fucking. I’m looking for that spark of what I thought porn was back when I was so naive. Extra points for featuring genderqueer performers, kink, laughter, rough play, and ReallySexyPeople™ of different body types.

A friend of mine is specifically looking for kinky/fetish porn that’s not too dungeony or scary: more light bondage and playful D/s.

Share your links! Share your turn-ons! Love your porn!

Read more about Rabbit Write’s Lady Porn Day here.

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