I wrote a post about porn and the new condom law on my Forbes blog.
Here's how it came to be.
This story broke last week when the LA City Council passed the ordinance requiring porn stars use condoms on porn movie sets. I didn't know what to say about it, though. It's bad! It's good! Most of the time, things are more complicated than that. Especially in porn. But with most issues, a lot of journalists will resort to this is bad! or this is good! because it makes you and the reader feel like you are sure about something, even though they only thing you can be sure about is that you are lying. Or they just report the facts, which is boring as fuck, no matter how you slice it.
Anyway, there's a saying that each question holds its answer, or something like that, so for me in this circumstance the question was: how can I represent this issue a) honestly and b) in a way that is interesting to me?
So, at some point, I can't remember when, I thought, oh, maybe I'll do it like this 9/11 anniversary post, when I asked people in emails where they were when 9/11 happened, and they wrote me back emails that told their stories, and I posted those. It was like an anthology of micro-stories. I like this format because their total truth is greater than any single truth you could manufacture.
I did that with the porn condom law story. I sent out emails to, I don't know, maybe 10 porn-related people I knew or didn't know or sort of knew. But then I got to a place where I had several emails, but none from performers, and then Lux retweeted my Twitter call for porn stars to email me, and then the porn star emails came.
Some of the stories I got were a little graphic. Like, one talked about peeing-on-people porn, and another one talked about vaginal canal tears. That is understandable when you're talking about porn and condoms, but I didn't want anyone at Forbes to have heart failure, as I have already been accused (not by Forbes, by morons) of diluting the brand, or some such thing, whatever that means. I edited a very few of the emails very slightly for stuff that was too raunchy, but I left everything else as is, even the grammar problems and stuff, because I think that's good. That's how they wrote it. That's real. That's their voice.
So then I jammed all that in the Forbes CMS and asked my editor to look at it and make sure I wasn't going to post anything that was too raunchy. She made a few editorial suggestions, gave me a better title, and then said, um, you know (she didn't say that, but I'm trying to make a point here), how about some hard numbers for your intro?
I was annoyed by this because a) I was busy, b) I've had a headache since Monday or before, and c) hard numbers in porn is, like, impossible. That's how the porn business is. Private companies, not telling everyone their financials. That's fine. But I'm not going to be one of those fucktards, like sometimes happens everywhere else (Frank Rich at the New York Times Magazine, I'm talking about you), who trots out BS porn numbers like they're fact.
So I got really annoyed and almost wrote her back, no, I will not do that, but then I got on the phone, because that is how I am. Give me a challenge, and I will resentfully rise to it.
Of course, once you get on the phone and start making calls, you get all juiced on that, and you are off. It was still early, but since I have been writing about porn since 1902, I know that, for example, Adam and Eve, which is a big old adult company, is in North Carolina, so maybe they would be up, because no one on the West Coast would be awake yet, especially not porn people.
Then I sent an email to the publicist at Vivid, which is the biggest porn company in the known universe, and she was cool. No, I am sorry, I think I called, and then she emailed me. And I waited for a few hours, and eventually I got on the phone and talked to these guys, these porn guys. They were helpful. I didn't get any hard porn numbers, but I got stuff that was about how it is impossible to get hard porn numbers, which is what my editor had suggested, so there you go.
After that, you have these notes, and you peer at them, thinking, too much!, and, how will I ever convert this into my precious prose?, and then you start hacking at it, and that's how I wrote my intro, with their quotes, and what I learned, and stuff like that.
I had my editor look at it again. Was she annoyed at that point? I don't know. I appreciated it.
Then I published it.
I think that was it. It came out different than I expected, but it has two things: the reporting and the testimonies. I think getting out of the way of the story is good, but it is also good to be making calls, and talking to people, and expanding your brain.
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