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Rumpus Book ClubBarely Legal Whores Get Gang-F***ed
Sometimes, in the Industry, you see things that you really wish you hadn’t. If it’s a certain kind of very independent girl, she’ll shrug it off, like “Hey, it didn’t turn out that well—but I have no regrets, and it’s good for business.” But it can be hard to watch someone you know being sincerely degraded—dressed up so she’ll look half her age, ganged up on and treated like a whore, and edited so she’ll intentionally sound like an idiot—even if you know she made a lot of money off it.
Like when Tasha Rey does The Tyra Banks Show.
(This is an excerpt from We Did Porn. At the beginning of the book, the author notes that, although this is a work of non-fiction, the names of all the adult performers in the book have been changed “to remind readers–and myself–that there is probably more to them than I managed to see or record”. So, Sasha Grey is referred to as Tasha Rey. Tyra Banks is Tyra Banks.)
It begins, as I assume is usual, with Tyra in front of a large blue screen featuring her own first name gleaming on an unconvincing computer-generated medallion.
Tyra says how, when she was in high school, her friends got jobs working in fast food, or at corporate chain clothing stores—like the kind that sell the sweater-vest-and-puffy-shirt combination Tyra is wearing. Tyra doesn’t say how it was an all-girl Catholic prep school called Immaculate Heart that held its graduations at the Hollywood Bowl and that, when she was there, her own job was being a runway model.
Tyra says, “But today, you wouldn’t believe the lengths that some teenagers are going to to make money.”
Tyra doesn’t say why she made Halloween: Resurrection.
Tyra shows some footage of Tasha Rey combing her hair and packing a bag and reading a book. It doesn’t show which book.
Tyra says that, as a teenager, Tasha was sexually active.
There are no statistics available on how many girls at Immaculate Heart High were sexually active.
In a voice-over, Tyra says that Tasha, in school, was “bombarded” by pornographic images while Tyra shows footage of Tasha, seminude in pearls, eye-fucking the camera.
Tasha says that, in school, far from having porn dropped on or launched at her in a military setting, she actually looked for porn online and stole it from her friends. This is in a shot where Tasha is driving and looking very sleazy and blurry in wraparound sunglasses and lighting that erases her jaw and in a from-below, up-the-nose angle that everyone in television, film, or photography will tell you is the shot you use to make someone look ugly and morally bankrupt.
There is no footage of Tyra Banks from that angle, not in the show or anywhere else, even in that part of Coyote Ugly when she’s dripping wet and doing a pole dance on the bar where it would be the most appropriate shot to accurately represent the point of view of the shrieking drunks she was supposed to be dancing for.
Tasha talks about the ways she likes to have sex. She is still in the horrible driving shot, where she is looking not at the cameraman, who must be sitting in the well of the passenger seat, but straight out the windshield. It makes her look creepily detached from the very many deviant sex acts and perversions she’s describing.
But actually it is good because when you’re driving you have to look not at the camera but straight out the windshield or you’ll kill yourself and everyone in the car and possibly other people or animals.
There is a Godard-ian edit and Tasha says how much money she makes. It’s unclear whether this is in response to a question someone off camera asked or whether this is something Tasha feels personally is important to communicate to the audience of The Tyra Banks Show.
Tasha says how she has to take some days off if she gets an infection and at the word infection there is a sort of doom-lite keyboard-where-a-guitar-should-be brake screech in the soundtrack and a sinister fade into a makeup room.
“Although the money is seductive, this young woman struggles with the trappings of her pornographic life,” goes Tyra.
Tasha says something unrelated while getting her makeup done.
As the interview proper begins, Tyra says that Tasha looks like a middle-school student, but does not say that when Tasha walked into the studio, Tyra told Tasha she looked too old because, in her natural habitat, Tasha has almost intimidatingly extreme and sleek Francophile-fashion-model-on-cell-phone-with-agent-with-whom-she-is-none-too-pleased-this-morning style and so Tyra had her people put Tasha in a shapeless rubber-ball-pink shirt, and clueless-attempt-at-cute earrings, and bruised-peach makeup and iron her long, dark, shampoo-commercial hair into a flat playground slide awkardly semitwisting around her neck so that she would—in the same daytime-TV hotlit-high-contrast glare that makes Tyra’s own face seem like a rusting bone mask—look like a middle school student. Who smoked.
Tasha talks about movies where they want her to be like a little girl: “I don’t do it though—you know—you wear the clothes, you wear the wardrobe, but I try to change that, I don’t want to portray that, that’s not me.” The camera pans back to show the Gap jeans and rube-ishly awkward flat brown slippers Tyra asked the wardrobe people to put on Tasha.
There is a cut to the nearly all-female audience looking like they are watching a live appendectomy being performed on an unanesthetized kitten after having been told that, if they move at all, the kitten will be impaled on fence spikes and then incinerated.
Then Tasha tells the famous Asking-to-Be-Punched story, and a pall falls over what we can see of the room and an atmosphere takes over the broadcast that is rare, and funny, and disturbing in every essential way. It comes from the sequence where Tasha’s small, roving, lash-shaded, and knowing eyes move easily, almost self-deprecatingly (I’m such a freak) across the crowd while she tells this story about how totally deviant she is, but then her whole face tightens as she realizes, in the middle, that she’s talking to someone with no sense of humor and we notice too, since all this is intercut with the paralyzed, lip-lifted, triangular slab of inert judgment that is Tyra Banks’s face and the edge-of-tears, speechless, butterfly-wing flickering of eyelids out in the audience.
Those who enjoy whatever private pleasure is to be gained from receiving physical pain publicly would appear not to overlap at all with those who enjoy whatever private pleasure is to be gained from inflicting shame collectively.
The idea that you could be playing a different game with your life than them and yet still be playing it with a full deck is totally alien to this audience.
Have you ever watched strangers play cards? It takes patience to figure out whether they have fifty-two, and whether the game is poker or rummy or bullshit. There is a cultural scar so wide and raw here that information can’t cross it.
There are parts of Tasha’s face that always seem like they’re squirming to do something cruel, around the lower lip and lower lids, under the sated stasis in the eyes, but her business sense keeps them still.
Tyra asks Tasha what she will do. Tasha says anything but children or animals.
Tyra asks about anal: “Anal sex? On film? Every scene?”
Tasha also has to explain to Tyra what a gang bang is. The five gyrating guys in wifebeaters and jeans deflowering the air behind a lone Tyra in Daisy Dukes and a bikini top in the “Shake Ya Booty” video did not explain it to her, apparently.
Tasha explains about fucking fifteen guys at once. This is something the audience can imagine, and they do, judging from a real or inserted rippling reaction shot of them imagining what it would be like to have sex with fifteen men at the same time. The audience girls look grave. One of them is hot. I’d fuck fifteen of her.
Tasha talks, twinklingly, about the always interesting experience of telling your mother you’re doing porn. Pale and still peachy in her makeup, time after time, she smiles and tosses the ball of human interaction to Tyra, where it hits a null field, loses all inertia, and is sucked straight to the floor. Thuck. If the look Tyra Banks wears while receiving reality was a sound, the sound would be thuck. If Tasha is very lucky, she gets instead a cautious, queasy nod before the next queasily asked question.
Station break.
“Up next: a teenager sucked into the seductive world of porn.” Tyra asks Tasha why there is something cold, hard, and distant about her and says she can’t help thinking there is something that made her that way.
This, coming from Tyra Banks, is really, really, really, really funny.
Tyra asks about child sexual abuse.
Tasha says she wasn’t sexually abused as a child.
Tyra says, “So you got into porn just because?”
Tasha says no, like she said before, she got into porn because of things she wanted to do that have to do with having sex.
Tyra says that it’s a fact that a lot of women in porn have issues whether they want to admit them or not and then talks a lot more about how people do things for reasons and then cuts immediately to Tasha’s boyfriend.
We see Guy, looking as if the camera just woke him up. He comes across like a dazed, blunt-headed mouth-breather in a collared shirt who doesn’t realize that his unwavering, upright posture and attempts at eloquence and pruned facial hair only seem to exaggerate how unwholesome and hollow he is. That is, Guy comes across here like all boyfriends ever on daytime talk shows.*
Tasha’s agent comes on and helps even less. He looks exactly like a shaved wombat in flared lapels that just ate a truck, and also exactly like sleaze.
The show tapers toward the next commercial break and Tyra asks Tasha to really sit down with herself and do some soul-searching and find out why she’s really in this industry.
And Tasha says she knows why she’s in this industry, which Tyra does not expect to have to respond to because she was planning on just saying all that and then just going straight to commercial, but then she has to respond to this or else redo it so they can reedit the whole bit, in which case the studio audience might realize how strange and manipulative that is, and so Tyra quickly says, “Yeah, okay,” but Tasha hasn’t told her a real reason, a “deep soul reason,” and then, okay, commercial.
Presumably there are soulful and deep reasons for a seventeen-year-old wanting to be a rich and beautiful actress/model/celebrity who fucks pop stars, gives people tips about makeup, cuts records, shows up in people’s music videos, and eventually has babies, but there are no possible deep soul reasons for an eighteen-year-old wanting to be a rich and beautiful actress/model/celebrity who fucks porn stars, gives people tips about sex, cuts records, shows up in slightly better music videos, and eventually has babies.
“We’ll be right back,” Tyra says, and gives the camera a Sir-would-you-mind-standing-behind-the-line? smile and then there is a shot of Tasha looking off into the audience with controlled hate.
When the show comes back there’s a segment about a fourteen-year-old prostitute.
I watch all this on YouTube—where the show is posted by whoever runs antipornographyactivist.blogspot.com. This entity claims that the (extremely involved) montage the show inserts after the commercial showing “Victoria” (the prostitute) wandering a city in a short skirt at night is misleading because Victoria was never a street prostitute and also that Tyra’s people told the prostitute they’d blur her face out and didn’t.
The (now) sixteen-year-old prostitute comes on the TV. Tyra does not ask her why she is cold or hard or distant, because she is feverish and quivering and gushing and looks essentially like a piece of confused cookie dough. Which isn’t surprising because she is a sixteen-year-old prostitute and she’s on TV.
Tyra interviews the little hooker with a measured condescenscion that stands in stark contrast to the measured condescenscion with which she interviewed Tasha (now in the front row of the audience next to her agent). With Tasha she kept herself coiled and steady-eyed—like if she asked the wrong question, Tasha would blink twice and turn her into a pervert. Her style with Victoria is that of an SVU cop wanting to know just exactly where she was when the bad men came and took her mother away.
Victoria is clearly totally fucked up, and not comfortable, and sad, and not very smart, so Tyra knows she isn’t going to tell her anything everybody didn’t already know when they saw the commercial for this afternoon’s show, and that that makes for good TV. Victoria says she became a whore because she wanted money and then started doing cocaine and it was scary and she says she is upset and that no one should do what she does.
Something that at first seems to be a giant pencil in a sport coat but is actually a celebrity doctor comes on in order to tell everyone more things they know.
He frictionlessly offers a Freudian, or post-Freudian, “compulsion to repeat” theory for Victoria’s behavior. He uses plural nouns enough that you can’t tell if he’s talking about Victoria and everyone else who’s irrational and on drugs and greedy, or about Victoria and Tasha, who is keeping silent in the front row of the audience next to her agent.
Tyra says she’s gotten in touch with an organization that will help Victoria and her family and that antipornographyactivist alleges did not actually help her as much as Tyra told Victoria it would. Tyra touches Victoria a lot, and while being touched, Victoria has exactly the expression the girl who gets raped while she’s high has when she’s in the elevator in the movie Kids.
After the commercial, Tyra says:
“Now, when she was a teenager, my next guest thought sex was an easy way to make money, but now at age twenty-five she knows how wrong she was.”
Her next guest is a fat whore (spiritually speaking) and a fat ex-whore (physically speaking).
Tyra asks her to offer advice to Tasha and Victoria collectively. The fat whore says she knows these girls and she is these girls. While the fat whore is certainly large enough to be at least tripartite, a certain ambiguity remains. She may be following the Catholic philosopher Peter Geach, who argued that the mutual indwelling of the Holy Trinity can be understood if one assumes that all identity is relative to a chosen sortal term.
To illustrate her perichoresis, the fat whore tells a story about her path from stripper to cam girl to whore to porn star that is teleologically similar in no way to the story of either of the other guests because, she says, it’s a slippery slope.
Rejecting both epistemic and pragmatic modes of argument, she says:
“It’s a lifestyle. I mean, you drive a nice car, you live in a nice house, you have tons of money, you can buy whatever you want, but, but what does that get you in the end?” Okay—sure—I see where you’re going—you have material things but you don’t have integrity or self-respect or love or Jesus in your life or something, right? No, actually, that’s not where she’s going at all—next she says: “I don’t have any of the things from when I did that.”
So it’s bad to be a whore or a porn star not because there are more important things than money, but because somehow the money, house, and car evaporate due to some form of as-yet-undescribed economic attrition that attacks only money made in the sex industry.
The fat whore has advice for Victoria: “Money and material things can be gone (snap) like that.”
Victoria cries a lot and nods.
The fat whore has advice for Tasha—oh wait, no, she says it is, but it’s questions. The first question has a false premise, which Tasha points out. The question also brings up the fact that Tasha licked a toilet seat in a movie, which Tasha then points out was her own idea because it was her movie. The fat whore says, “Then, well, I have a question for you.”
Examining the shrapnel in the wake of the rhetorical train wreck that is the second question, you can clearly pick out cars labeled aren’t-your-fans-horrible-masturbators? porn-is-a-bad-example-to-somebody, and your-movies-make-people-think-things-about-you-that-aren’t-true, but by the time the traditional verbal-question-mark-followed-by-pause-to-receive-answer is actually delivered, the fat whore is basically asking whether Tasha would like to be in an abusive relationship. Tasha says no.
Tyra goes on for a tigerish paragraph about how she—Tyra—can’t judge Tasha or tell her what to do because she hasn’t lived Tasha’s life, but that the fat whore can because the fat whore used to have the same job Tasha has and is now seven years older than Tasha. Tyra does not then invite Nina Hartley on to give advice to the fat whore.
The fat whore then says that all that anal sex will destroy Tasha’s butt. Tasha tries to say out loud that doctors servicing the world’s many homosexuals have not reported this to be so, but she is interrupted by the celebrity doctor in the suit and also Tyra, who both agree about her butt based on unstated evidence. When they’re done gang-interrupting her, the conversation has finally pinwheeled over to the point where Tasha realizes she has to explain to Tyra that, other than being white and a woman and once having had the same job, none of the things in the fat whore’s life resemble things in Tasha’s.
The fat whore says, “Your pimp is sitting right next to you.”
This shifts cameras and attention to Tasha’s obviously unsavory agent Jack Wiegler, whose silk-framed bald spot everyone in the studio audience has been eyeing queasily throughout the show, and so it gets the show’s first full-blooded-Orc-horde-Nuremberg-pecking-party-vintage-daytime-talk-show-We-Will-Drive-Them-into-the-Sea roar of approval.
Commercial.
Tyra, having finally realized where her points are going to get scored, tacks Wiegler-ward. Is he a pimp? Wiegler points out that Tasha does what Tasha wants to do. The fat whore points out the fact that Tasha makes Wiegler a lot of money because of all the sick shit Tasha does. Wiegler fudges and lies and argues with the fat whore and sounds generally governmental.
The fat whore keeps bringing up how much money the agent makes. Tyra talks about how “seductive” the money in porn is.
Tasha’s main crime appears to be talking about some other thing besides money. When she makes arguments that reference some nonmoney standard, no one else seems to believe or even hear her. The idea that sex might be “seductive” doesn’t seem to occur to Tyra, which is sad because what you see in a Tyra Banks music video is a woman licking a fist-sized microphone who is going to make a lot of money off the fact that her only talent is she makes you want to fuck her.
The doctor says Tasha is like a heroin addict because she is trapped in self-destructive behavior that she says she wants to keep doing.
He says he sees porn stars on their knees begging him for help: “—and that’s where this always goes. If it didn’t, it could be a healthy behavior—who knows? The fact is it’s destructive—if it were not destructive we wouldn’t all be shaking our heads [saying], ‘Why would someone put themselves in this position?’”
The audience applauds this provably inaccurate statement and its attached tautology.
“And Victoria wouldn’t be crying the whole time,” adds Tyra.
Victoria says it’s because all her emotions came out. The fat whore tells her to love herself and that money isn’t everything.
There’s a commercial and then Tyra tells any teenager out there that there are other places to turn for validation and support than pornography and prostitutiton, because money that comes that easily has a lot of consequences, and then says that whatever money you make you will pay for emotionally and then she touches Victoria again.
There is not another Tyra Banks Show about Tasha when she wins Performer of the Year and announces she is leaving her agent to form her own agency. You get the definite feeling about Tyra, and the fat whore, and the doctor—and the audience—that they would not care that, if Tasha really did what she said she would and started her own agency that avoided agents and commisssions and therefore their desire to book you for whatever, this could be a major step in the practical prevention of violence toward—and exploitation of—women in the Industry. You get the definite feeling that this wouldn’t matter to them and they would still think Tasha was missing the point.
The point is: they will not forgive her until she is ashamed.
*Although, presumably, his short performance here is his own fault, it is misleading. In actual life Guy’s swagger and goatee suggest he is the kind of guy who knows exactly how unwholesome and hollow you think being a thirtysomething boyfriend of barely-legal-porn-star Tasha Rey is but, much more than that, suggest he is kind of exactly the kind of lazily cynical would-be-director boyfriend an extremely sleek Francophile-fashion-model-on-cell-phone-with-agent-with-whom-she-is-none-too-pleased-this-morning-type girl would have if she chose true kinky-hipster love instead of marrying the first Mediterranean shipping magnate who offered to buy her an island. Also note that the collared shirt is not Guy’s fault, as Tyra’s wardrobe department provided both it and a pair of loafers to replace the Motorhead T-shirt and whatever likewise cliché-reinforcement-inappropriate shoes Guy showed up thinking he was going to wear on TV that day.
**
Sasha Grey’s Kink.com page (NSFW) Sasha Grey at Andrew Black films (NSFW)
June 26th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Not to be difficult or dismissive, but can any of the editors explain why The Rumpus – whose excellent and admirable mission, as I see it, is to champion culture in light of pop-culture – spends so much time on porn? Porn, in my mind, seems like the paradigm of pop culture: it’s without substance, without subtext; it’s cheap, mindless pap.
I’ve watched Tara Banks grilling Sasha Grey, I’ve read this essay. They both left me feeling empty. What’s the point here? Why is has this entered our lives as a non-pop-cultural topic? Regardless of how hip a subject it seems to have become, I find it as insidious and meretricious as commentary on popular television. I wish we could just agree that everyone has unique, strange sexual tastes and shelve the topic indefinitely.
Maybe I was just born in the wrong century.
June 26th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Red:
A) The Rumpus is more into porn than the vast majority of literary journals, it’s true. It’s an editorial quirk. But I just wrote a book about what it;s like to work in porn, so you won’t catch me complaining about it.
B) I too “wish we could agree that everyone has unique, strange sexual tastes and shelve the topic”, but part of what bothers me about Sasha’s appearance on the Tyra show is that, apparently, “we”–even the allegedly liberal and open-minded seciton of “we” represented by Tyra Banks and her celebrity Doctor pal–can’t. And the general topic: “There exists a large group who inaccurately claims that a certain harmless thing is indeed harmful to us all” is universally regarded as a worthwhile thing to write about.
c) I, too, agree that porn itself is usually pretty vapid. This piece–and I realize your comment isn’t entirely about this one article–isn’t about porn at all, though. It’s about a person who has a job in porn, and about how a particular moment where she appeared in public turned her into a magnet for a lot of the stupid preconceptions people apparently still have about that kind of person and about sex in general.
June 26th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I ranted about this segment when it aired…but didn’t rant anywhere near as eloquently. Great article, truly.
Is there an LA gallery/ book store that will be carrying We Did Porn or is that only out of Fredericks & Frieser?
June 26th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
“We Did Porn” will be available at finer bookstores worldwide (and on the web) circa July 1.
If you live in LA: I’m reading (a different part) at Book Soup on July 1, and Skylight Books July 31.
June 26th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Just caught this on Fleshbot and I agree, it succinctly encompasses everything I felt about that interview but contains all the wit and attention-to-detail I wish I could muster in my own shitty attempts at writing.
Also: Didn’t know you were in the MoMa. I’ll have to check that out.
June 27th, 2009 at 1:22 am
This is exactly the type of writing that needs to be highlighted more. Zak, thanks so much for taking the time to answer comments. Really enjoyed your piece, can’t wait to read your book (and see more of your art).
June 27th, 2009 at 11:52 am
You know, I have to agree with Red. This is a nicely written piece. But is it really necessary to title it “Barely Legal Whores Get Gang-F***ed” and splash that title in a large font front dead center? I like to read the Rumpus at work. After this, I will no longer be doing that.
And Red also has an even better point: what does porn have to do with the mission of the Rumpus to promote overlooked, non-pop culture? Porn is the epitome of all the crass and vacant and popular (very, very popular) culture you say you’re not interested in. And so is Tyra Banks. She does not represent the liberal and open-minded “we” like Zak says. She hosts a daytime talk show! How is that not pop culture?
When I want to see porn, or constant discussions of porn, I go to one of the million other websites that specialize in it.
June 27th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Andy B.:
To answer both of these questions at once:
“But is it really necessary to title it “Barely Legal Whores Get Gang-F***ed” and splash that title in a large font front dead center? I like to read the Rumpus at work. After this, I will no longer be doing that.”
AND
“And Red also has an even better point: what does porn have to do with the mission of the Rumpus to promote overlooked, non-pop culture?”
This is an excerpt that The Rumpus chose from my book. Therefore: the title of the article is the title of the chapter in the book. (I suppose they could’ve titled it “Excerpt from We Did Porn”–would that’ve been better? Not my call anyway.)
And since this article is an excerpt from an upcoming book that is, I hope, “nicely written” (in your words) all the way through, then this falls well within The Rumpus’ statement of purpose, which appears at the bottom of this page: “We care about good writing, and we’ll publish essays just because the writing is good”.
The purpose of the article was obviously less to bring your attention to porn than to bring your attention to a book that person wrote that might be good.
June 29th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I agree with Red. I’m very bored with porn. It’s finally all about commerce & capitalism. Period.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Nada:
Should I just re-post what I posted after Red, or should I merely point out here that you don’t have to like capitalism or commerce in order to write useful things about it?
June 29th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
The provocative (and entertainingly supported) thesis of this piece is that Sasha Grey ended up being more compromised by appearing on the Tyra Banks show than she ever was by any act she consented to perform on a porn set. How, exactly, is that either vapid or commercial? I just don’t see it. To place it on an intellectual level with a porno film is an insult to the author.
It’s been very gracious of Zak Smith to respond to these criticisms and defend himself, but he didn’t have to. It should be obvious that there’s a significant difference between offering up porn per se, and offering up thoughtful commentary and good writing that takes the porn industry — and mainstream stereotypes about it — as its subject matter.
The “thoughtful commentary” and “good writing” bits of that are what qualify it as “not pop culture,” regardless of subject matter. Zak Smith’s writing is the “not pop culture” that is highlighted here. Good writers don’t recognize limits on subject matter, and there is no reason for them to start recognizing limits now.
July 1st, 2009 at 1:43 pm
I don’t know how Zak could make his point any clearer, but those people that didn’t get it to begin with are refusing to let anything sink in. People shut off their minds when sex, eroticism or pornography are brought up. People have been brainwashed to be uncomfortable or defensive when these subjects are brought up. I don’t see why something as natural, basic and vital as sexuality would shut people off, but then again, the church and media never got to me.
It’s not really about porn in the long-run, it’s about judgemental, single-minded media and false preconception. People should thoroughly read all the words, rather than just focusing on the ones that stand out as “crass”.
If you can read this essay and feel as though it was empty and pointless, you’ve missed the whole thing. This type of pre-judgement doesn’t just happen to porn stars. It happens to anybody outside of what has been deemed “normal”. Those “normal” people decide there’s an all-encompassing reason and answer for these situations, when that’s simply impossible. It’s that mentality that breeds racism, homophobia, etc… in a society.
Read all the words and think a little deeper about it, people.
July 15th, 2009 at 8:04 am
I love your treatment of this piece. I love that you didn’t remain in that safe zone of plain sardonic commentary with a hint of “let’s be fair” editorializing. I love that this piece is so passionate.
You focused on several themes here successfully: one I particularly liked was the exposé on the packaging of talk shows and their hosts. Great point about shame. Part of me wonders why Sasha Grey agreed to appear on Tyra’s show in the first place; I wonder if it was because she felt she could help make a point. Watching the episode, I wanted to yell out several times- “Jesus, screw this– get on Rollins’ show or something, do a segment on IFC: do anything, just not this pre-packaged, new age west coast puritan crap that causes one to spontaneously upchuck one’s lunch!” Watching Tyra, the Fat One and the audience attempt to stick a take-home message was a hilarious and heart-breaking thing to watch.
Thanks to you, I’m going to be returning to Rumpus far oftener than before.
July 17th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Today I’m visiting The Rumpus again after a serious break. This article’s title *specifically* is what made me roll my eyes, sigh, and close the browser window. It sounds like something that would end up in my junk mail, right after the junk mail titled “get so big and hard she’ll cum like a crazy”.
On a side note, I’m a fan of the mix of sex, politics, culture etc. that The Rumpus presents. But within the category of sex, it’d be nice if there was mix as well, and not only a focus on sex work and workers.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
e. lou
So…wait, you:
1. saw the article’s title,
2. failed to notice that it was specifically *designed* to sound like porn junk mail, only, y’know, with obvious irony, because clearly that kind of headline is out of place in a literary magazine,
3. closed the browser window,
4. then went *back to the article again*,
5. read juuuuust enough of it to realize it was in some way about sex workers but not enough to see that nobody actually gets gang-fucked,
6. then left a comment that was the equivalent of saying “Hey, you know that guy Ali G? His name sounds like a rapper’s name!”
?
Awesome.
August 2nd, 2009 at 12:14 pm
About the title of this piece, it strikes me that Tyra would have used it herself if she could have, for the shock and awe it appears to posses for some, to set the Stage of Shame that she feels pornography deserves.
She’s convinced most of her audience that sex and self are not valid reasons to enter into pornography, and that any female who does is damaged goods, and any male a pervert. Money and baggage, the soul of porn.
It’s disappointing that Bank’s deeper machinations behind the scenes will not be exposed to the same extent her superficial “sexpose” covered porn. Paralleling her video sexploits to Tasha’s would make fine viewing indeed. (And I still don’t believe she never had a boob job.)
Using her show to crusade against a perceived evil of sex is in no small way similar to the world’s oldest profession.
August 4th, 2009 at 9:45 am
The fact that Tyra isn’t the best person to ask these sorts of questions is kind of beside the point from whether or not they’re accurate, fair, etc, and though some of her music videos and her choice of profession glamorize some of the same sorts of things porn does, there’s still a pretty clear line between them.
I’m sure it’s possible for a perfectly well-adjusted, otherwise wholesome individual to go into porn. But I wouldn’t say it’s the norm, and I doubt anyone in the industry being completely honest with themselves would, either. If the excerpt here is merely designed to make Tyra Banks look kind of/sort of hypocritical, and suggest that we don’t assume the worst about people in the porn industry, well, okay. But if it’s suggesting that there isn’t a pattern of abuse and dysfunction in porn (and therefore a connection between the two), and that having sex for money on screen is even remotely akin to modeling, then I think that’s quite plainly false.
Just my opinion, naturally.
November 13th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Tyra Banks is pretty damn judgemental for someone who had sex with many famous men and women to get further in her career. tisk tisk..
November 14th, 2009 at 2:01 am
Lolita – the comments section of an article slamming Tyra and her show’s slut-shaming techniques seems an interesting place to air borderline misogynistic comments about how Tyra must have fucked her way to the top of her career path. :/
I preferred Zak looking at the hypocrisy in the way Tyra has herself been presented, instead of the kind of wink-and-an-elbow dollar store zinger in your comment.
I thought this was a brilliant essay & I absolutely have to read this book.
November 14th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Rachel, you should read it. It’s one of the best books I read this year.
November 16th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Zak’s vivid play-by-play (I haven’t watched the episode) points out the absurd elitism of talk-TV do-gooders, who aren’t even aware of their own hypocrisy. I’m sure they think they’re providing a public service w/ the requisite sensationalism to bring eyeballs to advertisers, but the whole spectacle reeks of bullshit.
From where I sit, Tyra Banks and Sasha Grey are sister whores, cut from the same pop-culture cloth where women sell their bodies for top dollar. This is a social construct and we all play a part b/c we LOVE to watch, either to fuck them in our dreams or to put them down to put ourselves up.
What most of us don’t seem to realize is that we’re all in this together. Reminds me of a couple of Jane’s Addiction songs: “Whores” and “Pigs in Zen.” Funny, too, b/c doesn’t guitarist Dave Navarro have some kind of managerial claim on Ms. Grey’s ass?
I like this piece b/c it explores a lot of issues that drove me to write my 3xbad book: Is there such a thing as sexual morality? What does intimacy look like in a culture of violence and hypocrisy? What’s the line between self-destruction and redemption? Who are we (from the outside looking in, or on, or at) to judge another’s behavior?
Finally, seems to me that Banks, Grey, TV-talk and porn all address the same dichotomy: shameful v. shameless. And yet, I’m left wondering… is there really a difference?
November 30th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
That was an outstanding article.
December 18th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I loved this article, but this comments section is puzzling. Questions, such as:
- Is porn “culture” or “pop-culture?”
- Should we care if daytime television is misrepresenting (and humiliating) sex workers in general, and Sasha Grey in particular?
- Is calling Tyra a whore the same as calling Sasha Grey a whore? Is calling someone a whore a bad thing at all?
- Is saying that something is only about “commerce and capitalism” grounds for leaving it out of a literary journal?
Rumpus readers, you surprise me. I hope to read many more articles about sex and sex work in the future. Especially while I’m at work.
December 19th, 2009 at 11:02 am
I assume that since porn is such an enormous and ubiquitous business, a lot of people must be watching it; as a business, it is there only because someone wants to buy it; if there is so much of it, lots of people buy it. I consume it everyday.
I don’t think it is a form of culture, not at all, but why should it be? Sex doesn’t happen with the brain, it happens with the reproductive apparatus located quite far from the brain.
I don’t know how other porn-consumers feel, but I for one think that since it plays such a big role in my life, it might as well be fine to talk about it, and understand it. Understand why I like the kind of porn that ‘Tasha’ does. Understand how there are people who don’t just vicariously masturbate at home behind their laptop, but actually live the fantastic sexual experiences. Talk about the various things I fancy.
Tyra is a gorgeous looking woman, maybe the former fashion model I find most sexy of them all; but why does she have to dress in the Pope’s shoes and waive her morals to us kinks?
Now, cheer up, Tyra, it’s a free world, and we can all masturbate and have sex as we please. We didn’t make our sexuality, your God made us so perverted and libidinous; he designed the machine, we are barely using it. Have complaints? Present them to the ‘Maker’, not to humans merely being human!!!
I strongly dislike the word ‘whore’, but if its actual meaning is ‘woman who pursues her sexuality freely without stopping to wonder about others’ opinions’, then it’s not all that bad. I have a clit, I love it, I want to satisfy it in perverted ways. Its will is monstrous, and stubborn; if I don’t feed it, revenge is sought in mischievous ways. If Tyra wants to come and shake her head in disgust at my bedside while I do it, it’s her ridicule and my amuse.
Marvelous article.
January 2nd, 2010 at 8:52 am
Some of the comments are funny indeed. Haven’t you guys seen Cat House on HBO? Porn and sex in general are huge industries, and most definitely huge cultures.
The reason why they’re so underground with some of the uptights is because it’s still taboo in American culture. Have a quick look at some other countries in Europe, much less taboo and very liberal.
What happened to Americans? We’ve become so shy, it’s shameful.
January 2nd, 2010 at 1:49 pm
At least everyone agrees about the really important thing – fat girls are ugly. So ugly that describing someone as spiritually fat is the best way to explain that they are morally repulsive. As long no one challenges that universal truth there are no actual divides in our culture, just a little bickering that both “sides” can use for their own financial benefit.
The porn industry brings in an enormous amount of money. If I’m remembering correctly it brings in more than many other forms of entertainment – traditional movies, TV and even sports. Yet porn stars are lucky if they make as much as 1% of the annual income that stars in those other types of entertainment make. This is in spite of the fact that producing porn costs much, much less than producing those other kinds of entertainment. That disparity means that something somewhere in the porn industry is way out of whack. Sasha better have chosen her profession because she loves the work. She makes less in a year than Tyra can afford to drop in one day of shopping.
January 4th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
egret–
Your first paragraph:
“Fat whore” is an unattractive image. Who wouldn’t stand behind that?
“Fat girl” is a whole other ball of wax. If you read Zak’s book you’ll see how much he likes the very big and very sexy April Flores.
Your (totally unrelated) second paragraph:
I have no idea what any of what you wrote is suposed to have to do with the excerpt from the book, but, for the record, most rich people make less in a year than Tyra can drop in one day of shopping.
Sasha Grey lives in abig house in Hollywood does quite alright. And, if anything ever written about her by anybody whose met her can be believed, she also likes the work.
And, yes, the porn industry is way out of whack. Duh. That’s in a whole other chapter of this book you haven’t read yet, though.
February 1st, 2010 at 4:07 pm
So an industry that is sleazy with undercurrents of drug abuse and criminality was attacked unfairly by a manipulative mainstream T.V. show and the major “victim” was a knowing porn star who was willing to take the abuse (she knew what was coming) in order to garner publicity in a larger cultural context, one that is hungry for the spectacle of this type ? Did I miss anything that was not obvious or old information–nothing new or mind bending in your reporting. You gotta aim higher than that!! Tell me somthing I don’t know already.
February 5th, 2010 at 10:07 am
Most of the commenters seemed to love this piece, but to be honest, I found it to be poorly written and unconvincing. Morally, it’s completely one-sided – it doesn’t make so much as a gesture at understanding the perspective of the other side. From the first sentences, the piece is based on ad hominem attacks on Tyra Banks. The tone is vengeful and bitter throughout, not the kind of thing that inspires confidence in the sobriety and dispassion of the author. The effect is heightened by the exhaustive play-by-play of the whole interview, which illustrates the kind of rapt attention that could only be paid by someone deeply aggrieved by the whole spectacle.
The problem with the piece is that the author does little to make us see the importance of this injustice before documenting it. This Tyra-style hitjob is a ubiquitous feature of television, and there are a million examples of it. So why this? What are the underlying issues at stake? In the first paragraph the author intimates that he knows Sasha Grey personally; whether it’s true or not, the piece reads as if he does.
This is written by someone already certain in his opinions on the subject, for an audience of the same. This is a rant, in the worst possible way.
February 7th, 2010 at 6:55 pm
“The problem with the piece is that the author does little to make us see the importance of this injustice before documenting it.”
I totally agree, Werther, unfortunately the Rumpus didn’t have room to print the 24 chapters of this book that preceded this excerpt.
You’ll just have to go buy it.
March 29th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Why does everyone want to complain about any discussion of pornography before any actual discussion of pornography happens? What’s so dangerous here? There’s always an excuse not to have an actual conversation about porn. Make a joke, or do what Tyra Banks did and make it a sad story. That’s our response. Awesome quote from the book that this segment comes from:
“Excellent, witty, urbane writers can and do fly in from somewhere and visit pornography and write about it wittily and urbanely and make it all seem funny or make it all seem sad because it is always funny, and it is always sad. But it also works. On them. On you.”
And I think that’s the actual core of why the conversation can’t really be had. Because porn works.
The secular world’s approach to porn is as fascinating as the fundamentalists’. The comments about this being a pop-culture piece are absurd. I think Zak Smith is a very interesting writer. Buy the book.
May 4th, 2010 at 10:06 pm
I thought about this piece earlier today. I was babysitting a sick friend and, flipping through channels, she landed on the Tyra Show. The topic was Sexless Marriages (or, the term Tyra insisted on using, ‘sexorexics’). I’ll spare the irksome details of the episode, but would like to note the ‘other end of the spectrum’ here: while Ms Grey is having too much, too disgusting sex, according to Tyra the women on this episode were having far too little.
Ms Banks,
I’m into voyeurs, but please remove yourself from my sex life if you’re just going to stand there judging the whole time.
***This bullshit is why I appreciate the rumpus’s selection of pieces like this one (also, dear comment reader, buy the book). Let’s talk about sex, let’s talk about porn. Like adults.
May 13th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
i wanted porn!!!!!!!!1
May 14th, 2010 at 1:34 am
Sasha Grey is a pornstar and Tyra Banks is not that is all
June 1st, 2010 at 12:37 am
I too wanted real, live porn, but instead I ended up adding the book “we did porn” to my “next book to buy” list, Thanks!
August 10th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
I’d just like to give my friendly Chicago Public Library props for carrying a lot of dirty books, including but not limited to We Did Porn, which I just put on hold.
And as a 19 year old girl, I’ve got to believe that one day they’ll hold porn for me too.
August 21st, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Zak,
I appreciate you calling out Tyra’s absurdity- but please think twice about the way you call the women who were guests on the show “whores” repeatedly unless you are one yourself and know them personally. It is just plain condescending and rude. To learn more about being a better ally to sex workers, which it sounds like you are attempting to be, visit http://redlightchicago.wordpress.com/how-to-be-an-ally-to-sex-workers/
-Anonymous Whore
September 20th, 2010 at 4:15 am
@anonymouswhore
Did someone say “condescending and rude”? Also, not to be condescending and rude, but did you even read the article? If you did, you’d know Zak is a “sex worker” and that he does know the people in it personally.
February 23rd, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Obviously this subject matter makes some folks uncomfortable. I appreciate what you are doing here, and the very smart way you choose to do it. If you aren’t careful, the UN will begin to call on your services, when asteroids threaten to collide with earth, or when diamonds the size of the Sears tower near the core of the planet begin to resonate to the hum of expanding dissonant energy waves, the Ultra Low Frequencies (caused by tight minds thinking hard) and reach critical mass, threatening to crack open the world. Long winded, I know. I got a little excited… so from one loose mind, well done. You are a Champion.
February 28th, 2011 at 2:17 pm
How one can put porn in the same sentence as culture is a mystery to me, unless you qualify it as the culture of cheap, dehumanizing exploitation. And attempting to deconstruct is about as fascinating as taking feces from the toilet and analyzing why it floats or sinks.
When there are so many other, more vibrant, stimulating, and illuminating forms of excitement, why would anyone be drawn to something so pedestrian, debasing, and ultimately devoid of love?
March 1st, 2011 at 5:21 pm
So funny. So awesome. Really accurately portrays the problem with Tyra Banks and how her influence on our culture is so disruptive. Way to go.
March 9th, 2011 at 12:03 pm
@Egret:
It’s worse than that, because calling the woman a “fat whore” is exactly the kind of cheap, prejudicial rhetoric that the piece seeks to excoriate when it mentions the Tyra Banks people’s dishonest camera angles and wardrobe choices. A piece that grooves on pitilessly exposing hypocritical moralism and outrage (and, Lord, was I grooving) risks puncturing its own authority when it stoops to ad hominems.
My sympathy immediately shifted at those words, wondering whether she was happy or unhappy in her fat body, whether it was new or familiar to her, and, ultimately, what about her story and choices were obscured and conflated by those two words.
Polemical execration of hypocrisy is maybe the hardest writing to do, playing with knives, because it requires great discipline, and beacuse, in the end, aren’t we all hypocrites in one way or another?
June 10th, 2011 at 9:25 pm
I picked up a fresh pallette and laid on it a dollop of deep calming forest green. Then I thought to pep that up a bit with a small smear of chromium yellow. But instead of whispering “fresh young shoots emerging through late spring snow” the paint rasped back at me: “polyester soaked in coal tar dye #12″ So I dulled it down a bit with a strong dab of red. But that made my color appear to have just dropped like a sick leaf from a high branch to the forest floor. In a last ditch effort at salavgin g my prismatic ambitions and to relaunch my soaring aspirations I threw caution to the winds, dribbling in a live stream of cloudless blue. Imagine my disappointment when the resulting mess served only to coat my brush with an unlovely excretory shade of brown.
First we have Tasha (or Sasha) perched astride the web of her creation. Then the pompilid wasp Tyra arrives to prey on the predator. Soon enough all creation seems to have tumbled into the web, which promptly turns into a black hole locking stares with the Eye of God circling remorselessly overhead writing it all down in a little golden book in ink of Greek fire. Yet, up to this point the sinews and veins of the story are still barely discernable, even if at times they resemble delicate capillaries coursing with translucent blood beneath a paper fragile skin. But then all at once the locusts of commentary descend, filling the void with their furious buzzing. The earth falls away, the familiar comforts of gravity disappear and any sense of ‘up’ or ‘down’ is irrevocably lost. All questions became equivalent to all other questions, in the *sortal* sense. In the final analysis we’re all predators, we’re all whores, we’re all on TV and simultaneously the audience watching TV, we’re an ineffable ineluctable indwelling mystery to ourselves and each other. If there is any lesson here in this meta madness it can only be that the universe ends with a whimper, not a bang. The bones turn to chalk, the oceans become deserts, and the cum dries on the keyboard. Go now, the mass is ended, thanks be to dog.
June 11th, 2011 at 12:24 pm
I’m obviously late to this party, but this story was linked on a recent Slate.com piece.
I watch porn. My sexual proclivities would very likely make the audience of a show like ‘Tyra’ twist and/or harden their faces to placate that knee-jerk need they feel to be one of the shaming crowd rather than one who empathizes or tries to understand another’s perspective, particularly because the observers, themselves, do not want to be shamed.
Still, even though I am a conspicuous consumer of pornography, I recognize that my yen for it is most often the result of my own shortfall of intimacy, is bolstered by being sexually abused as a child and by the palpable misogyny I feel. I watch it with ambivalence. I enjoy it on a base and primal level and I enjoy it as an expression of my hatred of women. Then I feel guilty for feeding, and reveling in, my misogyny: an issue that would be better worked out with therapy, which is something I am currently doing.
Sure, sometimes I just want to see some sex and there is none of the murky, difficult mental scurf attached to that desire, but that’s rare. And I believe that very few people consume porn with only their base desire to witness sex or satisfy their primal urge. It pains me to concur with someone as vapid and hypocritical, faux and disingenuous as Tyra Banks but, I too, believe there is always psychological/emotional damage suffered by those who make porn and, very often, by those who consume it.
Your work, Zak, really comes across just as hollow as Tyra’s attempted evisceration of pornography. You are nothing more than a defender of something you purvey. You are just as subjective, albeit conversely, as she is. And your defense of porn, and the style of writing with which you defend it, is insipid and puerile.
June 11th, 2011 at 4:42 pm
In my opinion–though why would I be expressing the opinion of someone else?–Zak writes quite well and I look forward to reading his book.
Apart from that, vapid and jejune as porn may be, I find it to be better done than almost anything on television. Except I don’t own a television, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. (Not unlikely, in any case.)
Finally, to take one step back from the tone and content of the piece, I would suggest that Ms Banks invited Ms Grey as a guest in order to keep up the ratings and that Ms Grey appeared on the show to get publicity. So, in essence, the show had nothing at all to do with porn, humiliation, veracity, sanctimony, or hypocrisy.
June 12th, 2011 at 10:11 am
Ratings and cheap production costs to dumb down the masses, keep them happy, keep the growth economy rolling by attaching that happiness to consumption:
Titillate them but keep it moral for the advertisers.
June 12th, 2011 at 12:44 pm
@ Vincent – Way to project all your feelings onto everyone else. If you watch porn to “revel in your misogyny”, then of course everyone else must too. You’re doing exactly what Tyra and her audience did, only you have the ability to be introspective, which actually makes it worse. Nicely done.
June 12th, 2011 at 12:44 pm
Just wanted to add that this is an excellent piece.
November 28th, 2011 at 6:51 pm
I watch porn because I like it.
December 25th, 2011 at 9:15 pm
I liked the articial, although I admit the fat whore comment undermined the arguement and wasn’t needed.
To offer an alternative perpective as a consumer of very perverted porn, I don’t hate women, but in my case I can understand why people would mistakenly think so.
See male sexual domination turns me on, so most of my fantasies revovle around men taking control of a woman and sexually degrading and enslaving her, often against her will (fictionally, not in reality). She eventually cum and the men will break her will taming her as a plaything. Alot of porn is choosen around that sort of fantasy.
I’m not an idiot, I know how horrible these fantasies sound to people, hell when I first started having them I hated myself for it and it left me really depressed because in real life, I’m a nice guy, I like most women, I have great empathy for other people and I care.
You really have to understand just because Sasha likes to be called a whore and gang banged, don’t mean that this is some reflection of who she is as person, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t respect herself because even though the sex is real, the fantasy she is exploring is fictional, its not a reflection of her real belief systems.
I write erotic fiction as Omega Phallic and it includes rape, blackmail, piss, slavery, psychological torture, and some honestly impossible types of orgasms and sex acts. Oh and bad spelling and grammar sadly.
If some one read what I wrote in these stories and assumed that was a reflection of what I believe, I’d appear to be a psychopath.
Instead I’m the type who who has helped old women across the street, who lends or gives money to his family when they need it, who believes in equal pay for equal work, and a women’s right to choose, I believe in rape shield laws, in social democracy, in gay marriage. You see non of that in my stories.
People don’t get to pick and choose which fetishes turns them on, so being PC needs to stop at the bedroom. Your penis or vagina does not care what your politics is.