She giggled over Skype as she applied bright red lipstick in the mirror.
“Sorry, I’m listening! Just doing my makeup,” she said, laughing. “I gotta work later, you know.”
Josie Savage* is not a barista or waitress like many college students. Savage makes her living by webcamming — doing live online porn — under the porn name Josie Savage.
Savage, a sociology major with a concentration in queer theory at the University of North Carolina, believes in order to navigate the realm of online porn it is necessary to widen the scope in which it is viewed.
She said what is considered “normal” must be rethought, to adjust the institution of pornography itself.
A blonde size-zero with double-Ds, being mounted by a large, oily and muscled man — this is the mainstream, commercial porn experience.
“Straight people watch porn, gay people watch porn, queer people watch porn,” Savage said. “Everybody thinks it should be OK, to some degree, but we don’t know how to navigate that.”
The once-a-month rush of a Playboy magazine is fleeting, while the endless accessibility of online porn makes it everlasting. Every second, 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography, according to the internet pornography statistics on TopTenReviews.com.
Although there is no way to answer the question of whether online porn is good or bad, it is undeniable that its accessibility today has changed the way we act in our real-life sexual relationships. The question is: How do people feel about this?
Researchers Marnia Robinson and Gary Wilson co-wrote “Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow,” a book and online piece on PsychologyToday.com about the negative effects of online porn. They said online porn is the biggest trigger of erectile dysfunction’s serious interference with real-life relationships, citing that 70 percent of young men treated for sexual performance problems use Internet pornography heavily.
In Robinson and Wilson’s research, the sex workers themselves are rarely mentioned in the endless research conducted.
For Savage, working in the online porn industry is not only a reliable source of income, but also a way she can use her sexuality and her people skills. Savage said her job has allowed her to explore her own sexuality — she identifies as queer — and help others do so as well. Savage said she, like many sex workers, is a survivor of sexual abuse.
“I eventually want to do sex therapy, so I am finding a way to make sex OK for me, and others, outside of the context of the socially constructed loving relationship thing that I feel is blown out of proportion,” Savage said. “It’s not the only way to fulfill all of our sexual needs.”
Savage develops relationships and friendships with her customers, most of whom are regulars. On her website and over Skype, she tries to create a safe space for herself and her clients.
“[I’m] creating a space where someone can explore their sexuality in a healthy way without fear of me calling them gross or telling them it’s not OK,” Savage said. “I’m not in the business of telling someone that they are fucked up for feeling the way they feel. I think a lot of times people’s sexualities are influenced [negatively] by society.”
Natalie Purcell, a graduate from UCSC’s doctoral program in sociology whose book, “Pornography and Violence: The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in Pornographic Fantasy,” will be published next year, said porn is intimately entwined with our day-to-day relationships.
“Like other genres of our mainstream media and culture, pornography has a complex and multilateral relationship with our identities, relationships and practices,” Purcell said. “It can simultaneously reflect, reinforce and rebel against different aspects of our lives, attitude and behaviors.”
Purcell said mainstream porn reflects what is popularly desired, which in turn can lead to false definitions of normality.
“The content of mainstream pornography is shaped by popular demand — by what people already say, do and desire,” Purcell said. “What we see again and again in mainstream pornographies — and in any other part of our daily lives — helps define our sense of the ‘normal.’ On a societal level, pornography is one of many modes of cultural expression that can impact our sexual identities, relationships and practices.”
Porn star Tasha Reign, who has been in the adult entertainment industry for over a year and is a fourth-year student at UCLA majoring in women’s studies, said “normal” doesn’t necessarily play a part in mainstream pornography.
“When somebody watches porn they want to watch a fantasy,” Reign said. “They could be watching something that’s beautiful or they could be watching something that’s hardcore and rough — it depends on what that particular person likes. Mainstream media in general has definitely shaped what people view as ‘normal’ and ‘sexy,’ but in porn, because it’s so kinky there is not a ‘normal’ anymore.”
Beginning with a job at Hooters in high school that led to stripping, her career ultimately blossomed into an invitation to the Playboy Mansion, where Hugh Hefner reviewed her portfolio. Reign feels empowered by her sex work.
“The gender roles in porn are very different,” Reign said. “Women make more money than men, much more money. In regular society, the majority of men are the breadwinners. It definitely switches things up — the dynamics change. The women rule the show, in my opinion.”
Savage said gender roles in porn are the problem, and works to defy them. She said pornography is a way she expresses her sexuality and works to break the extreme gender roles present in American culture.
“I’m pansexual. I identify as queer,” Savage said. “I think the gender binary is a problem, and we need to be getting past it. I think every work in sexuality that I do that stresses that helps.”
Although the Internet has allowed her to liberate herself from gender constructs, Savage said the Internet has also changed how we “do sex” — in a negative way. This negative stigma is what Savage combats in her sex work.
“I didn’t have questions growing up because I had a computer in my room when I was 13,” Savage said. “I knew what sex was, at least this one kind of sex that you saw in mainstream porn. And I do think our preferences have been really informed by that. We look around us at what’s called ‘hot,’ at what we think as a society is sexy, and we internalize it.”
It’s not only porn-positive people who take issue with this kind of internalization. Luke Gilkerson, Internet community manager at Covenant Eyes — a website that offers education and software tools to encourage the fight against Internet temptation — said Internet porn drives users beyond their natural libido.
“Pornography essentially trains men and women to be sexual consumers, not lovers,” Gilkerson said. “To treat sex as a commodity, to think about sex as something on-tap and made-to-order, it trains … viewers to desire the cheap thrill of fantasy over a committed relationship. The real problem with pornography isn’t that it shows us too much sex, but that it doesn’t show us enough. [Pornography] cannot possibly give us an experience of real intimacy.”
Aside from the lack of intimacy, Gilkerson said online porn also sets unrealistic standards of beauty.
The negative effects of these skewed perceptions is something Gilkerson is intimately familiar with. Before he was the community manager at Covenant Eyes, Gilkerson was a porn addict. When he moved to Michigan to get married, he was introduced to the Covenant Eyes community. Here he found a way to heal, and help others who shared a similar struggle.
“Pornography is just the tip of a very ugly iceberg of unrealistic beauty standards imposed by mass media,” Gilkerson said. “If people are concerned about how the photoshopped models in standard advertising affect a girl’s self-worth, how much more should they be concerned about a highly-edited pornography film?”
Webcam model Savage said she is occasionally confronted with users who want unrealistic ideals, but that it is ultimately worth it.
“The Internet can be a really mean place, as is evidenced by every forum, ever,” Savage said. “I don’t need to sit here and have my body insulted. But then I think about it, and the people who aren’t saying that are looking at me and masturbating, which is probably one of the biggest compliments. Ultimately, it’s definitely given me more confidence.”
For third-year Evergreen College student Willy Johnson* — who humorously suggested he be called by that name for the purpose of this piece — webcamming is simply a way to make money. He said the question of whether or not this makes him happy is a complicated one to answer.
“There is a lot of intellectually masturbatory discussion around sex work,” Johnson said.
“[This ignores] the actual, lived realities of the people who engage in it. Personally — and I want to stress the ‘personally,’ because I think the answer to this question is going to vary wildly from person to person — I don’t find it empowering, in the same way I probably wouldn’t find working retail empowering. It’s a way to pay the rent.”
That Johnson is transgender complicates this further: He lives his day-to-day life as a man, but cams as a woman.
“It is exceedingly surreal, in a way that veers between being flattering and being absolutely horrible,” Johnson said, “to be desired for a body that I would do almost anything to be rid of.”
While webcamming has helped Savage explore her sexuality, Johnson said it has not left much room for his.
“It’s played a role in exploring sexuality in general, though not necessarily my own,” Johnson said. “The work requires I pretend to be both female and straight, when I am neither. For me, personally, it’s very, very fake. It’s a performance that panders to the male gaze in a way that doesn’t leave any room for my sexuality as someone who identifies as gay and [transgender].”
Jessica Drake, Wicked Pictures exclusive contract performer, writer, and director, has been in the adult industry for over 10 years. In addition to being the creator and host of “Jessica Drake’s Guide to Wicked Sex” — a series of sex education DVDs that aim to make sex education sexier — Drake holds sex workshops all over the world, and brings her real-life experience to the table.
Drake has been in a relationship with a partner, who also works in the industry, for eight years. She said they never have jealousy issues, because they can relate to each other and understand each other’s jobs.
Drake said she is not strictly “acting” when she has sex onscreen. For that reason, she keeps a list of onscreen partners she has chemistry with.
“Some people may have a hard time accepting the fact that I really get off with the people I work with,” Drake said. “But to me, sex is something I don’t want to have to fake. If you’re not enjoying sex, and you’re really just going through the motions, whether it’s on-camera or off-camera, it requires a disconnect. I’m not willing to turn off that part of my body, or my brain or my soul.”
As Savage pointed out earlier, and as evidenced by the wide variety of perspectives, an expansion of the way the pornographic realm is viewed is necessary. Savage said the denial of her right to be a porn star without being looked down upon is a problem.
“I don’t think [porn] should be something people are ashamed of, because I think that’s a larger problem of how we treat sexuality,” Savage said. “For me, it’s mostly an agency thing. The way culture, especially straight culture, sees porn as degrading to women — it really denies agency. I do porn because I enjoy it. Someone telling me I am being degraded, almost against my will, is truly insulting.”
Everyone has a different perspective on how porn affects his or her life, whether they are a porn star, a consumer of porn or an anti-porn activist. Sociologist Purcell said why each person feels the way they feel, and in what context, is the important part.
“Who feels degraded or empowered by which pornographies, within what contexts, and why?” Purcell said. “Certainly, there are many people who find the images, words and actions portrayed in mainstream heterosexual pornography to be hurtful and abusive, but you will also be able to find people — including women — who would shrug off the same content or find it titillating, empowering, even revolutionary.”
