My girlfriend Emily requested that I roast her in front of her friends for her birthday party. This is what happened…
(This was the first stand-up I ever did…)
[This is a memoir chapter from The Divine Absurdity of Love: A Memoir and a Novella ]
The party was called Éphémère, a Belle Epoque-themed party, in October 2013. It was hosted by my friend Philippe Lewis, one of the most experienced organizers of play parties in the Bay Area.
Ladies in feather hats and bodices filled the mansion in Sausalito, and men in three-piece suits wore ascot ties. I was there on, believe it or not, a quadruple date—three kinky witches, and me, all on a date with each other in some type of amorphous polyamorous configuration.
At the beginning of the party, we—the four mutual daters—sat in a circle, clasped our hands together in a big ball in the center, blessing the marijuana chocolates we were about to eat. (This was California, where we bless our marijuana.)
Visions of an orgiastic pile of Sapphic love had filled my mind when I organized this quadruple date. Before this vision was consummated, however, the marijuana chocolate hit me hard. I sauntered into a side room to take a sit down and collect myself.
At that moment, a woman sat down to an electric piano, facing the room. She said into the mic that her name was Adey Bell. A black garter peeked through slits of her tight black skirt, while a black corset with touches of red lace flourished upwards. Neck-length bangs with blonde highlights sloped up towards cropped dirty-blonde hair in the back. In the front, the light green of her eyes reflected the candle flickers of the room like flaming absinthe. All accented by… a top hat.
The first moments of her first song knocked me backward. I laid back on the carpet, as if I had been shocked by a river of electrified honey and champagne hitting my ears. By the middle of the first song I started twitching and trembling, in my place on the floor. I had witnessed many explicit sex acts that night already, and now I was the one being penetrated—by her music.
Adey sang:
I was fortunate to be able to read the following letter to my father on his deathbed a month ago. (I was with him as he died of pancreatic cancer peacefully this morning, in my childhood home, surrounded by loving family.) When I read it to him, he said he felt deeply seen and understood by it, which was extremely meaningful to me.
#####
Dear Dad,
We know this will likely be the last letter I ever write you.
I could write a whole letter about all the ways you have loved me. You’ve cared when I was hurting, you’ve given great advice through the decades, and you’ve shown a passionate interest in my writing when I’ve shared it with you.
I could also write a whole letter about all the things I love about you: the unfathomable subtlety, beauty, and brilliance of your mind; your sense of humor when you get on a roll; the way you want the people you love to thrive, and the way you support them in doing that; and obviously, your care for the world and the inspiring way you manage to keep on fighting even though you’ve never felt much hope.
Here is what I want to focus on in this last letter: the way you have impacted me. The thing I most value about myself is that I’m a writer. (I know, I’m nice and caring and all those things I’m supposed to say I value about myself too—but what breathes fire in me is my identity and practice as a writer.)
I simply cannot imagine myself as a writer without you. Thus, I cannot imagine a version of Michael that didn’t have you as my father. (The same goes for Mom, and I’ll write her that letter too.)
Due to college labor practices, many adjunct professors now need side hustles; Dr. Mistress Snow’s involves beating up men in a sex dungeon.
[This is the full version of the Daily Beast interview I did with Mistress Snow, Ph.D. Due to their length guidelines, they did not include large parts of my introduction, and some parts of Mistress Snow’s answers. Segments not included in the Daily Beast version are indicated with asterisks **before and after the segments.**]
When you think of a college professor, you don’t usually think of a dominatrix. And, you also don’t usually think of someone who is so underpaid that they don’t know how they’re going to afford rent or groceries. However, due to college administrators’ relentless drive to cut labor costs via outsourcing college instruction to freelance “contingent faculty,” the latter situation of professorial poverty is increasingly common. And for that reason, at least one professor—whom we’ll meet soon—has taken up the former as a side job.
More than half of all college professors are now “adjuncts”: part-time freelance instructors who often have the same Ph.D.s as their tenured and full-time colleagues, but who get paid low amounts on a per-course basis, with few or no benefits or job security. Typically, adjuncts (also known as “contingent faculty”) string together gigs at multiple colleges, which pay an average of $3,984 per course. Three courses a semester, or six per year, is considered a full teaching load–many adjuncts report it’s difficult to get this many courses–which implies a typical yearly income of $23,904 for the “lucky” adjuncts with a full-time-equivalent teaching load.
For reference, full-time baristas at Starbucks make an average of $27,030 per year, and are eligible for benefits including health insurance, dental, vision, 401(k), paid time off, parental leave, and even emergency financial assistance during family crises; adjunct professors typically receive none of these benefits. **And, making these thousands of dollars per year more plus benefits as a barista does not require ten or more years of study and foregone earnings during college and graduate school, nor the often-six-figures of student debt that adjuncts carry.
One researcher titled his book on this downtrodden half of the professoriate “The Adjunct Underclass.” The title is apt: according to research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center, 25% of part-time college faculty are on some form of public assistance, including Medicaid, welfare, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and/or food stamps. Since 50% of the faculty are part-time now, taken together, these statistics imply that one-in-eight college professors are adjuncts currently on public assistance. If you’re taking a college class right now, there’s a chance your professor just showed up to your class having slept in her car.
Welcome to what one team of researchers have referred to as “The Gig Academy.”
How did this happen?
For my Daily Beast article about Mistress Snow, a college professor who is a dominatrix, I did background research on famous people who did porn and other forms of sex work while in college. Tasha Reign—who did porn in part to pay her way through UCLA, and was also doing porn during her recent master’s program in journalism at USC—told me that her friend Brett Rossi also did porn while in college.
Brett was kind enough to grant me an exclusive interview on this topic; she has never publicly discussed the relationship between her porn career and her college education.
How did you come to do porn while in college?
I was a runway model since I was 14. Once I turned 18, I started working at the Playboy Mansion as one of Hef’s little painted girls for parties. I was introduced to somebody who worked for Penthouse, and it went from there. At first, I was mostly just a centerfold in the beginning. I started doing hard-core girl/girl scenes in 2010, when I was 21.
The sole purpose of me entering the adult business was because I had to survive for myself. My family was not poor, but we were not rich either. When I turned 17, I moved out on my own where I was not supported or helped financially by anyone but myself. Before porn, I had gotten a lucrative job as a mattress salesperson where I moved up the ladder quickly and became a manager. After I got into the adult entertainment industry, I started using the money that I was making there to go to nursing school in Los Angeles, in 2018, when I was 29.
I wanted to become a trauma nurse because when I was in high school, I lost my very first boyfriend to a drinking and driving accident. The trauma nurses kept him alive for 3 days. They worked so hard and fought so hard for his life that I always admired them and wanted to fight to save lives like them.
I was still doing porn to pay for school when I started. But I was outed by a student, and I was bullied out of nursing school.
One paradoxical aspect of political coalitions/alliances, such as the broad anti-Trump alliance that just won (which included. i.e., progressives, centrist Democrats, and never-Trump Republicans): in order to turn out their faction to coordinate with other factions on overlapping goals (i.e., defeating Trump) each faction actually needs to criticize the other factions to some degree on the non-overlapping goals.
Without that, many people within the factions feel that coordination with otherwise-opposed factions in the coalition is a form of selling out on the parts where the factions disagree.
In other words, a certain amount of in-fighting or at least bickering (within factions and across the entire coalition) is inevitable and even necessary. It’s a delicate balance though. Too much intra-coalition in-fighting and the coalition blows up into shards; not-enough and no faction can allow themselves to work with the others.
[This is Chapter 1.3 of Sex, Cash & Privacy: A Case for Allowing People to Profit From Their Own Sexuality in Peace. For previous and subsequent segments, click on that link.]
With all that, let’s get back to Ashley Judd’s genuinely impressive sexual performance in Normal Life. In this film, she deftly plays an emotionally-unhinged lab technician, with a passion for astronomy, and a serious problem with pills, alcohol, and overspending. She gets involved with a cop played by Luke Perry. Her sexuality (starting from an inability to orgasm) begins to open up to him, the more she spends his money, and the more he lavishes her with gifts he can’t afford on his cop’s salary. Liking the sexual effect his gift-giving has on her, Perry eventually turns to bank robberies to fund their lifestyle. Their newly-rich lifestyle leads to increasingly explosive sex between them, including the fuck-a-thon described at the opening of this chapter.
Here, a production company “bought sexual access” to Luke Perry and Ashley Judd for their explicit and impassioned performance. This purchase including access to their “orifices” as they made out with each other passionately, and as Luke Perry licked Judd’s cleavage.
(Note: the phrases in quotation marks in the paragraph above, and in the paragraph below, are from Ashley Judd’s tweet about sex work here.)
Was this “body invasion”—as Judd calls sex work—of Perry’s mouth into Judd’s mouth and vice-versa “inherently harmful” to either? Was “cash the proof of coercion” for Judd’s sexual performance? And if “buying sexual access commodifies something that is beyond the realm of capitalism and entrepreneurship,” as Judd puts it, then why did she accept payment for this sexual performance? Is the Hollywood film industry not a part of capitalism?
[This is Chapter 1.2 of Sex, Cash & Privacy: A Case for Allowing People to Profit From Their Own Sexuality in Peace. For previous and subsequent segments, click on that link]
As we will see in detail in this book, the Nordic Model—and the accompanying baggage, stigma, stereotypes, gaslighting of sex workers’ own experiences and boundaries, and de-facto criminalization it heaps on sex workers—goes squarely against all of the ideals professed by Ashley Judd and other Nordic Model proponents also involved in the #MeToo movement. All this makes Judd and her colleagues in Nordic Model advocacy, unfortunately, justly described as anti-sex-worker advocates.
Why? Just look at the way they erase the very existence of sex workers when sex workers are demanding them loudly and publicly not to.
In 2018, Judd gave a talk at the feminist co-working space The Wing in New York, promoting the Nordic Model. In this talk (see the embedded video), she said, “There’s no such thing as sex work.” In the run-up to this talk, she had also approvingly retweeted tweets by other organizations in the ASW coalition that stated “#NeitherSexNorWork” and “#SexWorkIsNeither.” And one prominent ASW feminist whom Ashley Judd describes as her own “HERO,” and whom Judd introduced at ASW events, is Rachel Moran, who has tweeted, “There’s no such thing as ‘sex work’ – therefore there is no such thing as a ‘sex worker.'”
If you regard yourself as a sex worker—as hundreds of sex workers who responded on social media in outrage to these statements do—then it would seem fair to say that someone who says you don’t even exist and that you’re wrong to think that you do exist is “against” you. Hence I believe the term “anti-sex-worker” is a perfectly valid, in fact, objective, description of this stance towards sex workers.
Sex Work
Starlets v. Harlots: Why Are Liberal Hollywood Actresses Allying with Right-Wing Christians to Throw Sex Workers Under the Bus?
[This is Chapter 1.1 of Sex, Cash & Privacy: The Case for Allowing People to Profit From Their Own Sexuality in Peace. For previous and subsequent segments, click on that link.]
It could have been a porn movie.
With heavy metal blazing, a topless woman with bleached-blonde hair tackles her male sex partner in a fit of passion, rips his shirt off, and makes out furiously with him. She then jumps off him, rips his pants off, and jumps right back on top of him. She slides her head down his chest towards his crotch, as her clutched fingers scratch violently down his chest in tow and her head bobs.
He leaps off the bed, pulls her up while she straddles him, and then slams her back down on the bed, now on top of her still furiously making out. He rips her panties off and starts thrusting her from on top, as he shoves his tongue into her cleavage. She lets out staccato orgasmic huffs and screams at each of his aggressive thrusts. Her head hangs back off the edge of the bed, upside down, and she pushes up on the carpet so as not to fall off the bed from his vigorous thrusting.
She writhes in ecstasy and screams in pleasure even more as he chokes her gruffly. Now he’s leaning off the bed too on top of her, gymnastically propping himself up with one arm, so they don’t fall off together as he continues to thrust her energetically. Now they fall off the bed and roll over onto each other, as they catch their breath in post-orgasmic gasps of air.
It could have been any porn film, but it was not porn. It was a rated-R movie, Normal Life (1996), featuring Luke Perry and Ashley Judd.
[This is the Introduction of Sex, Cash & Privacy: A Case for Allowing People to Profit From Their Own Sexuality in Peace. For subsequent segments, click on that link.]
I believe that dictating the way a person relates to their sexuality is one of the gravest wrongs a society can impose, so long as that person is not directly harming others in their sexual activity.
The past sixty years have seen the greatest reduction of this type of societal wrong in human history. In many parts of the world, we have thankfully decided “it’s none of our business” whether another person:
- Fucks before marriage
- Fucks using contraception
- Fucks someone of a different race
- Fucks someone of the same sex
- Fucks (or is fucked) in the ass
- Fucks themselves
- Fucks with sex toys
- Fucks while watching other people fucking
- Fucks multiple people
- Fucks rough (consensually)
- Fucks with kinky role plays
- Fucks while high on cannabis
- Fucks in a furry costume (even more entertaining when combined with the previous…)
- Etc. Etc.
When society decides that these and other activities among consenting adults is “none of our business,” it does not mean that all people who respect this “bedroom privacy” of others—as I call it—approve of all such activity that goes on in others’ bedrooms. It does not mean everyone thinks all such activity is socially beneficial. It does not mean everyone in society would be happy if their teenagers (or even grown children) engaged in such activity.
And it certainly does not mean everyone would want to try all such activity themselves (unless one is, like me, a “try-sexual”: I’ll try pretty much anything once).
It just means we have decided that what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. . . is none of our damn business.
It’s not our business to judge, and it’s certainly not our business to get the law, the police, or the courts involved.