I’ve been griping talking recently about how I took a part time job with my old employer in order to pay the bills after law school graduation. This has generated a certain amount of interest,  since the employer in question is an adult video website.

In order to streamline the discussion, I’m reposting something that I wrote on my Livejournal in January of 2006, just before the end of my first year in porn. If you’re curious about the depths of banality that I plumbed while working in the adult industry, keep reading. And when you notice particularly boring, repetitive tasks, keep in mind that those are all I’m doing these days. Enjoy.

Ask LBB – Clarification, Explanation And Welcome To My Porn Filter

  First off, welcome to my Don’t-Tell-My-Mom-I-Work-In-Porn filter. I’ve named it Lieutenant Smut, because I’m allowed to sometimes amuse myself solely. If you’re reading this, it means your Friends page will be subjected to my semi-regular posts about working for an Internet pornography company. I thought I would take some time out to enlighten you about the whole dealy, a’ la my short lived and underappreciated advice column, Ask The Little Bald Bastard. Any links you stumble across are NOT safe for work, unless you work somewhere where naked people are the order of the day.

  Do you really work for a porn company? - To be fair, the company doesn’t JUST do porn. They also do phone sex, escort listings, paparazzi pictures and video, and mainstream Video-On-Demand. I, however, work for the porn division.

  Why do you work in porn? - The short answer is, “because retail was eating my soul in tablespoon-sized chunks.” I tried for months to get a job I could be honest with my parents about, but to no avail. Despite my mad skillz, I was forced to work forty or more hours a week at several jobs all through attending college at Rowan. I had bills to pay, so I couldn’t afford the time for an internship. Unfortunately, this left 3 1/2 years of school and concurrent retail work as the most prominent items on my sad little résumé. Based on the total number of interviews I got (two) in the two years I was actively looking for a non-retail job, I’m guessing that this caused a lot of employers to pass me by without even looking at how well-written my cover letter was.
  I’m sure it says something about my character that I was willing to take a job that I couldn’t tell my parents about (or talk about in polite company) rather than stay in retail. My only answer to that is I hate polite company, and there’s something freeing about working in an office where I can use the phrase “big black dick” in casual conversation without raising any eyebrows.

  Do you have sex with anyone for money? If no, why the hell not?! - Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t shoot or act in adult films. I’m not involved in any way in producing porn. I love my wife, and I don’t think she’d be excited about me slinging my johnson about on camera. Also, it takes far less shame, a lot more courage, or a far larger package than I possess to let an audience of strangers watch my pale, flabby ass flap around.
  Nobody here is involved with making adult movies. What we do is solicit porn producers to license us to put their titles online for streaming. We collect money from people who watch the movies, and we pay a percentage to the producers who supply us with the content.

  Ooh, big whoop. Aren’t there thousands of porn sites on the Internet? - True, it’s not exactly revolutionary. Online porn is a huge (think billions of dollars annually) business. The only thing that sets us apart from a lot of other sites is our billing model. Instead of charging a flat fee per month, our users pay per minute of usage. They buy time, and then they can spend their minutes watching a lot of a one movie, or a little of lots of movies. It’s kind of like a pre-paid wireless phone plan, only you’re buying a screenful of genitals instead of a conversation with your grandmother.
  Hah! I used “genitals” and “your grandmother” in the same sentence! I’ll wait while you stop shuddering.

  *shudder* Weren’t you talking about what you do? - Weren’t you shutting the hell up?

  I don’t need to take that shit from you! - You’re right. That was too harsh. I’m sorry. Asshole.

  What? - Nothing. Anyway, I was telling you what I do at the online porn place. Technically, I am sort of an administrative assistant. My boss is the man who I refer to as the Wee Angry Gay Man, or WAGaMa. He’s in charge of all incoming submissions, and the client accounts for all of our the people who send us movies.
  I do lots of stuff for him. I started out logging in shipments from established content providers. Recently I’ve passed most of those on to my work buddy Sara, and I’m learning to do initial shipments from new clients. I’ve also started handling more client questions. “Can you change the title of my movie?” “I shipped you some movies from France this morning. Have you received them yet?” “Why can’t I find my ass, and why does this hole in the ground smell like shit?”
  I also do some writing.  Sara and I write four promotional mailers that go out to our email list every week. That’s three straight and one gay, in which we have to make an adult film sound really awesome. For the weekend, I write a news mailer, which contains four movie blurbs by your truly and three news stories related to the industry, which I shamelessly copy from one of the hundreds of porn news sites out there.
  I also write press releases, which sometimes get published on the big porn news sites.

  Is there anything you read (or write) about that skeeves you? - We do have some odd stuff on the site: bondage, and various fetishes including  transsexuals, menstruation and watersports, which sounds like basketball played in the pool, but really involves people peeing on each other. We don’t really get into the more obscure stuff in the mailers, so my exposure to it is minimal.

  Yikes. Well that’s cool. You’re writing for a living, at least a little bit, right? - Yes, it’s kinda cool, but it has a definite downside. First off, the WAGaMa edits everything I write. And I mean everything. Sometimes I suspect that he’d change my name if he could think of something that sounded better. I know that happens at every writing job that’s any more professional than “Mom’s Basement Blogger,” but it’s more of a challenge when the guy who edits your stuff A) sits at the cubicle next to you, B) makes you review the edits so that you get to see every little “tweak” and C) occasionally plunks a comma down in the oddest conceivable place.
  The other, more frustrating thing about the writing that I do is that I get zero credit for it. The mailers don’t have any kind of attribution. When my press releases are sent out, they are posted on websites. At best, they’re used without attribution or listed as being from the company. At worst, some hack on their staff cuts off the last paragraph of general company information and gets credited for “writing” my release. When I’m ready to move on to the job-I-can-tell-my-mom-about phase of my career, I’m going to have a few hundred Word .docs and zero bylines to show for my writing experience since college. Something tells me that “trust me, I got paid to write stuff” is not very impressive in interviews.

  Is that all you do? That can’t take up eight hours a day. - You’d be surprised. Sending drafts back and forth to the WAGaMa and the company owner, needing two approvals for every comma, can eat up a day of work faster than a pothead housing a bowl of corn chips. Processing new accounts is frustrating and time consuming. Thanks to modern digital production, any mouth-breathing idiot with a dick and a video camera can become a porn studio. They often have a hard time with things like spelling, and it becomes my job to interpret their drool-smudged scribbles.
  Still, you’re right. I do have other duties. I do some filing, photocopying kind of stuff. I do research in the files, and contact clients when we have a question. I sort out the incoming shipments, and pack up things that we need to send out. I also go to the Post Office when we’re mailing out contracts to international clients. I’m even developing my psychic powers; the WAGaMa likes to randomly call out his thoughts on whatever he’s working on, and I’m getting better at knowing what he’s talking about without asking.

  Do you get free porn? - I do, as a matter of fact. All the Internet porn I want, which (after working with it all day) is none, unless I stumble across something particularly amusing.

  Wow, that sounds like a sweet deal! Why would you ever consider leaving? - The short answer is, I don’t want to be Lieutenant Smut (or even General Smut) forever. As much as I believe in the right of consenting adults to participate in blah blah blah, mainstream porn is misogynistic at a basic, systemic level, and it makes me a sad panda. Also, I’d like to someday have a job that I could talk about without doing a mental check of the audience to see if they’ll faint or try to stone me. Now that my wife has gone pre-med, I’m feeling even more keenly that I’d like to do something more productive and satisfying with my life. I’m not entirely sure what that is yet, but I know it isn’t encouraging ejaculation, no matter how indirectly. In the meantime, I’m available to answer any questions that you have about the modern adult industry. If I don’t know an answer, I will endeavor to make something up that sounds plausible.

  I’m an old, fat, midget clown who likes to GET IT ON! Is there a place for ME in porn? - … Believe it or not, our inventory has categories for each of the keywords in that sentence. I’m sure that an adult performer who embodies all four would generate quite a following.

  Is there anything that DOESN’T make a porn chick horny? - Although they would tell you differently, I suspect that what really turns them on is the paycheck. The mechanics of a studio shoot drain away what little sensuality exists in a pre-scripted hour of sex acts, so any pleasure that they exhibit is at least as much performance as genuine stimulation.

  Whenever my scantily-clad slumber parties order pizza, the delivery boy isn’t as cute as we were led to believe. It gets us so disappointed, we’re barely into the ensuing lesbian spank inferno. Aren’t there any pizza places with reliably good-looking guys? - No. In fact, there isn’t a consistent standard of attractiveness in porn, let alone at an actual pizza place. Old, fat, greasy, weird – and don’t get me started on the delivery boys.

Tags: Ask LBB, boring, explanation, job, Journal, Livejournal, memories, porn, questions, work

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