NEW YORK – Over the years, I’ve written literally millions of words about porn.
Some of those words have appeared on box covers, others have been published on websites. Some have described, in occasionally cringeworthy detail, sex acts that made me throw up in my mouth just a bit, while others have saluted women and men in the adult industry whose physical beauty and sexual prowess leave the viewer breathless.
I’ve interviewed federal law enforcement agents, legendary porn performers, prominent First Amendment attorneys, multimillionaire erotic entrepreneurs and pioneering technologists from literally all over the world.
Ironically, perhaps, the scope of this writing and the nature of the many mind-altering chemicals I’ve consumed in furtherance of composing it are very difficult for me to capture in words. Reading a recent article in the New York Post, however, one thought has united all my wordsmithing in a single, overarching truth: I don’t get paid enough for this shit.
“Dead porn writer’s Upper East Side crash pad asks $4M,” stated the headline on the Post piece.
Look, I understand New York real estate is more expensive by the square foot than, say, a bare dirt lot near Nogales or an abandoned, dilapidated chicken shack outside Globe or any of the other nearby properties that are within my price range. But to hear any porn writer lived in a joint for which the asking price is now four million bucks? How many fucking porn reviews did this person write, for God’s sake?
To say I’m skeptical is putting it lightly. This person had to be selling coke on the side or his ass for $400 an hour to wealthy New York Johns or something, right?
According to the Post’s Jennifer Gould Keil, “the unit was formerly owned by the late author Kathleen Winsor, who penned a novel, Forever Amber, detailing the sexcapades of a heroine in 17th-century England.”
What the fuck? When did erotic novelists become “porn writers?” Did this Kathleen Winsor person even write one DVD review with the acronym “DVDA” in it? Did she ever make fun of guys injecting erectile dysfunction drugs into their cocks? Did she even once mock Steven Hirsch over a classless job offer to a disgraced celebrity?
I’m so pissed off about the blatant unfairness, the severe income inequality, the downright pornographic injustice at hand here I can barely bring myself to google Forever Amber to see what the fuss is about.
“Her honey-coloured hair fell in heavy waves below her shoulders and as she stared up at him her eyes, clear, speckled amber, seemed to tilt at the corners; her brows were black and swept up in arcs, and she had thick black lashes,” reads one of the only excerpts I could find from this allegedly pornographic novel. “There was about her a kind of warm luxuriance, something immediately suggestive to the men of pleasurable fulfillment — something for which she was not responsible but of which she was acutely conscious.”
Is it just me, or does that passage not contain a single description of a cumshot? Did I miss a subtle reference to double-penetration? Where are the monster cocks? Where is the gratuitous alliteration, the lapping lesbians, the pounded pussies, the quivering quim?
According to Gould Keil (and Wikipedia) the book was banned in 14 U.S. states but still managed to sell more than 100,000 copies in its first week. (I guess it’s a good thing for Winsor there was no such thing as the internet back then, or some site called TextHub or YouNovel or maybe XXXBookworm would have been handing that shit out for free by the time it hit the shelves.)
Clearly, I’m in the wrong sector of the porn-writing business. Instead of blog posts, keyword-dense website text and uber-graphic porn reviews, I should have spent these years waxing erotically poetic about characters with names like “Lord Bruce Carlton” and “Black Jack Mallard.”
This sinks it! Starting tomorrow, I’m giving up peyote (and crack and morphine and maybe even model glue) and packing my laptop in a box. Instead, I’ll spend my days drinking brandy or white wine or whatever it is scandalous women drank back in the 1940s, switching over to an old-school typewriter and sitting down to write about an orphaned Englishwoman with badly-dehydrated-person-piss-colored hair and a thing for rich guys, lords and “swashbuckling lotharios,” whatever the fuck that means.
Sure, I may never sell 100,000 books in a week, but if I play my cards right, I bet I can get famous enough that one day one of my heirs can sell my rehabilitated central Arizona chicken shack at a price that enables them to pay off at least 10 percent of their student loan.
