How Do You Make Your Money?
Or, whatever you do, lie!
“I'm a content creator in the adult space.”
That’s what I tell people when they ask what I do for a living. But that wasn’t always the case. For a long time, I lied. It really depended on who asked me.
“I manage outsourced labor in the Philippines,” used to be one of my answers. In the early days of running adult sites, we did that. Menial writing tasks, mostly. Submitting content to TGP’s. Some HTML coding. Our Filipino crew did that sort of work.
“I manage online affiliate programs,” was another one of my go-to’s. Again, because I really did, and I liked that answer a lot because people didn’t really follow up with anything else.
I don’t care what people think now, so I tell the truth. Maybe it’s a function of age. Maybe it’s because I’ve given up on having any sort of intimate, age-appropriate relationships with a woman. Next time you’re in a bar, and someone you just met and might have an interest in asks what you do for a living, reply, “I’m a pornographer” — just to see what happens.
Or I can just tell you now: in the worst case scenario, she’ll ask to clarify what I just said, then walk away in disgust. Or they’ll just walk away disgusted. Doesn’t matter how far we were into drinks or a meal. It’s an immediate get-up-from-the-table-and-leave-the-creepy-sex-trafficker. In a best case scenario, the conversation is kinda fun and sometimes intense with lots of questions about everything from anal to the money shot to testing for STD’s to what-happens-when-this-or-that-happens…but, realize once it’s out there, I’m immediately Friend Zoned.
The “you should meet my crazy friend the pornographer” Friend Zone.
Unless, of course, I’m interested in dating a fellow sex worker. I’ve got all sorts of stories about those kinds of relationships, but I’ll talk about them later.
My mom had a stroke recently. I had to hire a consultant to come over and retro-fit her house for the handicapped. At the end of our 90-minute consult, as he was starting to fill out an order form, he popped the question. “So, what do you do for a living?”
“I'm a content creator in the adult space.”
He looked over at me, stopped writing up his estimate, and said, “My dad worked for Reuben Sturman when we lived in Ohio! For years. I even met John Holmes!”
(So this is the first time in my story / tutorial where I’ll digress into a history lesson. Because you probably don’t know Reuben Sturman. Expect future lessons on 18 U.S. Code § 2257, Hal Freeman, The Miller Test, the enemies Jim South and “Reb”...as well as Carey Kefauver and Bill Margold. To name a few.)
Reuben Sturman is considered the Godfather of The Modern Pornography Industry. Sturman got started selling comic books out of the back of his station wagon in the early 60’s. Then, he got a hold of some nudist mags. Early smut. Think long shots of naked people frolicking around nudist camps, playing volleyball, a guitar around the campfire, or barbecuing. I find them all the time now at flea markets. Of course the nudist mags outsold everything else in the back of his wagon by a long shot, so there you go.
Soon, he was approaching truck stop owners to install 25-cent peep-show booths. I won’t claim to know his pitch, but if I was working for Rueben back then, mine would be something like, “see that back corner of your store? The one you’re not using for anything? I’m going to put a peep-show booth back there, maintain it, change out the movies regularly, and when I do change those movies, I’ll pull all the quarters out of the machine and split them with you 50/50. You do nothing but get money. I do the rest”. Remember that scene in The Duece? When the thugs walk out of the Times Square peep show joint with bags and bags of quarters? Those were Reuben’s gang.
It didn’t take long for Rueben to become a self-made squa-zillionaire; and, like most self-made squa-zillionaires, he hated The Taxman. So much so he did a pretty awesome job of avoiding taxes (lots of long stories about all the various corporations he created); but, in the end, you know what happened to Reuben. He even managed to escape prison (in a bundle of dirty laundry, I think!) If you really want to know more about Reuben, read Eric Schlosser’s excellent book Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. It’s pretty much where I learned everything I just told you.
“I used to be really good friends with his son, David,” The Consultant said. “We used to hang out back in the CES days.” This piqued my interest, because I’ve always wanted to meet David and ask him questions about his dad and what our industry was like back then.
“CES” is the Consumer Electronics Show that goes down every January in Vegas. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s a huge industry show, and for reasons I’ve never known, AVN’s would coincide every year with CES.
“After CES, sometimes I’d head over to David’s warehouse,” The Consultant said. “When he was part of Doc Johnson. We’d laugh as he showed me the ruined sex dolls people returned wanting a refund. The dolls were literally blown to pieces because they got fucked so hard.”
We laughed, too. “I can’t believe we just had this conversation,” he said. And then he handed me an invoice for all the stuff we’d have to do to make sure my mom could shower safely from now on.