Are We Having Fun Yet?

Las Vegas, NV – An hour removed from landing at McCarran International Airport, I am sitting in what is frequently regarded (at least by the locals) as the world’s best strip club. I have joined some friends who arrived a couple hours earlier. We are seated in an area reserved for bottle service patrons, an elevated section fenced off from the rest of the club. A half-dozen used glasses ring half-empty carafes of vodka and fruit juice. The group is buzzing and there is lots of demonstrative backslapping. Howls of laughter are barely audible over the din of hard rock coursing through the place. A pneumatic platinum blonde dancer slinks down a pole on a small circular stage just a few feet from us. A scene couldn’t scream “Vegas” any louder.

I plop down on a velvety couch facing the rest of the club. I admit to finding the inverted social dynamic of strip clubs intriguing. All the girls play by Sadie Hawkins rules. At least ostensibly they do. Like everything else in this city, you’re still coming out of pocket. It’s not as if the girls are risking anything when they approach a guy. Still, I have watched dancers get upset when their dance solicitations get rejected. Maybe in some ways that rejection is even worse than a guy approaching a girl in a normal club. It’s hard for somebody to be implicitly told that they are physically unattractive no matter what the circumstances.

Next to me is a girl who goes by the name Aria*. Aria is not a dancer--at least not tonight. Her face is as perfectly sculpted as a Greco-Roman statue and roughly as warm. I decide to chat her up anyway. I introduce myself and her blank face reproduces the pre-programmed smile of a perfume girl at Macy’s . She is from San Diego which she claims to miss terribly. But Vegas is where the money is. She has offered to procure girls for some gentlemen who are acquaintances of my friends. The rate is $1,000 per hour. This is what she does. She is a fixer, a party girl: a species by no means unique to Las Vegas, merely more prevalent. She gets things people need: girls, drugs, instant entrée into the best clubs. Aria‘s got whatever you need.

After some breezy conversation, Aria excuses herself to conduct business. She is working after all. I am left to wonder how she got started in her career. I’m guessing someone scouted her after observing her in a club or something. Asked her if she wanted to make some easy money just offering to hook deep-pocketed men up with long-armed girls. Was it much of a moral quandary for her? Did she worry about her parents asking about how she afforded her lifestyle? What about relationships? Was she able to maintain a significant other? What were her tax returns like?

I won’t see Aria for the remainder of the trip. I feel a tinge of disappointment about that.

Strip clubs like nature abhor a vacuum. Eventually a couple of other girls insist on keeping us company. I tell one girl that I am treating my friend to a dance and she goes over to sit on his lap. I explain to the other girl that I don’t like dances. I haven’t for a while. Not so much for moral reasons, but a stubborn immunity to the effects. My brain is unable to detach what the girls are doing from the fact that money has facilitated this transaction as opposed to say my disarming charm. The cash nullifies the gratification. So I hand her a few twenties and tell her I’ll compensate her for her time.

We talk while her friend grinds my friend into submission. She tells me about how they both fly out to Vegas when they want to make some quick money. They are from the tri-state area and usually work at one of the large clubs near the Westside Highway. This is fairly common among dancers. Many come from LA and San Diego for the weekend. I ask her how it works and she explains that the girls pay a flat fee to work, usually $100-150/night depending on the weekend. For dances, they keep whatever they make. If a girl and her clientele use the VIP section or one of the more private and insanely expensive ($500/hour) rooms, the club takes a percentage. On a good weekend she says she’ll clear maybe $5,000. And that’s not even the real money.

She says that she doesn’t offer “take-out service,” but many of the girls (including her companion) do. If I had to hazard a guess I would say maybe 70% of these girls are pros. On any given night in this club there are usually over 100 girls working. I ask her what kind of money they make for extra-curricular activities. She points to one of the girls engaged in a lap dance, a life-size Barbie. “My homegirl working over there? She charges $2,500 an hour.” Surely that can’t be right, I scoff. A man with the means to pay that kind of money, wouldn’t he be able to just go pick up a girl? Obviously these sort of profligate transactions happen. I mean New York’s former governor is perhaps the most famous John of all time for doing just that. She waves off my incredulity. “They do it because they can. They like being able to get what they want right now, right here.” Still, I can’t really wrap my head around it. I just envision having the wickedest case of buyer’s remorse ever.

I would guess the enhanced women outnumber the natural girls at least 4:1. It’s disturbing how much (bad) plastic surgery is being regularly showcased here. But the girls wouldn’t do it if it didn’t increase the bottom line. I’m no proponent of breast augmentation, but I would think optimally a woman should only go one cup-size up from her natural physique. Anything more and her body isn’t equipped to handle the bulk. These girls completely stomp on that rule and seem to be adding three or four cup sizes to their natural frames. The result: skin stretched taut across the breast plate with two bocce balls straining underneath. It confounds me that anyone finds this attractive.

A number of songs later, I tell her that I’ve let the meter run long enough and thank her for her time. The two girls discuss how much longer they intend to stay in terms of dollars: “How much more you wanna make tonight?” “I’m at fourteen-hundred. So like five more dances?” I’m impressed at how they’ve compartmentalized their work.

My friends and I are all still on New York time and it’s after three in the morning. We are exhausted, but not sleepy. Everything in this city conspires to decouple you from your internal clock. Unless you’re outside you never have any idea what time it actually is. The city is one giant sensory deprivation chamber. I can’t believe I have three more days of this.

*name changed to protect the innocent

Behind the Green Door

Las Vegas , NV - The Adult Entertainment Expo (now in its 10th year) is where Silicone Valley descends on the desert each January in order to showcase its seemingly inexhaustible supply of products ranging from hi-def DVDs to anatomically-accurate-to-a-disturbing-degree inanimate companions. The weekend's festivities culminate in an awards ceremony, a sort of Bizzaro Oscars, where awards such as “Best Director – Bi-sexual Video” are distributed to a cavalcade of the industry's brightest and horniest. It follows right on the heels of the CES, one of the largest electronic trade shows in the world. Thus two of America's favorite obsessions, technology and sex, are spotlighted for a solid week within licking distance of one another.

As luck would have it, I recently spent an extended weekend in Vegas to celebrate an old friend’s birthday and got a chance to observe the bacchanal spectacle firsthand. As I stood in line with the other perverts curious attendees, it struck me how many women were in the queue. We could just as well have been lined up to get into a Knicks game at the Garden. The demographic still skewed heavily towards white males in their late thirties to early forties, but there were also quite a few young people. Some were alternative-types, tattooed and pierced in various uncomfortable looking places, but there were also a lot of average Joes and their girlfriends. It was a surprisingly diverse cross-section of America. Such is the power of porn.

While the industry’s revenues are undoubtedly as exaggerated as the purported, uh, attributes of most of its male performers, there is no denying the depth of its cultural penetration. (Couldn’t help myself, sorry.) No longer relegated to the area hidden behind the slatted wooden doors of your local mom and pop video store, pornography has become as mainstream as the personal computer. Or more precisely, the internet. The advent of the web has been the biggest development in porn since VHS. (Ironically for porn purveyors, the ‘net has also posed the biggest quandary they’ve had to face: on the one hand it has increased the ubiquity of their product exponentially, but they face a piracy issue that’s arguably worse than the music industry’s.)

The web has made porn pretty much inescapable (not that we were actually avoiding it to begin with) and that has de-stigmatized it to a large extent. Just think: in 1984, a few racy photos forced Vanessa Williams to resign her title as Miss America and retreat into obscurity for a few years; in 2004, the release of a homemade sex tape magnified Paris Hilton's celebrity after clips of the notorious tape spread across the net like herpes in Cancun. Now pornography has significant value as cultural currency (think how we all bonded in revulsion over "2 Girls 1 Cup"). It seems there's no shame in indulging in a few 10-second clips every now and then. Think about the scenes in “Knocked Up” where the guys are talking about making a website that tracks nudity in mainstream movies. True understanding of the joke is predicated on the audience’s familiarity with the Mr. Skin web site and judging from how many people in the theater laughed at the scene when I saw it, I'd say most of us were pretty familiar. Superbad has a similar scene with the whole Vag-tastic Voyage bit. I’m not sure if you can make a qualitative assessment of this development just yet, but I don’t think we’re worse off for being unashamed of looking at Pandora’s box.

"Greatest. Game. Ever"

After coughing up my $80(!), I made my way through the convention center which housed a reported 300+ exhibitors. The largest exhibition booths resided at the front of the hall. Representing the industry heavyweights such as Wicked Pictures, Vivid and Red Light District, these massive displays drew the biggest crowds mostly due to the bevy of high-profile names signing autographs and taking pictures with fans. Digital Playground’s booth had large LCD flatscreens all running a looping clip of CG water and boats with a literal skeleton crew seemingly generated on a Playstation 2. This was a teaser trailer for “Pirates 2,” one of those “big-budget” porn films (meaning it didn't have the production budget of a public access show on cable). I’m not sure who these “high concept” (given that it’s porn where most films are filmed in somebody’s well-lit San Fernando Valley home, I’d say screwing on a pirate ship counts as high-concept) films appeal to. I’ve actually watched one (or five) of these big-budget productions and found them to be wholly entertaining but only in an unintentionally comedic way. I remember this movie “Flashpoint” that starred Jenna Jameson at the height of her career (what a mess she’s become; she was actually booed at this year’s awards ceremony for stating to the crowd that she would never “spread her legs for the industry again.”). In the movie she plays a firefighter. Near the beginning of the film, a member of the company dies in a blaze and after the funeral two female firefighters console a fellow fireman by engaging in a ménage a trois. I believe this is the fourth stage of grieving as described in the Kubler-Ross grief model. Anyways, I think such departures from the industry “bread and butter” productions are interesting, but ultimately a waste of time. Of course, the mammoth sales numbers prove me wrong, as I believe Flashpoint is one of the best-selling adult movies ever.

The smaller booths were fixed like satellites around the major displays. They were mostly no-frills, consisting of a few long tables topped with sample DVDs, posters and glossy one-sheets advertising upcoming productions. Most had between three and four company representatives (mostly ladies) who would sit and chat with enthusiastic fans without hesitation. Behind the ladies, there were usually a couple of bored looking men in baseball caps fixing up the booth or re-stocking the table with freebies. Although I’ve never been, I imagine that this is what a Star Trek convention must feel like.

At these booths, fans didn't have to wait long for autographs and photographs with their favorite stars. I would often watch men engage in extended conversations with booth girls, as if they were old friends oblivious to their surroundings. I’m curious to know what the performers thought of all this. I imagine many are contractually obligated to come to this event each year. I’m not saying they don’t enjoy the attention. It’s just the nature of the attention that I find problematic. The fan in his enthusiasm is basically saying, “I enjoy fantasizing about you sexually.” It seems fair to conjecture that when men watch adult films, the male performer in the film acts as a surrogate for the viewer. Despite being a level removed, there is still a sort of pseudo-intimacy shared between audience and performer. Granted in mainstream movies, we are encouraged to fantasize about actresses/actors (this is why Halle Berry could command a premium to appear topless in the forgettable Swordfish years ago). But we don't actually watch them engage in graphic intercourse. So what happens when an actual face is put to the invisible audience? What are you really saying when you compliment a performer on her (or his) work? To borrow an idea from Seth in Superbad, you’re basically saying, “Wow, you take d!ck really well.” What goes through a performers mind knowing that almost without exception, every fan she encounters has fantasized about having sex with her? Maybe it’s an ego trip. I think it’d just be skeevy.



Obviously, there is a misogynistic component to pornography, but maybe this is balanced by the fact that most pornstars are probably misanthropes. I mean if my entire raison d’etre in the eyes of these fans was to act as an instrument for their sexual gratification, I’d have a fairly low opinion of humanity (not to mention myself). Is this fair to speculate? The women didn't seem miserable, but maybe they lacked self-awareness? Well that's a pretty condescending thing to say, but how else to interpret a scene like this: you walk past a booth where a woman smiles and chats about the latest offerings of the studio she works for while not a couple of yards to her right, a large flat-panel television loops clips of her vigorously copulating with a nameless pony-tailed drone. Surreal isn't even the word.

I remember having a conversation with a stripper (the lengths I go to probe the darker sides of human consciousness, I tell ya...) and I asked her how she handles the day-to-day stress of allowing various unwashed hands to paw her for hours on end. She replied that she was a naturally very sensual person and that she actually enjoyed it. Now granted she could have been lying to me, but at the very least I have to believe that she was lying to herself. Doesn’t sensuality naturally imply some sort of sincerity? Some honesty? Some intimacy? Doesn’t the commercial nature of the interaction inhibit these things? I mean when this girl is at her most flirtatious, she is selling a manufactured sensuality. How well she sells this fantasy determines how much she makes. But it is still a charade that both participants knowingly engage in. So what about the porn performer? How thick must that wall be? She has to sell the idea that she enjoys having rigorous intercourse with random men. I don’t know if it’s possible to leave the industry unscathed. I mean most of these films don’t even pretend towards any sensuality. They revel in a sexual violence that appeals almost exclusively to men. ( I can't imagine any performer is able to maintain a normal sex-life let alone relationship after his or her career in the industry.) What does this say about us? I don’t know, but it makes me want to take a shower using industrial strength chemical decontaminants.

Seeing the stars up close also illustrated just how physically deleterious the business can be on a person. I did quite a few double-takes when I spotted a couple of performers that I recognized. You remember how stunned you were when you saw Mark Mcgwire just a couple of years after he’d retired from baseball? It was that same feeling. I saw this one woman who at some point was the most popular black female performer in the business. She’s in her mid-thirties now, but she walked with a slew-footed shuffle that gave her an old woman’s gait. She appeared bloated and tired. I can’t imagine what middle age has in store for her. And then you have something like this which just defies all forms of verbal expression:

"The goggles...they do nothing!!!"

One of the people who attended the show with me commented that none of the women seemed particularly attractive. That was true and probably one of the biggest surprises. A lot of the women just looked comically unnatural from the bleached hair and teeth to the absurdly inflated chests. To be sure, there were a few genuinely attractive performers, but they were definitely in the minority. Overall, the scene just reinforced all the negative things you associate with pornography. It was like Scared Straight for porn consumers. I don't think I'll have to worry about hiding any embarrassing DVD titles from company anymore.

Of course, this thread is useless without pics.