“Do you fake it?”

It’s the question I probably get asked the most often when it comes to my work in porn. Do I fake my orgasms, do I fake my interest, do I fake the sex that I have or how I dress or that I even want to be on set? It’s a complicated question, even after I’ve answered it through multiple lenses and in multiple contexts over many years. There’s never an easy answer that trips off the tongue.

I think one of my hesitations when unpacking the concept of authenticity in porn is that the answer seems contradictory. Part of me wants to say “no, I am very privileged in that I get to have sex on film in the way I want to. I prioritize having a lot of agency on set over making a lot of money, and what you see is sex I want to have, with people I want to have it with.” I do genuinely enjoy my work, and often perform with people I like to spend time with off set. I adore my boss, and TROUBLEfilms, the company where I primarily perform, has ethical standards and political beliefs that align comfortably with my own. Porn has ended up being a realm where I have felt some of the most encouragement to grow professionally in front and behind the camera.

That said, I feel weird making such a statement. Sex work is the only paid labour that I have felt the need to reassure my readers, my friends, my family and my lovers that I like what I do, which I find to be indicative of the social stigma surrounding women and sex. It’s a job, and I feel strongly that it’s more important that I feel safe at work, that I have protections and rights and cultural support around how I make my money. It’s ok to fake it at your job, like so many other people do in various types of employment. And the more marginalized you are, the more the pressure and expectation to grin and bear it cheerfully weighs on you. We survive under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as best we can. 

 

No one ever asked me if my smiles were genuine and if I felt degraded when I worked at Build-A-Bear, is what I’m saying. 

When the topic of authenticity comes up, I remember when I purchased sex in Amsterdam’s red light district. I remember sitting with the woman, a curvy blonde who had flirted with me through the window, and having a wave of anxieties rush in. I wanted to have a sexual experience with her that was enjoyable to us both, but I was also very aware that this was a service job. I had not purchased and was not entitled to her “real” desires. We could negotiate, of course, but I had to trust that what she offered was what she wanted to do with me at that moment. Whether it was how she fucked when not at work, I’ll never know. And that’s ok. The sex was lovely, sure, but what I really gained from that experience was a complicated understanding about sex work and performativity.

When I think about porn and the push for more authenticity, I think about other entertainment industry work. Hollywood, for example, has some similarly warped ideas about what is authentic, who decides what that means, and authentic for whom. We watch big dramas like Mad Max: Fury Road or Game of Thrones, and discuss at length whether what we’re seeing is a realistic depiction of that imagined world. We know it’s fiction, yet we want it to be convincing on some level, or we feel torn away from the story. The highest praise we can give to an actor or actress is that they are believable.

Yet at the same time, Hollywood often makes decisions that veer away from the realistic in order to increase “marketability”. Consider, for example, Maggie Gyllenhaal, who talked to the press about being turned down for a role as the love interest of a 55 year old man because they felt she, at 37, was “too old”. Hollywood casting felt an 18 year age difference would not be realistic on screen for telling a story, despite that on average in heterosexual couples, the majority of age differences range from 1-5 years apart. We prioritize, not the actual authenticity, but the transformation of something that is extremely rare into something conceivable.

I see a parallel to this in heterosexual porn. Oftentimes the focus is on the female talent who checks multiple boxes of mainstream attractiveness. The male talent, meanwhile, is headless, absent of personality, and often not particularly handsome. The scenarios that lead to sex between them are absurd enough that jokes are made about them- we all can share a knowing smile when someone talks about porn plots or acting in porn.

 

So then why, even though it’s entrenched in the cultural consciousness that it isn’t real, do we prioritize “real orgasms” in pornography? 

Case in point: I remember doing a porn shoot for Fisting Day last year. I performed with my boyfriend, though in most ways it was like any other shoot- he was paid, we signed paperwork, there were camerapeople present. However, despite being a “real couple”, doing sexual acts we certainly do at home with the cameras off, it was a highly performative experience… not because of what we did, but because of what we left out.

 

We were much gentler with each other during the shoot than we are when we fuck at home--even though that is less authentic for us as a couple, it reads as more authentic to the viewers at home. It was fun, certainly, but it was no more or less real sex because there were lights shining at our junk and a camera recording.

The best description of what was going through my head was Schrodinger's Porn. Do “real couples” have “real sex” when they’re alone, but once it’s observed it’s a performance? What about the little ways in which we all perform for a partner, by squeezing our cunt muscles to clench around them, or by being a little bit louder than we are when we masturbate alone? Does that make sex less authentic?

Whose gaze turns it from “genuine” into an act, or vice versa? Does it even matter?

It does matter to some people. There’s plenty of discussion about how mainstream porn “ruins” people’s attitudes about sex, or about their bodies. An article in Cosmo a couple years ago discussed “11 Porn Fails Ruining Sex For Normal Women”, because of course porn actresses are not normal women, but actually a species of mystical creatures. Many of the complaints were about how porn fakes it, from how many women enjoy blowjobs to what foreplay looks like.

There’s some truth to this, of course- porn can also be very homogenous in what it portrays as a sexual experience, and that deserves critique. But even porn that challenges those ideas are still performances, and that doesn’t make it better or worse. Suggesting that performers who get breast augmentation are “fake women” is as much of a problem as demanding that all porn performers shave their pubic hair. Authenticity as a privileged brand projects the construct of what’s “real” in a way that’s still very prescribed, which seems to contradict the very concept.

Being too good at your job and too persuasive can also backfire. To go back to Hollywood for a moment, I have a lot of sympathy for Anthony Perkins, who was cast as Norman Bates in Psycho. He found himself typecast for the rest of his career, despite having previously demonstrated a decent range of performances. It affected Perkins enough that for a long time, he withdrew from acting entirely. "I did feel I'd never escape Norman," he said in an interview in 1986. "But my wife pointed out to me that the more I would try to escape him, the more people come away convinced and reaffirmed that Norman and I were very similar.”

This really resonates for me as a porn performer. If we are not good at acting, we don’t get booked and are pushed out of the industry. But if we’re too good at our performances, it makes it that much harder to leave, or to persuade the public that we have a life outside of our work. Porn performers have had crowdfunding campaigns shut down for medical bills because the companies believes it would just go to making more porn. Our non-performer lovers may feel challenged and struggle to believe that while sometimes we like our work, work is still work. We might get fired from our jobs when we try to start a new career path. We are typecast- once a porn star, always a porn star, after all. And of course the better you are at your performances, the more popular you become and the more people know your name, sometimes trapping you into your at-work persona.

So when I’m asked if I’m faking it on camera, the answer to some extent is yes, of course, and also no, not as much as you might think. It’s complicated. I don’t believe “realness” should be valued any more or less than giving a great performance. My ultimate hope is that porn sets allow their stars to bring as much authenticity to set as feels safe and comfortable for them, and that the viewers honour that for what it is- a demonstration of agency at work.