The Hand Print

But a bruise.

[Porn set, 1995; photo by me]

I read “Chris Cuomo Sexually Harassed Me. I Hope He’ll Use His Power to Make Change” by Shelley Ross in the New York Times Opinion section with interest. In it, she recounts the time Cuomo, whom she had overseen as an executive producer at ABC, grabbed her ass. “When Mr. Cuomo entered the Upper West Side bar, he walked toward me and greeted me with a strong bear hug while lowering one hand to firmly grab and squeeze the cheek of my buttock,” she relates. “‘I can do this now that you’re no longer my boss,’” he says. “‘No you can’t,’” she replies, at which point she shoves him away from her, revealing her husband, who had been sitting behind her out of Cuomo’s range of vision. She goes on to point out that she did not perceive Cuomo’s butt grab as “sexual in nature” but as “a hostile act meant to diminish and belittle his female former boss in front of the staff.” This sounded about right to me. Often, sexual harassment is framed as unwanted sexual advances by men upon women, but in my view it is primarily an act of aggression that seeks to subjugate the target.

Reading Ross’s piece reminded me of an incident that happened early on in my journalism career. I believe it was August of 1997, and I was on the first adult movie set I’d ever been on in my life. The movie was called “Flashpoint,” and it starred Jenna Jameson, who was the most famous porn star in the world at the time. I seem to recall it had a budget of around a quarter of a million dollars, which made it a big budget movie by adult industry standards back then. (Wikipedia describes “Flashpoint” as “a 1998 adult film starring Jenna Jameson as a horny firefighter” and claims it “is the highest-selling adult film of all time.” I doubt the latter, but I suppose anything is possible, especially when it comes to pornography.) In any case, I spent the day watching seven people have an orgy on a firetruck in the middle of a parking lot near downtown Los Angeles, and then night fell and we all sat around and waited for a scene that would be shot in an adjoining warehouse building.

That scene would star Jenna and a well-known male porn star named T. T. Boy, a short, pugnacious performer with a lantern jaw and a permanent scowl who reminded me of a less-bright Patrick Bateman. (“Within the business, he is known as an untiring performer,” T. T. Boy’s Wikipedia page touts. “In a 2015 interview, he stated that over the course of his career, he has slept with over 10,000 women.”) I knew who T. T. Boy was before I arrived because I had read about him in the pages of The New Yorker. In 1995, Susan Faludi had written about the suicide of a male porn star named Cal Jammer, and during her research in the San Fernando Valley, her path had crossed with that of T. T. Boy’s. In her story, she’d quoted a former male porn star who’d observed of T. T. Boy: “Basically, the guy is a life-support system for a penis.” I found this assessment to be about right. He was smaller than me, brooding, coiled as if looking for an excuse to do something to someone—it didn’t really matter what or who, whether it was fighting or fucking. Maybe it was all the same to him.

As I recall it, we were sitting in director’s chairs, waiting for Jenna to come out of the trailer into which she’d disappeared to transform into some sort of spectacle of female sexuality, and I believe I began to banter with T. T. Boy. About what? I have no idea. I guess I stood up at some point, and I probably said something sarcastic, and then T. T. Boy hit me, smacking me on the ass with his open hand. I distinctly remember how it felt, because this was no garden variety smack on the ass. This was someone hitting someone else disguised as an act of sexual aggression. It hurt badly enough that my eyes welled up with tears, and I turned away so no one would see. I wasn’t going to let anything or anybody see through the armor that I’d only just begun to assemble that would protect me as I moved through places like this throughout the course of my journalism career. I seem to remember him smirking. But, really, what does it matter? The main point is that a day or maybe two days later, I craned around in the mirror to see there was a large bruise on my ass—in the shape of T. T. Boy’s hand.

(For what it’s worth, I wasn’t alone in my assessment of T. T. Boy. When Jenna finally emerged from the trailer for her scene and paraded past us looking like the living embodiment of a sex doll, and we followed her up the warehouse stairs to the second floor, where the cavernous room had been decorated with devices that shot flames into the air, and Jenna bent herself over a barrel, she looked over her shoulder at T. T. Boy, who was bearing down upon her, and said: “Take it easy on me, okay?”)

That was the first time I got what people would now describe as being sexual harassed while writing for mainstream magazines about the adult industry, but it wouldn’t be the last. There were sexual comments, uninvited touches, flat out come-ons. To me, it was the Faustian bargain I’d made: Did I really think I was going to write about the adult industry and not be sexually harassed? The idea that I would think stuff like this wouldn’t happen was like wanting to believe I could stand out in the rain and not get wet. It was the cost of doing business. It was the price I paid. By the time I ended up in a bedroom in the back of a house occupied by a photographer, and he closed the door behind him, and I sensed something was wrong, I’d learned how to navigate my way out of what could happen to make sure that nothing did. (Nothing happened.)

I often wonder why nothing more serious ever happened to me. Maybe it was my height—I’m 6’1”—that protected me. Maybe it was the fact that I was what people in the porn industry would call a “civilian”—which is to say, an outsider, a class designation that may have insulated me from harm. Maybe I just got lucky.

Nowadays, a generation of women journalists that are younger than me talk about microaggressions and self-care and non-consensual touching. These sorts of things never crossed my mind. In fact, I would’ve made fun of them. Rightly or wrong, I saw my ability to stand up, to tolerate, to take whatever was thrown at me as a badge of honor. It meant I was tough. It meant no one could hurt me. It meant I was in some way impenetrable. Of course, my reasons for wanting to perceive myself and to be perceived by others as impervious to pain long predate my days in Porn Valley. And eventually, the things I saw took a toll on me and I started to believe that perhaps we are all little more than animals seeking to kill one another in order to survive.

So when I read Ross’s line in which she designated Cuomo’s behavior as “a hostile act,” I thought that sounds about right. I had encountered these hostile acts pretending to be sexual acts, too, but they weren’t just acts of hostility perpetrated by others against me. My interest in repeatedly exposing myself to harm to prove something about myself that wasn’t true—that I was invulnerable—was also an act of hostility I perpetrated towards myself. I wanted to prove I was a tough girl. I did. Later I broke.

Why did I write this today? I don’t really know. I think in part it has to do with the memoir that I’m writing, which has forced me to consider some of the ways in which I’ve used my tough-girl journalism persona to conceal my real self—someone who is vulnerable, who feels pain, who wants to shed her armor and be seen.

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