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Monday, February 19, 2007

HOW TO: Be An Altporn Star.

filed under: HOW TO:, Web Sex Index by Lux Nightmare

The thing they always want to know – the question everybody always asks – is how the whole thing started.

You know: how did a nice, Jewish girl like me end up in altporn? How did a Columbia student end up running her very own porn site?

The story starts – not surprisingly – with a boy. A boy, and a two room studio in slightly pre-gentrification Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. The boy was my then-boyfriend, who I was almost-but-not-really living with at the time, and we were curled together in his bed, and he leaned in and asked me if I wanted to be a porn star.

There’s this idea out there – one that I helped create – that anyone can be an altporn star.

That idea is a lie. If anyone could be an altporn star, everyone would be an altporn star, and there would be no need for me to write this piece.

It takes a special kind of person to really succeed in altporn: there are very specific qualities that you need to have to succeed. These qualities have nothing to do with your appearance or your body type or your skin color (hence the idea that “anyone can do it”) – but they are still very real, quantifiable qualities that every aspiring star must have.

Getting into it was easy: in part because this was way back in the day, back before Suicide Girls made altporn stardom every emo/goth/hipster girl’s life aspiration. This was back when you could email the owner of a site, and have her write back and agree to come to your town in the next couple of weeks and take your picture.

That’s how it happened for me.

Maybe a month after that bedroom conversation, I was in my living room – my new living room, because my boyfriend and I had progressed from almost-but-not-really living together to actually, factually living together, lease and all – and I was taking off my clothes for the camera, and more than anything I was worried about what my face looked like.

Not my body, just my face.

That’s the first thing about being an altporn star: you have to love your body. Altporn – real altporn, not the bastard spinoff that’s colonized the airwaves – is a celebration of the self. Altporn is about knowing that you’re sexy, regardless of what the mainstream media tells you.

I knew that I was sexy. I posed for the camera. Snap, click, snap: I was on my way to being naked on the Internet.

I got really into the site that I was on. It had a community that bonded through an IRC channel and some message boards. I made friends – at least in Internet terms – with several of the members, branching off from the site into Livejournal, where I learned more and more about their lives – and they, in turn, learned more and more about mine.

When I got a webcam, I started doing shows on a regular basis, chatting with members as I disrobed in thirty second intervals. Sometimes I used the webcam as a “life cam,” giving site members a view of my daily life.

That’s the second thing about being an altporn star: you have to engage the fans. Altporn grew out of the Internet: because the overhead was so low, it was relatively easy to start up a site and not worry about over investing and going broke. Because it was the Internet, there was an intense focus on communication – one of the biggest attractions of altporn was not simply that these models were “real,” but, even more, that they would talk back.

I was fascinated by the ever expanding world of altporn. I was in love with the idea that I was communicating with people about sex – and not just in lascivious terms. I saw myself engaged in a conversation about healthy sexuality, about body image, about how we interact with, how we talk about, our ideas about sex.

I wanted to be a missionary of good sex, I wanted to spread my gospel far and wide. When I found out about Ducky Doolittle, I was enthralled. I wanted to be a part of her world, I wanted to be one of her cam girls. We met, and we hit it off, and we started talking.

She called me one day – I was at work, and she called to talk about being on the site. She wanted to make sure that we were on the same page, she wanted to make sure I understood what being naked on the Internet actually meant. She told me about her early days of posing in magazines – thinking that they would be on the stand for a month and then disappear, and ultimately realizing that these magazines, once printed, existed in the world forever. She wanted to know that I understood that: wanted to know that I was aware of what I was getting myself into, aware that this venture would shape the rest of my life, aware that there was no turning back.

I said that I was.

That’s the third thing about being an altporn star: you have to understand that there are no takebacks. There are photos of my snatch, rendered in 72 dpi, on harddrives all around the globe, and I have no claim to, no control over, these images. Being an altporn star means letting go of ownership of your image; means knowing that you are more than the photos that depict you.

I got fans. I got deeper into the world of altporn. I started my own site – a site that I ran and appeared on, a site that features boys as well as girls. I got more committed to altporn – its ethos, its ideals – I got more committed to promoting it, to talking it up, to living out my ideals through its mechanisms.

I also got good at living a double life. Online (and sometimes off), I was Lux Nightmare, altporn diva, That Strange Girl. Offline (and sometimes on), I was this other me: a college student, a nice girl.

Things were okay until the Internet and the real world started to collide.

There were some early stirrings of trouble: a few months after I started making porn, some acquaintances learned what I was doing, and I was essentially blackballed from what had been my oncampus group of friends. The people I really cared about stuck around, but I learned the hard way that there are friends, and then there are friends.

That was nothing, though: as more and more people got into the Internet, as Friendster made it cool to put yourself online, I found the distance between my two lives becoming uncomfortably narrow. I joined Friendster as Lux Nightmare, using it to promote my porn site. As more and more of my real life friends joined the site, navigation became a bit complicated. I was simultaneously trying to promote myself as a porn star and hide the porn from my legitimate life, and it became more than a bit tricky.

A girl I went to middle school found me on Friendster. “When did you change your name?” she asked me.

I didn’t even know what to tell her.

That’s the fourth thing about being an altporn star: you have to be very good at managing a split identity. Even if you’re able to be out to the people in your real life, there’s still an important boundary that needs to be maintained between yourself and the world.

Being an altporn star means giving yourself to the world: means exposing your body, your heart, your sexuality, your self, to a mass audience. If you aren’t careful, it can mean losing your sense of self to the world at large, as you become owned by your audience.

And that brings us to the fifth, and final, thing about being an altporn star: you have to love it, or it will kill you.

There are a lot of bad reasons to do porn: because you think it will make you popular, because you think it will make you feel pretty, because you think it will make someone love you. Doing it for the money is an okay reason (provided you consider a few hundred dollars a month, maximum, to be adequate compensation): but the real reason, the most worthwhile reason, is because of love.

I loved altporn. I loved the message it sent, the way it made people feel, the way it inspired people. I loved altporn with my whole self, and it made everything – everything – worthwhile, worth the pain, the difficulties, the split identity.

Altporn was about love. That’s what drove it, that’s what made it succeed: until the beating heart of altporn was chewed up, commercialized, reprocessed and repackaged.

There are no altporn stars anymore: but there were, once, and they created something unique, beautiful, and special.

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