In GQ’s July issue, writer Wells Tower explores the real life of male porn star James Deen in “The Well-Hung Boy Next Door,” learning the ins and outs (sorry) of the industry, and revealing the actor’s secrets to success, as well as what really happens on set. Following the porn industry’s growth in recent decades, Tower highlights some interesting statistics:
- Two in five U.S. Internet users—125 million—visit an adult site each month
- American porn sites reportedly receive 28,000 unique hits every second
- AVN estimates that a third of consistent porn viewers are women
Deen says he began his career after hearing some sage advice from none other than female porn phenomenon Jenna Jameson, who incidentally answered Deen’s query on how to get into the business while responding to another caller on her radio show:
“So some guy calls in for like the millionth time and says, ‘I wanna do porn. How do I get into the industry?’ … She goes, ‘You wanna do porn? Go get a folding chair and sit in a room with twenty people and jerk off for an hour. And if you can keep hard, and when one of them yells “Come!” you can come in thirty seconds, then you can do porn.’”
Deen followed the suggestion, began having sex in public to practice his performance tactics, submitted video footage of the acts, and the rest is history. ”Yeah,” Deen says. “I always say sex is like soccer: It’s fun and athletic, and you should do it with your friends.” Right.
Deen stands out among his male porn peers due to his “average” looks and “boy next door” appeal. As Tower puts it:
There are probably 12-year-old girls who could take him in a fight. And this, Deen tells me, is partly the secret of his success. He is not the traditional porno man, no overbulked squat-thruster spray-broasted from the Darque Tan booth. He is sort of wimpy-looking. With luminous blue eyes and well-structured, stubble-flocked cheekbones, he is handsome, but in an everyday, non-Hollywood way. “Not horrible to look at” is how Deen describes his appearance. “I’m like a guy a chick might actually meet in a bar.”
Tower spares no detail in transcribing the events witnessed with Deen on camera, and even captures the ludicrousness of some of Deen’s intensely intimate moments:
After a brief interval of manual pump priming … the derricking begins. [Deen's female co-star] is posed in a swastika of shapely limbs. He toils, leans his face into hers, and the two murmur to each other in a guttural lock-jawed patois intelligible to no one but themselves. Every now and then, the two of them break into heliated laughter, as though to say, “All of this grunting and grasping and fuck-me fuck-me porno jabber is a bit absurd, isn’t it? But jeepers, chum, it really is awfully nice to be having sex with you.”
Within Tower’s portrayal—which serves mainly as a playfully-worded relay of Deen’s daily events—lies the stark (and sick) reality of women’s feigned pleasure and at times extreme sexual discomfort experienced while performing in a typical, pornographic context. As a prime example, after one of the sex scenes Deen films in which he has anal sex with a woman, at the end of the take, Deen comes, and after the camera stops rolling, the woman breaks down in tears from the pain:
[The actress's] breathing is stertorous, rapid, pre-infarctatory. Between takes she’s asked if she’s okay. She nods. Her eyes leak little tears, which Deen wipes away with the quick strokes of an experienced cut man. Before long, Deen is instructed to ejaculate, which he does, with dispatch, on [her] face.
In the remainder of Deen’s sex scenes Tower transcribes, the women are never described as actually orgasming—unlike Deen, who comes like clockwork every time, almost always on the woman’s face.
For the legions of male and female viewers of porn, these behind-the-scenes accounts remind us pornography does not represent the mutual pleasure real sex offers. In fact, most porn neglects women’s sexual satisfaction and even comfort, and begs the question, at what point does “entertainment” come at the expense of a proper sexual education, and particularly women’s empowerment.
