September 3rd, 2014. I’m in the Las Vegas airport waiting for my connecting flight home to San Francisco.
I hear literal hooting and hollering and turn to see two guys getting off a flight, clearly excited about something in the terminal. Following their gaze, I see porn star Ron Jeremy at the Southwest counter. They yell his name, move toward him, try to slap him on the back, they’re elbowing each other in the ribs, they can’t believe their good luck. I wasn’t close enough to hear the words they actually said, but I imagine something like, Dude. Dude. It’s fucking Ron Jeremy, bro! RON FUCKING JEREMY.
Ron Jeremy, however, is not as excited. He looks pained. Like he wants to disappear. He’s not making eye contact, he’s not smiling. He seems to be twisting and pivoting to escape their attempts at physical contact. He moves quickly, shuffle-running from the counter to the gate next door, then back to the counter to grab a white plastic bag he left behind, then back to the gate and boards his flight. The whole moment lasts less than 30 seconds. Maybe he was just late for his flight. But those two bros will probably be telling the story of the day the saw Ron Jeremy in the Las Vegas airport to their grandkids.
It is safe to say that one of the last things I expected to feel on September 3rd, 2014 in the Las Vegas airport was compassion for porn star Ron Jeremy.
Porn. We all have some kind of relationship to it. For many, Ron Jeremy may feature prominently.
Mine had a cliched beginning ― dirty magazines found in the woods. I recall my cousin and I (and maybe some of his friends) looking at a stash found near some stumps. I remember wet leaves, soggy pages, and checking over our shoulders for any adults approaching from the neighborhood. Even though I’d never seen this type of magazine, I wasn’t surprised. It felt inevitable.
Fast forward to middle school ― there was a paperback that found its way into my hands in sixth grade, smuggled in from a parent’s collection and brought to school by one of our more entrepreneurial classmates. A friend and I bought one of the last remaining titles, Carla’s Beast Rape, for I think, two dollars. We read it together one afternoon after school, sitting side-by-side in the top bunk of her room. Pausing every few pages to look at each other as if to say, holy shit, does stuff like this really happen? There was a kidnapping by a motor cycle gang. There was a scene with a dog. Then a scene with a horse. I was compelled and repelled. It’s all still vivid in my middle-aged mind. Stay away from motorcycle gangs.
In high-school, I saw my first frames of a porno flick. After work one night at the pizza shop, the manager, who was in his late twenties, had a party. Beer. Pot. Porn. High school students. I don’t know who gets the credit for picking the movie, but it featured lactating women with not very good aim. I recall Milkmaids being in the title. I think of this movie every time I see a woman breastfeeding.
In college, I worked in a bookstore that boasted a huge magazine section, a good part of it devoted to skin mags. The selection satisfied a wide array of tastes and fetishes. Feet, legs, big boobs, big butts, Asians, African Americans, girl-on-girl, boy-on-boy, spanking, S&M, bears, twinks, you name it. It was an education. Secretive, guilty-looking men approached the section in the back corner of the store in a circuitous route. Frat boys were bolder. Small groups of them would walk with purpose to the back corner of the store, make their selections after consulting with each other and then give us some variation of this isn’t what it looks like, it’s for a frat project. All the men were embarrassed. My co-workers and I, all women, made these uncomfortable transactions drag out as long as possible. It was the least we could do for the discomfort this caused us.
My boyfriend liked that I worked in this bookstore. He would ask me to bring home specific titles — or maybe I offered. Maybe one day it’d be Car and Driver, The New Yorker, Playboy and Juggs. Another day, it was a different batch. We lived together. I was 19. He was a few years older. If he wantedJuggs magazine, who was I to argue?
When I moved in with that boyfriend, my mom decided to cut me off financially. I had to drop my classes. She and I stopped speaking. That was the Stovetop Stuffing sandwiches and Porn Thanksgiving. I can’t recall if it was lack of money or lack of desire to figure out how to cook a turkey that led us to stuffing and porn. But we ate stuffing and mustard sandwiches (yeah, they’re as sad and bad as they sound) and had a movie marathon. I’m sure we rented other movies, but I only remember the classic porn. I watched them as any other film ― for the story, for the acting, to be entertained. It was a classic porn survey. Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat,Debbie Does Dallas.
We broke up.
I took a women’s studies class. I took another. And another. Then as many as I could. Down with patriarchy! I wore a pin that said Subvert The Dominant Paradigm. And I really meant it. I joined and then ran a feminist group on campus. I marched on Washington. I did an undercover ‘sting’ on a pro-life organization fronting as a women’s clinic. There was a lot of talk of porn in our group, what it meant to the culture, what it did to women and girls. We weren’t prudes. We were righteously pissed off. In order to talk intelligently about the worst kinds of porn, we watched it. Some of the torture porn we saw will never leave my brain. The only porn I didn’t hate was porn for women, made by women, which there wasn’t much of in those pre-internet days. Selling porn in the bookstore became more and more difficult for me. Some weeks I took the more offensive stuff (incest, nazi S&M fantasies) out of the shipping boxes, walked out the back door of the store, and tossed it right in the dumpster. The judgement I heaped on those men, yes, always men, was white hot. When Playboy came to our town to scout women for their college issue, our feminist group picketed outside of the Holiday Inn where Playboy was interviewing co-eds. Someone from the magazine distributor ― the owners of the bookstore ― drove by and saw us. I was almost fired that day.
In the years since then, the white hot has cooled. Sexism (and all the -isms), objectification of and violence against women, the dominant paradigm, patriarchy ― all that still deeply bums me out. On the bright side, there’s more porn that’s made for women, by women. There’s also all kinds of dark stuff out there, that I can’t bear to see. So I don’t look anymore.
But I did see Ron Jeremy in the airport. And I felt bad for him. And now there is a little sliver of my heart that belongs to him. And man, does that feel weird.