Thank You For Quitting Porn

“When we’re done, I’ll pull out those old photos,” I told her. She was painting my new bedroom with me and with my boyfriend, the first girl I ever did porn with who is also the last girl I ever did porn with. The photos were no more than 200 pixels wide on any side, and were from 1999. She and I were at turns nude and having sex in them.

This is what doing internet porn in 1999 was:

You went where the digital camera was. You drove to Boston, to Providence, to New York. You took planes to Chicago, San Francisco. You started a blog to just talk about porn not because there was no one offline to share porn with you, but to talk about porn on its own terms, in its own space. You had to speak its language, even if you didn’t know it. You got paid enough to buy books for one class, to buy a vibrator and a box set, to buy a plane ticket, to buy dinner for your boyfriend. You got paid enough to buy lingerie you ended up never wanting to wear anywhere else after you wore it on camera. You got connected enough so that for a few years, you never had to pay for your own webcam, or computer, or sex toys.

You forgot if you were getting paid to blog or to do porn. You “had” to have your blog linked to the site so you could have something else for the members to pay for. You “had” to hang out in chat after webcam shows to become more of a personality. You met every smart woman in sex online that there was to know because if they weren’t naked on your website, they linked to it, or you to them, and that was enough.

The fucking that porn was supposed to be about was almost incidental.

You quit when the photographer couldn’t get the word out of his mouth, pussy. As he asked you to spread it, and all he could say was, “Can you just…

…thanks.”