America Unzipped (20 page)

The irregular spelling, capitalization, grammar, and all-around oafishness is deliberate, an attempt to infuse the scene with a gonzo air. Yo! Yo! We're one of you, dudes.

The
Bang Bus
movie and its sequels like
Bang Boat
have been such huge hits that the porn world has been trying to find another series like it. The website Mike's Apartment features downloadable movies and photos of girls who show up at Mike's place looking to stay a few days for free, but of course, nothing is free anymore. In the movies and website of Shane's World, college frat boys sometimes have sex with female porn stars who show up at their parties.

Companies are harnessing this enthusiasm to package new reality formats.

Think You're Good in Bed?
PROVE IT
! The Ultimate Sex Championship Begins
NOW
! Submit Your Amateur Sex Video Today! Hot amateur couples screw for cash! You Could Win $100,000 tomorrow! Cash In On Your Wife's Perfect Tits! Cash In On Your Husband's Giant Cock! Compete Against Other Hot Couples for Mega-Booty! Fuck! Suck! Win $100,000 Bucks!

Phil Harvey's Adam and Eve staged
The Search for Adam and Eve
à la
American Idol,
except the winner got a porn contract.

My friends from the Las Vegas XBIZ convention, Zach and Anna, had launched their own company, ZAMediaInc.com. They consider themselves entrepreneurs, and Zach especially, who majored in economics, can recite any number of statistics and excerpts from business models to explain why their company is taking off. They are pleasant, good looking, and smart. But as part of their new business, they began producing their own reality porn production called FuckOrGetFucked.com and advertised it like this:

Not just any slut deserves your load, right? That's how we feel here at Fuck Or Get Fucked…We make
REAL
bitches compete for the meat and the hardest-fucking slut gets the wad! These are regular girls, totally amateur and eager to please. These chicks either fuck or get fucked; We eliminate the sloppy sluts and give the money shot to the one that's worked the cock best. We shoot in Hi-Def and all of our photo sets are Hi-Res, plus we offer multiple video formats for your PC, iPod, PSP & more. Check out some of our latest hoes and then sign up for instant access to see all of the Fuck Or Get Fucked girls in action!

Moffit Timlake has made a small fortune off the desire of everyday folks to show the world they can be erotic players. “These people could literally be your neighbors in the trailer park, and they're hot!” he tells me as we sit in his office. Moffit and his brother, Farrell, run Homegrown Video, the biggest brand name of their company, Xplor Media. Sixty to eighty individuals and couples every month send homemade DVDs of themselves naked and having sex in hopes of making the cut and being included in one of Homegrown's series like Handjobs Across America, Horny over 40, and Housewives Unleashed, available for online viewing or sale in DVD format.

These people aren't your average washouts, with blank eyes and ravaged bodies. Moffit is constantly amazed at how many middle-class, attractive, healthy people want to see themselves in action. As the years go by, the exhibitionists only get better looking, especially the women. Moffit isn't sure exactly why this is, or even why so many couples want the rest of us to see them coupling, but it's a fact and God bless 'em, Moffit tells me, using some of the same language as Kathy Brummitt at the Sinclair Institute, because these folks are showing the rest of us the way toward better sex and communication.

Just as the Sinclair Institute and its competitors try to “give permission,” seeing everyday people giving blow jobs, acting out fantasies on the patio, and having sex in public tells the rest of us that all the things we have thought about doing, but never would do, might be doable after all. Some contributors are probably classic exhibitionists, Moffit says, but these days, who is to say who is an exhibitionist? Aren't we all exhibitionists now? Even famous people are naughty, so why shouldn't we have fun, too? “I think it is the whole Pam Anderson tape, the Paris Hilton tape, [former Miss America and onetime nude model] Vanessa Williams, Lindsey, and Britney doing beaver shots,” he says of famous paparazzi photos of the pantyless celebrities. Besides, Paris hangs out with Jenna Jameson these days, which goes to show you, he says, that “people just don't care anymore. Porn is not that big a deal and I think that is a good thing.”

Moffit thinks many people feel that enshrining their sex into media somehow makes it more real. And if people watch them having sex, all the better, because knowing one's hotness is appreciated helps you stand out in a mass anonymous crowd. “We have a woman—she and her husband have become regular contributors—who goes into their local video store to make sure her video is stocked and announces to people ‘Hey, that's my video,'” Moffit says. “She's really proud.”

Of all the unlikely routes into the American sex industry I have found, the Timlake brothers' path seems the most unlikely. Both Moffit and Farrell look exactly the way you might imagine they would look if you read their biographies. They both have tousled, dark hair, and a thrown-together preppy style that manages to exude old money without obviously trying. Moffit is an avid golfer, and even in his office he looks as if he just stepped outside a locker room after eighteen holes. Their own names—Moffit? Farrell?—betray their preporn life growing up in a well-to-do family in Connecticut. Both went to boarding school. Farrell, the eldest, attended the Kent School, a redbrick and stone-and-clapboard campus located along the banks of the Housatonic River in northwestern Connecticut. Like Phil Harvey, Moffit studied at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Both moved to California for college, Farrell to Pomona-Pitzer, a small liberal arts school east of Los Angeles, and Moffit to Stanford.

Farrell was always the wild child, so it didn't really surprise his family when he decided to become a Dead Head, following the Grateful Dead from town to town. He financed his travels partly by selling videotapes of himself and his wife having sex to a small company, Homegrown, that relied mostly on tapes from swingers for its inventory. Farrell didn't plan on making a habit of performing in front of a camera, but it was fun and easy and Farrell had always been sexually precocious, so why not? More tapes followed and by the mid-1990s, Farrell was appearing in mainline L.A. porn productions, billing himself as Tim Lake.

When Homegrown began to crumble, he and Moffit sensed a business opportunity. So they did what generations of WASP entrepreneurs have done. They asked their mother (their father had passed away) for a loan to buy it. She agreed, becoming probably the only backer of a porn production company at her country club. Today their website is one of the most heavily trafficked adult sites in the world, and their DVDs are wildly popular.

Moffit is married, settled, a member of a golf club near San Diego where he tells people he works in “technology.” He is a businessman, plain and simple. There is not a single sign of porn in his office, unless you count a golf photo as porn. As far as he is concerned, the product could be socks or bicycle rims or software. In fact, if things keep going the way they have been the past few years, Moffit tells me, he and Farrell might welcome a buyout offer, maybe from one of the porn companies that have already gone public.

Farrell, on the other hand, was divorced a few years ago. His son is being educated in an elite private school where the other parents know he does “something on the Internet,” though his son is getting to the age where Farrell and his ex are going to have to figure out a way to tell him Dad is in the porn business.

Farrell also has a new girlfriend, one of Homegrown's more popular contributors. The daughter of a prominent Hawaii businessman, Mahealani was raised Catholic, attended an all-girls Catholic school, did some small-time fashion modeling, and worked as a child psychologist. A couple of years ago, she tells me when we meet, she wound up in a hot-tub orgy and discovered she liked it. It was freeing. She long had a secret desire to make porn, so she decided to make one for Homegrown. “Believe it or not, I told her she is nuts,” Farrell writes in his Homegrown blog. “Still, there is no denying that she is a natural hambone in front of the camera and obviously loves the sex. Ultimately, who am I to tell a grown woman with a Master's Degree in psychology what to do? Homegrown video fans went nuts for her in her first video, which she doesn't like that much because it was true amateur porn—full of glorious imperfections. She made another video for one of my amateur porn colleagues, Rodney Moore, and his fans raved about her, too. You just can't keep a sexy mature lady down when her libido is supercharged that way.” Like some other Homegrown contributors, she can no longer really be considered “amateur.”

 

D
on, on the other hand, is a purist. He has placed a small photo of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow on his Yahoo! Messenger screen while we engage in an online chat.

“I will change it to show you what I show women who are looking to cam,” he types.

“Okay,” I reply.

Whoa! There it is, a man's torso, his hand reaching down, grasping his penis.

“I love the way it feels,” Don types.

Uh-huh. Well, Don is waiting for me to type something back, but what does one say to a man holding his own penis? Nice physique? Happy to see me? Don has become so used to showing himself off to other people and to typing graphic dialogue that the words from his side of the conversation flow as easily as a chat about the weather in Russia, where he happens to be at the moment. He is in a hotel room early in the morning, typing back and forth to me before heading out to work as a construction supervisor for an international contractor.

At least that's what he says he does and where he says he is, but you couldn't prove it by me, because on the Internet Don could be an elderly woman in Des Moines or a teenage boy in Hamburg playing God of War II with his other hand. This is precisely the point. Don is not fully knowable or reachable unless he wants to be. So he can display his privates with impunity, without fear of fallout, and have whatever version of digitized sex he wants with whomever wants. Over the past seven years, Don—and I do believe Don is a real forty-nine-year-old man, though I also think Don embellishes for effect (he will tell in one of our chats that he likes to have sex a Herculean three to six times per night)—has had online powwows with about 120 different people. Many of these have become regulars. He estimates that about 40 percent of his sex life takes place over the Web.

At first, Don spent time looking at porn sites, cruising for jerk-off material. Then he discovered a few amateur women using Web cameras. “I searched the chat rooms for more, and found myself sitting in the chair rubbing my cock and wanting more. Eventually, I met a girl from Florida who showed me everything and spread her legs for me and begged me to get a cam. I did, and soon found myself stripping for her, joining in a private digital sex act.”

Despite being conservative by nature, a Republican who grew up in the upper Midwest and now has two children and a wife who know nothing about his forays into the sexual nooks and crannies of the World Wide Web, Don has become an enthusiastic performer. When he ends his workday he goes back to his hotel room, switches on his portal into the digital universe, and begins broadcasting himself to anybody interested in watching and joining in, often via Yahoo!'s instant message service, AdultFriendFinder's chat function, or ifriends.net.

“I think of it as pure erotic expression of human desire,” he tells me when I ask why. This is better than regular porn, because “we seek escape from our difficulties, from our routine or pressures and this gives it to us. The interaction of two or more sexually motivated people—real people, not actors—is so hot and can be very satisfying.”

Don credits the Internet with being a great equalizer. “Of course this also allows people—because of weight, or whatever—to hide what they look like and still have digital sex with hot partners using their desires and minds to weave an erotic digital date to achieve orgasm and satisfaction.”

When I ask Don how he goes about finding virtual partners, he says it's easy. “If you go into the right room at the right time, all you need to say is something like, ‘Looking to cam with hot lady that loves cock,' and you will have them begging to watch. Depending on how turned on I am, I can select one or two of those watching to chat with and see who they are and how sexy or nasty they really are. So the digital world gives me an avenue of escape [into] secret desire where I can find fulfillment.”

Satisfying. Satisfaction. Fulfillment. People keep telling me they are finding these online. My anti-Internet prejudice may be obscuring my judgment, but, really? Satisfaction? Fulfillment? What bothers me most about the Internet is the way in which it makes the virtual into reality. I doubt their word because the Internet offers a mediated, secondhand experience—to my mind, an impoverished version of fulfillment. Perhaps virtual and real have so blurred that we can't tell the difference anymore. Perhaps virtual actually seems hyperreal because all distractions are stripped away. There are no bills to pay, no nagging partner, no smells or tastes, or troubles, no risk. The heat of high-speed cable simmers all that off until we are left with a reduction of intent: getting off.

Maybe this is all it takes for satisfaction, or maybe this is all the satisfaction that is available. Maybe it has come to that.

Don does meet real people in this virtual space. To prove it, he sends screen images of various women, or I should say parts of various women, mainly breasts and genitals, he has received from online sex partners. Then he forwards transcripts of his dialogues. The words were typed with all the ardor he and his partners could muster, but there are only so many ways to say what amounts to “Ooh, baby.” mmgarcia8: “I want every inch of you…balls slappin' off my ass as you ride me.” Don's feverish exhortations to mmgarcia8 and the other women make Prince Charles's infamous recorded tampon fantasy seem Byronic by comparison, though I suppose Don might be creatively handicapped by typing with one hand and masturbating with the other.