Pop music has always been about sex, but it’s never been as up-front about it as it is today. Thanks in part to pop listeners’ migration from radio to censorship-free streaming services, songs overtly sexual enough to have earned invitations from a congressional committee back in Tipper Gore’s day routinely hit No. 1 without anyone blinking an eye. Browse through Spotify’s agenda-setting Rap Caviar playlist and you can hear tomorrow’s crossover superstars describing, in diagrammatic detail, sex acts that weren’t even common in mainstream porn when 2 Live Crew was battling federal courts for the right to distribute their music.
Pop’s newfound unconflicted, hang-up-free sexuality is a testament to free speech and sexual expression, not to mention the amount of ground that free speech advocates have gained in the course of the past three decades of culture wars with conservatives. But as pop has shed its modesty, it seems to have also lost touch one of the greatest outlets for its erotic urge.
When was the last time you heard a truly sensual R&B ballad? Not just a song about sex, but a song about lay-you-down-by-the-fireplace, put-your-phone-on-airplane-mode, light-some-candles-and-bust-out-the-massage-oil sex? I guess what I’m asking is, when was the last time you heard an unforgettable fuck jam?
I bet it wasn’t while you were listening to pop and R&B radio. The airwaves used to be as dense with fuck jams as America’s plains once were with bison, from the unbuttoned-shirt virility of 70s soul seductors like Barry White, Isaac Hayes, and Teddy Pendergrass to unabashedly sexual female performers like Aaliyah, Missy Elliott, and TLC who ushered pop’s sonics and sexual identity into the new millennium.
These days, tuning into throwback-loving “strictly for the grown and sexy” urban adult contemporary radio like Chicago V103 and L.A.’s 94.7 The Wave can feel like looking at one of those old photos of huge piles of buffalo carcasses from a railway hunt and marveling that they were ever so plentiful. Out of the 100 songs on Billboard’s year-end Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs list for 2018, only the Weeknd’s “Call Out My Name” and SZA’s “The Weekend” really qualify, and coming in at No. 43 and No. 85, respectively, they didn’t exactly light the world on fire. Ella Mai’s smash “Boo’d Up” is sweet but not sexy. Ty Dolla $ign and Jeremih are continuously pumping out brilliant sex music that can’t seem to connect with a mass audience, while Spotify’s popular Are & Be playlist is continually full of emotionally intelligent but chaste quasi-bohemian bops like Pink Sweat$’s “Honesty.” I’d argue that the last truly fuck-worthy song popular enough to get any randomly selected group of intoxicated people to sing along with it–the ultimate marker of a pop classic–is Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love,” and she put that out in 2013.
True, there are plenty of songs out there racking up Spotify spins by the multimillions that have all the sonic characteristics of a fuck jam. They’ve got the slow tempos, lush arrangements, even the right kind of lascivious mood, at least here and there. But they’re not really fuck jams because they’re not really about fucking.
About a decade ago, R&B-ish hip-hop records like Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreaks and Drake’s So Far Gone and hip-hop-ish R&B songs like Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” knocked down the last crumbling bits of the wall between the two genres. Rappers, emboldened by Auto-Tune and swimming in promethazine cough syrup, got slower and more sing-y. R&B artists who’d been raised on hip-hop started to emulate rappers. They started writing songs about the things rappers wrote songs about: ambition, material wealth, grudges. And crucially, they stopped making music for the bedroom and started making it for strip clubs, which are all about status and public displays of extravagant consumption, and only a little about sex.
The merger of hip-hop and R&B has been more successful than anyone could have imagined a decade ago. Now only has it swallowed the pop charts almost entirely, it’s produced some of the most adventurous artists to come out of the soul tradition since the seventies heyday of Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye. The Weeknd has introduced a chilly postpunk atmosphere and gothic melodrama to a genre that in the past often felt stiflingly glossy. Rihanna has proven herself to be one of pop music’s most agile stylistic acrobats by putting her instant-platinum stamp on everything from bubbly EDM-pop to hard-edged trap music. Drake, who’s spent his entire career shape-shifting around any attempt to pin him down as either a rapper or a singer, has given us some of the decade’s most indelible melodies and become one of the biggest forces in all of popular culture in the process.
But sex is rarely the main focus of their songs, and when it is, it’s usually not as a source of pleasure unto itself. Most of Drake’s songs are about Drake, and sex for Drake is something to be accumulated, shown off, compared to his peers in an endless game of competitive status anxiety. He delights in his ability to attract sex, and describes the emotional and power dynamics of sex in intimate detail, but doesn’t spend much time talking about the act itself. His sexiest songs aren’t even about fucking. “Passionfruit” is about long-distance obsession. “Marvins Room,” whose title explicitly references Marvin Gaye, is addressed to an ex-lover but is almost entirely all about her new boyfriend.
Same thing for rap and R&B’s other reigning sex icons. Rihanna uses sex for fun and power. Future, possibly hip-hop’s greatest sensualist, uses sex–and slow jams like “Rich Sex”–as an excuse to inventory all the high-end jewelry he wears while he’s having it. The Weeknd used to write about sex as a compulsion on par with his enthusiastic substance abuse, presenting a dark flip side of the archetypal R&B sex fiend that was intriguing until it was done to death by nearly every R&B singer to follow him (along with the emo-inspired SoundCloud rap movement as a whole). These days he’s mostly channeling most of his erotic energy into his automobile collection, which he’s eroticized to the point of paraphilia on songs like “Starboy,” where his lovers are easily outnumbered and outshined by the small fleet of sports cars he lovingly lists. (Weirdly, it’s a trait that he shares with Marc Bolan from T. Rex, whose most iconic songs are all pretty much about how badly he wanted to fuck a car.)
It’s maybe fitting that consumption’s replaced fucking as the object of obsession in soul music’s modern-day descendants. The single-minded focus on grinding toward a particularly materialistic ideal of self-actualization hasn’t only spread to R&B artists–it’s become the defining worldview for an entire generation. The fragmentation of the American job market, the rise of the gig economy, and the way social media has blurred the lines between our personal and professional lives has turned us all into rise-and-grinders desperately hustling to secure our various bags. When you’re trying to stay ahead in a round-the-clock rat race that touches every aspect of your life, your sex life is naturally going to suffer. Today’s young people, the bread and butter of the pop market, are having less sex than previous generations, and voting with their Spotify streams for music that matches their priorities.
And the kind of sex they are having doesn’t exactly fit with the whole slow-jam paradigm. Hookup apps have made sex not just plentiful beyond what past generations of slow-jam sexual connoisseurs could ever have dreamed, but so convenient that we often treat it as just another order-in staple on par with Thai food. By their very nature, fuck jams depend on sex being a big deal–such a big deal that you can only adequately express it through orchestral string sections, sky-high poetic metaphors, or pornographically intricate blow-by-blow reports of exactly how it’s going down. I’ve had fun on Tinder hookups, and even some genuinely good sex, but nothing I’ve been moved to write a song about after.
Maybe fuck jams just aren’t the permanent form we once assumed they were. Maybe they’re like rap skits or hard-rock power ballads, features of the pop-music landscape that seem eternal, right up until they day you look around and notice they’ve disappeared.
It could happen. Surviving R. Kelly seems like it’s going to finally topple the undisputed modern master of the fuck jam, a figure so integral to the past two decades of its evolution that his downfall could manage to bring the whole genre down with him. I suspect that one of the reasons so many people were so resistant to hearing that he’s a sexual predator is that deleting him would mean erasing a huge swath of their personal sexual discography. I wouldn’t blame a listener who feels gun-shy about getting so intimate with a singer again.
Or maybe we’re just in a drought.
There are still some very good songs coming out that don’t promise eroticism only to deliver a catalog of luxury watches. Frank Ocean, who almost everyone agrees is on course to make the era-defining album of his generation, showed on Blonde that he’s got the Prince-like ability to turn any song, in any possible mood or style, into a fuck jam. FKA Twigs is probably on more sex playlists than Sade at this point, and she’s overdue for a return to the spotlight. Tank’s recent single “Dirty” deserves recognition for the sheer depth of its lyrical depravity, including the line “I’ll violate all the meat on your bones.”
And then there’s Ian Isiah, a singer blessed with an angelic falsetto that maintains its strength and suppleness even at stratospheric heights, as well as a polymorphously perverse sensuality that permeates his music. Raised in his family’s church band, he’s a gospel singer with an operatic sense of soaring drama that he uses to elevate the fuck jam into the celestial sphere. His recent Shugga Sextape (Vol. 1) wafts out of speakers on a cloud of diffuse, prismatic horniness that comes as close as music can to capturing the feeling of being on really good, really pure MDMA. The music, arranged by Kanye-approved producer Sinjin Hawke, is seductively futuristic, as is Isiah’s kinky-glam androgynous style, but his reverence for the sacred power of the erotic runs straight back through the entire lineage of seductive soul music, and hints at a connection much older than even that. If the fuck jam as we know it is crumbling, this is what’s going to crawl up out of the rubble and take it somewhere new.
Sadly, we could not find one person in this big office who speaks the language being spoken here. The Team sent these short clips across, however, so we did feel obliged to include the update. If it helps any, we’re pretty sure they’re saying, “Yep. We still have an engine, and golly do I need a hot bath. By the way, does anyone know where the nearest car wash might be?”
Ppenthouse Dakar - video 2
A slight chance exists that we might be off just a tad in that translation.
Big Sister is peeking into your window to find out whether you’re reading anything “sexually explicit which subordinates women.” The men holding up the ladder Big Sister is perched on are none other than the Reverend Falwell and his gang of anti-feminist Moral Majoritarians. And if Big Sister catches you reading any objectionable stuff, she is going to report you to President Reagan and Ed Meese — who have sworn to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, who regard all abortion as murder, and who consider homosexuality a felonious sin.
No, this isn’t a Saturday Night Live takeoff on an Orwellian nightmare. It is an all-too realistic representation of the crazy-quilt coalition that concocted the recently enacted Indianapolis anti-pornography statute now under challenge in the courts.
The Indianapolis statute—which was drafted by a feminist law professor named Catharine MacKinnon and a radical man-hating author named Andrea Dworkin, and enacted by a conservative city council with the support of a right-wing preacher—goes further in censoring magazines, books, films, and even museum paintings than any law in recent history. It defines pornography to include “the sexually explicit subordination of women, graphically depicted, whether in pictures or words.” Nor does the term “sexually explicit” narrow the prohibition; instead, it broadens it to include nudity like “uncovered exhibition of the genitals or buttocks.”
The ordinance’s drafters readily acknowledge and even boast that it is not limited to the hard-core porn of the peep show and the X-rated variety. (Much of that already has been banned by laws approved by the Supreme Court, though these laws are often not fully enforced.) Rather, the new law is aimed at the mainstream and Main Street media that offend some women: Penthouse, cable television, A-rated movies, and sexist fiction.
The Indianapolis statute empowers “any woman” aggrieved by a book, magazine, movie, or painting to file a complaint with a government agency. If the agency and a court agree that the material is covered by the ordinance—that is, if it contains nudity and subordinates women—the agency may issue an order against it. Simply put, that means a censorship board may ban it, even for reading or viewing by an individual in the privacy of his or her home.
Nor does the ordinance exempt books, films, and paintings with serious literary or artistic merit. Indeed, one of the drafters argues that the more serious and acceptable sexist art is, the more dangerous it is to women.
The specter of feminist censors roaming through bookstores and museums and filing complaints against books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or paintings like The Rape of the Sabine Women, may be farfetched, but it surely is invited by the ordinance’s broad language. And all it takes is one aggrieved woman to start a censorship proceeding.
The current court challenge may well end up in the Supreme Court, as cities throughout the country line up to enact their own versions of the feminist censorship statute.
This “new approach” to censorship seems politically unstoppable. A Wall Street Journal columnist observed that if this ordinance had been drafted by the Moral Majority, it would have been “laughed out.” But since it has the backing of thousands of feminists—including some otherwise responsible leaders—it is being taken seriously by big-city politicians anxious to do something about smut without exposing either their left or right flanks.
It used to be that the perennial pre-election prattle about how smut is destroying our moral fiber would be greeted by sustained applause from the right and a collective groan from the left. Now things are different. The right is still applauding, but the left is in disarray. Many loyal opponents of censorship are unwilling to alienate their friends and allies in the feminist censorship movement. The result is a juggernaut which politicians in cities ranging from New York to Detroit to Madison and Wichita will find hard to resist.
The good news is that a growing number of sensible feminists are becoming appalled at their censorial sisters. Anti-censorship coalitions are springing up around the country. Groups such as the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force have recently emerged in New York, Berkeley, Montreal, and other cities. The women in these organizations are pointing to the dangers inherent in granting the power of censorship to those who regard sex as a dirty word. They are reminding their sisters of earlier episodes in feminist history, as when nineteenth-century American feminists joined with their conservative enemies to enact legislation raising the age of consent for girls, criminalizing prostitution, and closing the saloons. Eventually these early feminists felt used when they were thrown out into the street by their strange bedfellows. As one anti-censorship feminist has put it: “In all these cases, conservatives ultimately exercised more power in determining how laws, once enacted [by the coalition of conservatives and feminists], would finally affect women’s lives—more power than the feminists then imagined.”
History may well repeat itself if shortsighted feminists conspire with their archenemies to deny us all the freedom that nourishes equality. If together they succeed in closing the porno bookstores, the Moral Majority will turn on the feminist censors and start closing feminist bookstores, gay bookstores, pro-choice bookstores—and finally all bookstores except those that sell the gospel according to the radical right.
When I recently debated the leader of the Moral Majority in New England, I asked whether his organization would, if it had the power, ban the writings of Andrea Dworkin—the coauthor of the Indianapolis statute and an occasional user of four-letter words in her books and speeches. He answered without hesitation “We would most certainly ban such ungodly writings. It is not necessary,” he reasoned, “to use pornography to illustrate its evils. It is only necessary to read the Bible.”
Honestly, the Team seems to be rather busy, what with trying not to die in the desert, and all, so our updates from South America tend to be in visuals rather than words.
Ppenthouse Dakar - video 1
At first glance, we just hope they brought water with them. We’ll keep you posted (in theory). For right now we’re all headed out for a nice frosty beverage.
“I have a wonderful and long-standing relationship with Penthouse and I love to travel so needless to say I jumped at the chance to head to Peru to help promote the Penthouse car at the Dakar Rally Race,” Daniels said. “The trip was even better than I hoped it would be. I had so much fun meeting the race team, posing with the car and interviewing our badass driver Olga!”
The world-renowned off-road endurance rally which is held from January 6 to 17 in Peru, is a 10-stage race that will feature a variety of off-road vehicles in four classes and covers 3,100 miles of sandy dunes, rocky terrain and intense desert heat from start to finish. Rouckova is one of 17 female competitors in the race comprised of 334 racers in total. Although a traditionally male-oriented event, the 2019 Dakar Rally hit a huge milestone with the most female drivers to date, empowering women around the world to showcase their competitive skills.
“We were excited to have Stormy, a female pioneer of challenging endeavors, on location to support Olga. It is a great opportunity to focus on the achievement and great potential of all women who challenge the status quo,” said Catherine Brandt, COO of Penthouse World Media LLC. “The Dakar Rally is a grueling and difficult race and we’re honored to support Olga who is the epitome of courage, beauty, determination and talent. She is a great ambassador for PENTHOUSE and its free-thinking, unstoppable spirit.”
As sponsors, Penthouse World Media LLC, the leading adult media brand and publisher of PENTHOUSE magazine, and Penthouse Clubs Worldwide LLC provide financial and promotional support to Rouckova, by way of marketing and advertising as well as media opportunities during the race.
“I am thankful to PENTHOUSE for their faith and support and to Stormy for sharing her star with us on this exciting day,” Rouckova said.
Born in the Czech Republic, Rouckova is an accomplished quad racer with her four-wheeled motorcycle-like vehicle, having participated in a number of competitions like the FIM BAJA Europe for 3 years finishing every race on the podium, the Merzouga Rally in Morocco, along with obstacle races such as the Spartan race, Army Run, Gladiator Race and many others.
We actually did create a darned impressive gallery of the preparation day for Dakar this year, so feel free to SEE THE GALLERY HERE should you wish. Rest assured that as our journey progresses we will continue to move toward professional as slightly as possible.
With flawlessly manicured dark-red fingernails, @Kayotickat’s thumb softly grazes the steel frame of a single-action Browning 1911-22 pistol.
It’s an archaic gun with a tobacco-colored grip, yet it looks vogue in her hand. The close-up photo, posted on Instagram, gets its charge from a traditionally phallic pose (a gripped pistol) feminized by Kayotickat’s dangerous flirtation, like the femme fatale handling a cold piece of twentieth-century engineering.
This juxtaposition is the future of gun advertising for younger Americans raised on the internet—those millions who don’t read gun magazines and never visit a newspaper stand (if they even know where to find one). Instagram is where you’ll also find a photo showing an attractive young woman in a floral-print skirt that she’s lifted to reveal her thigh—and the Sig Sauer P238 holstered tightly to it.
The Sig appears in several photos taken by shooting-range safety officer Lisa Brianne, who executes yoga positions with the pistol, uses the gun as a lingerie prop, and holsters it on over her patriotic leggings—all while using hashtags like #GunPorn. These images are politically provocative. Brianne’s sexualizing her relationship with her firearm. She’s inviting you into her bedroom to play with her gun. And she’s how I’m familiar with the Sig.
Peruse the latest issues of gearhead-focused gun magazines, and you’ll find an austere, industrial, mostly sexless aesthetic. The masculine-feminine power dynamics of gun culture are muted in publications like AmericanHandgunner, which favor centerfolds showing stand-alone firearms and their accessories (though a recent rise in concealed-carry permits secured by women has produced the occasional photo of a midriff-baring woman holstering a Glock).
There have been vivid exceptions to this hardware-centric approach, like the photos of syndicated radio host and Second Amendment activist Dana Loesch in a black dress and goth ankle boots, wielding her AR-15 in the pages of Guns & Ammo in 2015. Loesch was the first woman to appear on the cover in 54 years. But this is not the norm.
Glossy gun magazines cater to their most reliable demographic—traditionalists in flyover country who view guns as self-defense power tools or recreational toys. Loesch, a right-wing vamp wearing Alexander Wang, simultaneously appeals to both Midwestern moms and heavy-metal fanboys. She’s a cultural bump stock in a movement that’s inspired conservative women to transform into gimlet-eyed Bond girls. These dark, icy, and chic spitfire dames are the future of Second Amendment activism.
Trinity Merrill is one of the millennials redefining the “gun gaze” on Instagram. She’s a plucky Second Amendment activist who poses in front of the flag and models for pro-military brands like Warrior Flasks. She frequents shooting ranges in Ozark, Missouri, on “Tactical Tuesdays,” wearing cutoff denim shorts with sponsored safety glasses and earplugs. She’s a gun-rights pinup girl, happy to scandalize those liberals who view guns with prejudice and paranoia.
Defiant women like Merrill, who has 125,000 followers on Instagram, are featured on wildly popular Instagram channels like @bassbucksandbabes, @pretty_girls_with_guns, and @country_bombshells. The bombshells account boasts 273,000 followers, an apparel line, and an endless stream of photographed conservative amazons who lift weights and comfortably handle the dead carcasses of big game.
Joining Merrill in contributing to this increasingly influential universe of girls-with-guns online imagery is the expert archer and outdoor enthusiast Katie Van Slyke, a gun-holster model who can be seen on Freedom Holsters Instagram page with a teal Glock 42 holstered safely near her crotch, an image accompanied by the hashtag “Glock Porn.”
The pose is an act of social rebellion. One like it was widely mocked by liberals in March when Fox News’s Tomi Lahren posted a photo of herself with a 9MM tucked into her leggings. “Not Your Average Gun Girl,” read the hashtag. In the case of Lahren, a blonde conservative woman with a prominent media profile, she would have known how much flak the image would receive—and was ready to revel in the outrage.
Kirsten Joy Weiss commands the most-watched female guns channel on YouTube. While just as physically striking as Tomi Lahren, Weiss is more of a gun gaze’s Ronda Rousey. She’s a gifted trick shooter and multi-title champion whose videos—like a YouTube Annie Oakley—show the sporting side of firearm partisanship. Weiss is a woman able to outshoot most of her male competition. Rather than flirting with gun rights like Lahren, Weiss is demonstrating her prowess as a sharpshooter—the best argument to counter the liberal bias against Americans who engage in shooting sports.
Instagram, the digital playpen of the prized millennial demographic, is the unintentional industry-leader of gun porn. There’s no data on what sort of impact these photos have. The vagaries of gun statistics in the U.S., especially on the internet, make them increasingly irrelevant, but we know that more women are engaging with firearms. We know that more women are frequenting shooting ranges, and acquiring those concealed-carry permits. We also know that more woman are photographing themselves in defiant poses with their firearms.
For the libidinous American male, these images offer a voyeuristic fetish stapled on top of fine-print that’s far more important—the conservative woman’s newly adopted role as defenders of adventurist masculinity.
Social media is where these Second Amendment bodyguards boldly talk back to the anti-gun feminists of millennial media. Social media is where Jackie, who defies feminist homogeneity, has an apparel sponsor and can be seen holding an AK-47 in each hand, wearing a “Right 2A Bears Arms” T-shirt in front of a big fucking truck. Don’t look for the mainstream media to tell her story.
Fierce feminists like Tara, a glamorous and “savage” U.S. Marine who extinguishes the fiction of unattractive female soldiers, are part of a DIY network of women ignored by liberal media outlets because, goes the argument, they are “complicit” in a culture alarmist contend produces mass shootings. This is the same poor logic that blamed first-person-shooter games and Marilyn Manson for Columbine.
While liberal puritans treat masculine, gun-themed pastimes as acts of terror, conservative women run them like credit cards exchanging in cultural currency.
Valerie Serbu, aka @50calval, the self-described “heiress” to the Serbu Firearms fortune, confidently plays with her sensuality behind colossal, magazine-fed, semi-automatic rifles (or homemade flamethrowers) that not only amuse men on YouTube but sell them guns.
Serbu’s ALS ice-bucket challenge video showed her firing a machine gun in a pink bikini. Her @50calval account is as much of a middle-finger to bourgeois liberalism as a satirical YouTube video of teenager Carly LaCroix, a southerner who hilariously mocked a male New York Daily News reporter after he claimed to experience PTSD upon firing an AR-15.
The gun gaze is not exclusive to U.S. gun culture. In Japan, airsoft hobbyists like Isis Osushi take stirring fashion photos at “shooting cafes,” cosplaying as Milla Jovovich and blending gaming culture with toy guns, creating their own, slightly nerdier Nintendo-gun gaze. The Russian Federation uses the gaze as a recruitment tool in the form of cosplaying soldier Elena Deligioz, whose 62,000 Instagram followers are drawn to the glam photos of her in full combat gear, or napping under an arsenal of machine guns. Deligioz is alluring because she’s the ultimate betrayal of everything we believe in—the gun gaze equivalent of infidelity.
In America, where the gun gaze began with cowgirls like Oakley and pistol-packin’ Hollywood molls like Peggy Cummins (Cummins starred in 1949’s Gun Crazy, robbing banks with her boyfriend, always itching to pull the trigger), the gaze now produces the effect of seeing Doris Day wearing an ammo belt, instead of a stitched apron. It slays domesticity with playbacks to images like the character of Sarah Connor from Terminator 2, posing with a cigarette dangling from her lip—the M16 assault rifle acting as an extension of her take-no-shit personality.
Today’s women of the gun are unapologetic, never compromising sex appeal for gender-neutrality or blindfolded misandry. They take something masculine and phallic and rub rouge all over it, pumping it full of roaring estrogen. The new gun gaze isn’t the bikinied, machine-gun babes from the 1980s VHS tapes. It’s a defiant throwback to first-wave feminism, but far more rebellious, where conservative women are taking ownership of the male gaze, instead of being wrecked by it.
Our new team fairly quickly felt the crush of trying to produce content in a country you have never visited before, but we did get a fairly detailed outline of their activities up to that point.
Got to Lima and had a taxi take us back to the hotel.
Had a pre production meeting with Olga’s team and Stormy Daniels and her manager (where we gave them the Penthouse merch).
Left with Olga›s team to base camp while Stormy Daniels stayed behind to get ready.
Arrived at the beach and took photos and video, including a lot of b-roll.
Stormy showed up and did some video work for us before we transitioned into photos.
We did the Christening of the car with Stormy popping a bottle of champagne.
Continued, doing photos of Stormy and Olga with our Penthouse merch.
Got on the beach to get last photos of Olga in her race outfit.
Arrived at hotel around 8:00 p.m.
Confirmed sticker delivery to hotel around 9:00 p.m.
For the record, we still did not feel sorry for them. We will say this, however: Should you ever get a chance to have champagne with Stormy Daniels, we would encourage you to take advantage of that opportunity
Also, we have learned that vehicles built to roam on sand dunes have themselves some serious tires.
Men think of sex workers as wealthy goddesses, but we’re actually working class. Like most middle-income Americans, we’re afraid to discuss money, but twice a month, my column “The Working Girl Diaries” will cover porn stars’ wallets. From how class affects porn stars’ financial habits to how much we spend on lube and kitty litter, I’ve got you covered. There is no taboo (economic) topic I won’t touch. You used to think of me as the Weiner girl, but now I’m the Barbara Ehrenreich of sex!
Once upon a time, porn stars earned most of our income from hardcore video shoots and kitschy pictorials. Girls could make a small fortune in the golden age of porn, because production companies, most notably Vivid, paid contract girls monthly salaries to shoot exclusively for their house. These financials changed in the aughts when ingenious streamers, including heavyweights XTube and PornHub, offered all the porn a man could desire—for free. Long before Netflix decimated movie studios, tube sites toppled the porn giants.
According to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, only 10.5 percent of men pay for porn, making it difficult for sex workers to subside on shoot fees. Adult performers were some of the first working-class Americans to face the gig economy, which Forbesdefines as the “increased tendency for businesses to hire independent contractors and short-term workers, and the increased availability of workers for these short-term arrangements.” But whereas Uber drivers are struggling to survive, porn stars are thriving again.
Performer Charlotte Sartre has exemplified how porn workers have reinvented themselves. Although she still shoots for old-fashioned production companies, she relies on video for less and less of her income. Videos now function as ads for her more lucrative offerings: homemade clips sold on her clips4sale; her manyvids; her merch store, Gothcharlotte.com where she sells T-shirts, signed photos, and signed DVDs; and prostitution services. Several times a year, Sartre sells sex at the Alien Cathouse Brothel. As former Alien Cathouse owner Dennis Hof wrote in his memoir, The Art of the Pimp, porn performers can charge more than other prostitutes because men place a higher value on an evening with a star.
Like most sex workers, Sartre’s income varies drastically, but she brings in an average of $8,000 a month. Much of her income goes to expenses. “Before I do absolutely anything else, I save 33 percent of my income for taxes and emergencies,” Sartre says. “I also spend $155 every two weeks getting tested for porn. For brothel testing, it’s about $90 per week.” This month, she also will pay $150 for pet supplies. “I have a lot of cats and tarantulas,” she says.
Kendra Lee Ryan, another diversified porn star, sees varying income, estimating she earns roughly $6,000 a month from porn shoots and much more from escorting. The later has led to banking problems. “I got Paypal, Google Wallet, and Venmo taken,” she says. “I fought Venmo and got it back, but that’s it.”
Ryan’s not alone. “I’ve also had my Cash App deleted without warning or reason after only using it to pay rent,” Sartre says. (Cash App, Venmo, Paypal, and Google Wallet did not return requests for comment.) When Sartre has walked into banks, tellers have asked her invasive questions. “Even when depositing normal checks without anything suggestive in the notes or company names, I feel pressured to lie about what I do and say I’m a musician,” she says.
As a precaution, performer Sofia Rose keeps two bank accounts and a third account in her husband’s name. She still worries. “I’ve spoken to the branch manager several times at my local bank and asked him point blank about this,” she says. “He said, ‘This is Vegas, and no one is really paying attention.’” No reassurance is enough.
Porn stars’ business models have evolved, but the industry’s public relations problems have remained the same. Women’s studies scholar Dr. Heather Berg believes our banking issue stems from bad public policy. “Dozens of banking and finance services have terms of service agreements that exclude sex workers,” she says. FOSTA/Sesta has intensified the problem. FOSTA/SESTA is a law meant to curb sex trafficking, but sex workers say it unfairly targets them and doesn’t differentiate between consensual sex workers and those who are trafficked. “If the End Banking for Human Traffickers Act goes through, it will be even harder for sex workers to access their own funds,” Berg says. “These policies are marketed as a way to reduce trafficking, but they actually make sex workers more vulnerable to violence and exploitation.”
Senators Kamala Harris and Senators Bernie Sanders have endorsed FOSTA/Sesta in the name of women’s rights. Instead of helping women, they’ve hurt female porn stars’ ability to make money. Although sex workers have excelled in the gig economy, our occupation remains stigmatized. Some people may see sex work as easy money, but porn stars are small business owners. If we are going to survive in this gig economy, we have to keep diversifying and stay on top of the politicians. (No pun intended.)
Last spring, we were lamenting the state of media over margaritas at a Mexican restaurant across from the Scientology Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles. We discussed how sex, humor, and provocative opinions had suddenly vanished from the web. Judging by Twitter, it seemed like everyone was outraged about everything, from Kathy Griffin to Roseanne to Backpage to the NRA. But in private (and on Signal), the populous was confessing their allegedly unpopular opinions about the war on free speech, sex, and humor. It was as though we all knew we had to act a certain way to save ourselves from being cancelled, but behind closed doors, we could let nuance flourish.
Everyone was acting like a neutered partisan puppy, and we did not want to hang out at the pound anymore. The only way to change this was to create a platform where people could speak their complicated, sometimes contradictory, but always genuine points of view. We planned a new media outlet, then we discovered the publication existed—and Mish already worked there.
To millennials and Gen Zers, a penthouse is the nice suite on the very top of a high-rise that takes up a whole floor. But to those who were born before 1985, Penthouse was an iconic men’s magazine run by New York artist and gold chain-covered eccentric Bob Guccione. Under his direction, Penthouse toed the line between where Playboypussied out and Hustler went too far. Penthouse was controversy with an intellectual purpose. Guccione valued literature and provocative, thorough journalism as much as he did art and gorgeous naked women. As Camille Paglia told the Hollywood Reporter, unlike Playboy Bunnies, Penthouse Pets were erotic, powerful, sensual women, or “femme fatales.” Penthouse was always a publication that valued salacious sleight of hand, stunts, and press—even negative—more than anything else. Penthouse went to weird places, nabbed daring stories, and wasn’t afraid of crazy headlines. It was simultaneously Gawker before Gawker and Richardson before Richardson, but with investigative reporting good enough for the New York Times. (When the Unabomber mailed his manifesto, he sent it to three publications: the Times, the Washington Post, and Penthouse.)
In the Ronald Reagan era, Guccione’s project took on a more important meaning. The Republican administration had launched a war on sex, trying to outlaw everything from porn magazines to bareback gay sodomy. At several points, conservatives united with radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin on a joint kamikaze mission to annihilate Penthouse. In response, Guccione doubled down. Through his combination of art, tits, ass, and sass, he defended all Americans’ right to read, think freely, and jack off.
The eighties hold many similarities to today’s scary times. Online journalists work day and night to “cancel” people who offend others. In between posting selfies on Instagram, millennial feminists have begun worshiping Dworkin and her sexphobic, censorious sidekick Catharine MacKinnon. In Washington, D.C., self-proclaimed progressives Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders have voted in favor of FOSTA-SESTA, a bill that targets sex workers in the name of “human trafficking.” The eighties are back, baby!
Although Mish is a former feminist blogger and Mitchell is a gold star gay man, we fell in love with Guccione’s methods and styles. He was more high/low than any homosexual, more open-minded than any modern feminist. For the past six months, we have tested Guccione’s model to see if it would work in the twenty-first century. First, Mitchell wrote the definitive profile of Stormy Daniels, which was picked up by the Rachel Maddow Show, the Wall Street Journal, the Hollywood Reporter,Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Paper, People, Page Six, In Touch, Spin, the Daily Mail, the Daily Beast, Jezebel, HuffPo, Bossip, and more. VICE called it “one of the most hotly anticipated pieces of political journalism of the year.” A few months later, we published Leah McSweeney’s critical op-ed about how Asia Argento and Rose McGowan hijacked the #MeToo movement. Although Mira Sorvino, Rosanna Arquette, and other female celebrities attacked Leah, roughly 500,000 people read the story. (The starlets backed down after the New York Times confirmed that Argento had paid off a boy accusing her of rape. Embarrassing!) For our experiment’s grand finale, Penthouse tweeted the first annual New Puritans List. Ranging from conservative looney tune Laura Loomer to woke avenger Michael Avenatti to President Trump to Kirsten Gillibrand, the article rankled America’s most obnoxious, pearl-clutching censors. Penthouse released the list in segments on Twitter, and it went viral.
For over a quarter of a century, we have kept our vintage pictorials and journalism in a vault. This goldmine will finally be released online. More importantly, every weekday we’ll be publishing two or more pieces about the most provocative topics of our time: the culture wars, cancel culture, free speech, sex workers’ rights, controversial pop-culture figures, high/low art, music, erotica, and sex and relationships. Of course, we’ll also be publishing artistic images of our gorgeous Penthouse Pets and other accomplished women.
For those who have been living under a rock the last year, Peterson is the 56-year-old Canadian psychology professor turned overnight political sensation when his YouTube video about Bill C-16 made waves throughout the media.
Peterson was rallying against new Canadian legislation (which has since become a law) that said anyone who does not call a trans person by their preferred pronoun could be legally punished. Peterson objected to the bill on free-speech grounds.
Cold, dry, and deeply Canadian, Peterson and his argument enraged transgender activists and progressive lefties who called for his resignation and stormed the University of Toronto campus, accusing him of every thought-crime they could think of.
Their attempts at silencing Peterson backfired—big time. Almost instantly, he became a North American political sensation. The New Yorker profiled him, a much-discussed New York Times article featured him as part of the Intellectual Dark Web, and Peterson soon found himself debating politics, religion, and culture with public intellectuals like Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, and Camille Paglia. He also famously jousted about workplace feminism with English TV reporter Cathy Newman in a 30-minute interview so potent it has attracted more than eight million YouTube views.
Peterson’s latest book, 12 Rules for Life: An Anecdote to Chaos, is a best-seller and sent him on a sold-out world book tour. Young men have flocked to Peterson and his message of love, independence, and personal responsibility. Still, the left sees him as an evil, sexist, transphobic monster hiding under the guise of free speech to push his “fash,” “alt-right” ideas. The best part about most of Peterson’s critics is that they are too dumb and lazy to read his book before barking their criticisms.
Because if they did read 12 Rules for Life or bothered to listen to some in-depth interviews with the man, they would see that Peterson isn’t some tyrannical right-wing pundit—he’s a classic liberal, a Canadian from the rural prairies, a teacher, a scholar, and a family man who loves his kids so much he gave up eating everything but meat and greens to help his daughter with her potentially fatal autoimmune disorder.
Like a great father, Peterson doesn’t want to give you a fish. He wants to teach you to fish, so you can eat fish forever. Then he wants you to know what could happen if you fish too often and understand the consequences your potential overfishing could have on the world.
12 Rules for Life is a self-help book for young men that promotes a conscious, respectful version of masculinity, one reinforcing universal truths such as “we are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be,” and “your misery is the weapon you brandish in your hatred for those who rose upward while you waited and sank.” In today’s ultra-PC climate, notions like this have been lost and replaced with identity-politics group-think and victim terminology, so Canada’s greatest dad has been a breath of fresh air.
Peterson wants young people to take responsibility for themselves as individuals, to become informed about the world, and to create meaning in life so that they can be fulfilled and contribute positively to society. If that’s what fascism means to the kids today, then I guess, yes, I’m a “fash.” I’m a big, fat fascist. Thanks, Dad!
Before we get into this month’s topic, I have a bit of bad news, good and decent Penthouse subscribers: I am bidding thee farewell….
Well, I’ll still be writing stuff for this glorious porno mag, I’m just done with this column. After all, how much can one guy rant about hating practices, persuasions, and people? By my calculations: about thirteen months.
Over the last year or so, I’ve used these pages to air my gripes with marriage, voting, sensitivity, merit, and a bunch of other subjects that I hope my opinions on had readers thinking, Interesting point, and not, What an asshole. To be fair, it was probably a little of both.
But since my fear of being repetitive far outweighs my respect for commitment, I’m bringing this thing to an end. Anyway, enough with the salutations. I was never very adept at expressing sentiment. Let’s get back to my specialty: bitching and moaning.
As stated, this column has always focused on the broader cultural ideas and concepts. But since this is the final entry to “You Let Me Down,” I wanted to try something different. For this piece, I’m shifting my focus from the surface to the subtext.
Subtext. I don’t think the term has ever been more relevant than here and now. When it comes to our favorite modern-day way to talk to one another—text messages, email, and social media; you know, the types of discussion where you don’t have to hear another person’s pesky voice—the subtext is swinging harder than ever. But I don’t think many of us are recognizing it.
The proper definition of the word is “an underlying and often distinct theme in a piece of writing or conversation.” Current methods of conversation are, almost exclusively, executed through writing, and there is a theme: We’re completely full of shit! We don’t mean what we say and we don’t say what we mean.
So, I took it upon myself to take some of this digital-age jargon and translate it into what I think the users of it are actually saying. Below you’ll find a list of phrases, words, and hashtags that we casually throw around on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Underneath each is their subtext and, of course, the two are quite different. But as they say, “The devil is in the details.” And if you ask me, what you’re about to read is a list of truly iniquitous language.
INTERNET LANGUAGE TRANSLATOR:
“You’re my new fave.” Translation: You haven’t offended me yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
“I love you soooooooo much.” Translation: I like you but also think you’re too dumb to recognize empty flattery.
“Definitely.” Translation: This will probably only happen over my dead body.
“#Woke” Translation: My opinion is fact and your facts are opinions.
“I’m gonna do me.” Translation: Fuck you and everything you stand for, now get the fuck outta my way.
“#Winning” Translation: If I don’t distract myself with constantly keeping score I might cry.
“Living my best life.” Translation: Something amazing happened to me today and I’d like to rub your lousy nose in it.
“#Amazing.” Translation: This was fine.
“You’re being aggressive.” Translation: I don’t agree with what you’re saying but I can’t think of a counterargument.
“#Blessed” Translation: I’m trying to come off as spiritual because saying “I’m so lucky” sounds gross.
“Respect my boundaries.” Translation: Please speak only in a fashion that I am accustomed to and fully approve of.
“I can’t even…” Translation: Why isn’t the entire universe catering strictly to my sole wants and needs?
“#NoFilter” Translation: Be jealous of how pretty I am or at least my sickening level of self-esteem.
“LOL” Translation: Your attempt at humor has been recognized, even though it didn’t even cause me to smirk.
“Can’t wait!” Translation: Honestly, I have nothing better going on.
“#Cancelled” Translation: I like to pretend people are TV shows and I’m a TV executive and I get to put a stop to them if I feel like it.
And finally…
“I’m a conservative.” Translation: I need you to listen to me while also not paying attention to what I’m actually saying yet still acting as if you did and totally agree with it.
“I’m a liberal.” Translation: I should warn you, despite my claims of being centered and level-headed, I’m extremely prone to explosive temper tantrums.
The translations of those last two expressions carry the most weight for me. I appreciate the ones that proceeded them, but, outside of scorning emotions, they’re basically harmless. The way this concept applies to conservatives and liberals is the red flag.
As we continue to decay into a nation of church parents and teenagers—one group hollering, “Because I said so!” and the other reacting purely with emotion—it’s apparent our words carry less and less meaning with every passing day.
We continue to warp and misuse our words, mostly out of spite, while remaining split in two, right down the middle, everybody screaming, nobody considering the gray area. The thick-headed elders don’t get “these kids today” and these kids are too spoiled and bratty to stop and listen. Your only hope to be a rational spectator. That way you’ll more likely be prepared to run for the hills and take cover when the shit hits the fan.
It’s one thing to lose faith in our institutions, corporations, and beliefs, but once hope is lost for language, the end’s around the corner. So don’t get involved. You’re better off becoming a weird, grizzled hill person. It probably won’t be so bad out there in the bush.
As for me? I’m an untrusting man in what I consider to be an untrustworthy world. As this chaos ensues, I won’t be too disappointed, just thankful that a long practice of anti-optimism has me not witnessing the fall of what I once thought to be great, but the exposure of the mess I always knew it to be. It’s subtext if you will.
I’ve always thought everything sucked. But who cares? Because I decided long before thirteen months ago that You Let Me Down.
“I know what the eggplant emoji is,” says one of the detectives in the twin-bed room, referring to an oft-used sexting symbol, “but do we know if the prosecutors will take it as an agreement for sex?”
As we wait, they give me a chance to write my own guesses on the operation whiteboard: the number of johns they’ll bust today, and of those busted, how many will cry, possess drugs, carry unlicensed guns, and have outstanding warrants. But before I finish, I’m interrupted by cheering plain-clothed officers. Bowhunter’s Mike Carney has nailed a musk ox in the heart.
“He’s coming,” crackles a police radio moments later, and the room comes alive.
I follow the officer in charge, Sergeant Paul Mahoney, into the bathroom, where he and his largest officer strap on their gun holsters and select a pair of handcuffs from a neat row. Two other detectives wait silently behind the hotel-room door, which is soon opened by a female cop, a tiny, bird-like woman in jeans and ill-suiting makeup, looking vaguely like the blurry online photo they posted offering her sexual services.
“Come in,” she says with a huge smile. The john puts his second foot inside the room and is jumped on and cuffed by four police officers.
Within seconds, I hear one of the officers mutter, “Fuck, he’s pissed himself.”
The other johns arrested that day would yell and struggle, or holler that they weren’t going to fight, but Fernando stands quietly as the cops search his pockets, his fear spreading across the front of his work trousers.
Gene, the male cop Fernando had been unwittingly sexting with, asks him why he’d been so stupid. In response, Fernando says softly, “I got to live with what happened,” his wet pants sticking to his legs. He goes on to calmly, politely answer questions about his wife, two jobs, and two toddlers back home.
Pissing himself will be the first in a series of humiliations for Fernando, and thousands of guys like him caught in john stings around the country. His mug shot, name, and engagement in “sex crimes” are splashed on the local news that evening, and will live on the internet forever. Fernando is another casualty in the war on sex, the fallout from a moral panic that is destroying lives in order to save them.
A week after Fernando’s arrest, I’m in a church basement in downtown Waco, Texas, with 11 more johns busted while attempting to procure sex. They avoid each other’s gaze, just as they avoid, even more carefully, the eyes of the man standing before them.
“This won’t be a hug-athon,” says Brett Mills, coordinator of an anti-prostitution program—a “john school”—to a field of lowered baseball caps. “We’re kind, but we’re not faint of heart.”
Mills has been running this john school—a mandatory education program for men convicted of first-time solicitation offenses—since 2014, part of the Jesus Said Love (JSL) not-for-profit organization he runs with his wife Emily.
Mills reads out the class rules: sleepers and phone checkers get one warning before being asked to leave. Same goes for anyone drunk, high, or late. Mills then instructs the johns to “own their story” by sharing how they were arrested, but without protesting their innocence.
Each john had to pay $525 for the privilege of attending this class, part of their misdemeanor charge for online solicitation of a prostitute. They were arrested during multiple police stings across several Texas counties. Of the johns in the room, seven are Latino and one is Asian; all eight are blue-collar workers. The three white guys are active-duty military personnel.
Brett Mills commands the room, smoothly shifting from cool youth-group leader to drill sergeant. Speaking forcefully, he says, “There are eight women in our [JSL] office right now that have been perpetrated on by guys like you!” JSL is primarily focused on helping “janes” leave the commercial sex industry, and its john schools, which teach that women should not be bought and sold, have become a core part of that mission. It doesn’t hurt that these schools have become a lucrative business and attract significant political support.
Unable to shrink any further inside himself, Tanner is called on to share his story. He’s a tall, thin, 24-year-old from suburban Dallas. While others fidget and down energy drinks, Tanner only clenches his fists around the sides of his T-shirt, his eyelids at half-mast.
“I just wanted to talk to a female face before being stuck in a box,” he says of the day he was arrested, mere hours before he was due to be deployed overseas. “I tried to call and got a text back. I thought it was weird, but I just wanted to see a woman. Then these two guys are comin’ at me. I tried to fight back; they didn’t ID as cops. There was no video or audio surveillance—it all seems kind of sketchy to me.”
Mills asks the johns who had their mug shots posted on local TV news. They all raise their hands. “And on Facebook, everyone saw it on Facebook,” Tanner adds quietly.
“I don’t give a fuck about your face on the news, I care about these women!” Mills barks, telling me later that he calls these “front-end alignment moments.”
If Mills had his way, the class would cost twenty times more so that the johns would feel the true weight of their crime. The average DUI costs in excess of $10,000 when impounding, fines, court, and attorney fees are taken into account. Even then, Mills says, the crimes are not equivalent: driving drunk is nothing like trying to buy a human being.
“And don’t tell me that legalization is the way to go,” he adds. “The only one who wins there are the regulators, ‘cause they get the money. Go to a bar and meet someone!”
Before we break for lunch, we meet Sheronda and Jackie, two of JSL’s presenters, who share stories and information. Some of what they relate is shocking. Sheronda used to rob johns, we learn. She ran away from home after being sexually abused by her stepfather and later used to pose as a prostitute and make off with would-be johns’ money and cars.
Jackie is a state health-department nurse, and wheels out a projector for a stomach-churning slideshow of the worst effects of untreated STDs in men and women. She offers free swabbings to the johns as they filter outside. Several of them complain they’ve lost their appetite for lunch.
A number of the guys share cigarettes and laughs, but I notice Tanner walking anxiously around the parking lot, painfully alone. He doesn’t want to talk about what happened, but soon the words rush out anyway. “I just want it all behind me,” he says. “I hope that this is the end.”
Tanner was arrested with 30 others in a sting at a motel near the Fort Hood military base. Local media ran his mug shot and a report that he was found in possession of a knife, six lengths of rope, duct tape, and a body bag. He told deputies he brought the rope to the room because he had a bonding fetish. The other items were found in his car later.
“There was no investigation,” Tanner says. “The sheriff told the media that I was a serial killer.”
Not long after talking to Tanner, I arrive at the Waco office of the McLennan County sheriff, Parnell McNamara. I’m here to talk to him and his human-trafficking team. Sheriff McNamara greets me with a hug and asks if I want anything to drink. Within minutes, I’m being shown a media highlight-reel of the sheriff’s greatest law-enforcement triumphs. When we’re done, he asks me to pose for photos with his collection of Tommy submachine guns, and hands me an autographed photo and merchandise promoting his reelection campaign, all of which carries the slogan, “Parnell’s Posse: 2020 Vision.”
“Some of these guys should have been shot,” the sheriff tells me. “Johns are the root of the evil, creating the demand. It’s a big effort—the pimps, the johns, the molesters are all in it together.” Sheriff McNamara pauses and asks me to write down the following quote: “Child molesters should be tied to a post and horse-whipped every day.”
Moving on to a gateway theory of what johns involve themselves in, Sheriff McNamara argues that soliciting women is like the marijuana of sex. “I think prostitution leads to child molestation,” he continues. “[Johns] get bored and escalate to something weirder, kinkier.”
* * *
Sheriff McNamara describes himself as a lawman who “just inherited the job.” His family on his father’s side had been Waco law-enforcement mainstays going all the way back to 1902. His office is a shrine to three generations of the badge—one cabinet alone holds 17 framed photographs and seven guns beneath a scales of justice.
He is something of a Waco legend, Parnell McNamara. That’s what happens when you do things like form a posse of old-school lawmen to track down a thief dumb enough to steal a horse belonging to your daughter. That much-publicized event took place in 1996. More recently, the 70-year-old sheriff was cited as the inspiration for Jeff Bridges’ character Marcus Hamilton in the 2016 Academy Award-nominated film Hell Or High Water. Bridges plays an ornery U.S. marshal not ready to face mandatory retirement at age 57—which is exactly what happened to McNamara after 30-plus years as a Texas deputy marshall.
“You gotta get the right-lookin’ hat,” McNamara told Bridges, who shadowed the Stetson-loving sheriff to prepare for his role. “If you get a stupid hat, you’ll wind up lookin’ like Howdy Doody.”
To seal their friendship, McNamara “put him in the posse,” making Bridges an honorary deputy sheriff, before traveling with the actor to the Oscars, an experience he recalls almost as fondly as he recounts tales of his law-enforcement career.
McNamara hasn’t visited the Jesus Said Love john school, but says of Brett Mills and his wife: “[They’re] good, good people, and it’s a wonderful program they have. There’s a place for them, at least as an attempt to straighten people out.”
* * *
It’s debatable, though, whether john schools—or “stop-demand programs” as they are sometimes called—have any effect beyond humiliation. The first program of its kind was launched in 1981, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, followed by subsequent competing models, one developed by Minneapolis therapist Steve Sawyer, and another, higher-profile model pioneered by former San Francisco sex worker Norma Hotaling.
“Norma was extremely shrewd as an advocate,” says Michael Shively, an independent researcher who has evaluated john schools extensively for the Justice Department. Norma Hotaling developed a close working relationship with Kamala Harris, then California’s district attorney, now a U.S. senator, and considered one of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
“Ideologically, john schools are all over the map,” Shively says. “Well under half have any sort of faith-based element. One of their partners is often a charitable organization or something that is really survivor-focused.”
In 2011, Texas passed a state law allowing any county or city to create a john school as an alternative to fines or incarceration. As with drunk driving, it is the local prosecutor’s decision whether attendance at a john school is required under their misdemeanor charge.
“It’s the Wild West, totally unregulated,” Shively remarks. “It is almost impossible to find out whether they work, and there is almost no accountability. The criminal justice system is heavily discretionary—there’s a lot of latitude on restitution versus punishment.”
Shame is driving so much of this activity. Convicted johns live with the very real possibility of losing their jobs and families, and so they rarely fight their cases in court, unable to bear the cost and desperate to put the event behind them. Of course, many of them stand trial regardless on the evening’s news, and their shame lives in perpetuity online.
There are roughly 50 john schools in existence nationwide, although it’s difficult to say precisely how many are fully operational at any given time. Like other startups, the ”moral entrepreneurs” behind these schools have to contend with the flow of supply and demand. Without a doubt, though, it can be a money-maker—fees paid by johns to attend are seen as a key component of the restorative justice philosophy that underpins the movement. And perhaps it goes without saying that it helps if stop-demand operators are backed by local politicians and law enforcement.
Jesus Said Love is a charity financed solely by private donations and revenues from its monthly john school. The year it started the program, revenue jumped from $12,000 to $370,000. Now it averages around $500,000 a year. JSL’s annual fund-raising weekend getaway, Wild Torch, is attended by a who’s who of local business leaders, church leaders, and political figures, including Sheriff McNamara.
“Marketing is a strength of ours,” says Brett Mills in JSL’s Waco office, a converted warehouse decorated with chic lamps, lounges, and cowhide rugs in every room. “We’re in talks to do a corporate program. A local company approached us after their foreman was arrested in a sting. It had affected their business.”
If Mills likes to be the balls of the operation, then his wife Emily is the heart. She felt called to work with women in the sex industry 15 years ago or so. She now spends much of her time organizing gift-bag runs to Texas strip clubs (which are hubs for prostitution), providing women with high-quality toiletries as well as resources if they want to leave the business of sex.
“I believe we’re divine beings, not for sale. But it doesn’t matter in secular terms, and I get that,” she says. “Sex is a $3.2 billion-dollar industry—look at the economics, look at whose backs it’s built on. This country fought a war over slavery as economics. Is that why we’re not doing anything? Is it just about money and white-male power?”
Waco is on the I-35 between Austin and Dallas, well within the “Texas Triangle,” which Emily and her husband, along with other activists fighting human trafficking, say is one of the nation’s hot spots for modern slavery. Using the carefully formed language of social justice, advocates avoid talk of borders and illegals, but the Triangle discussion retains a charge in the current political conditions.
“The mortality rate for trafficking victims is seven years from entry—usually through suicide, violence, and drugs,” Emily says, using a frequently-cited but false statistic. “People don’t realize that they are victims. We tell them that they are a walking miracle. The victims have to learn to say that they are victims.”
Brett Mills adds: “Our philosophy is that we can’t condemn. Holding up a bloody fetus is shaming, and it’s weird. We treat people with kindness no matter how awful they are to women so that we can get in their ear.”
Jessica Sicora, head of training at Unbound Waco, told me that they believed the incoming Republican district attorney, Barry Johnson, is “going to be a good asset,” and “has the right attitude, but needs more education to be accurate.”
Sicora gave a 45-minute presentation on human trafficking at Waco’s Jesus Said Love john school. “I was on the phone last week with a director of the governor’s demand-decrease unit,” she told the johns. “They are sitting, waiting, to get a strong enough case to make what you did a felony. It hasn’t yet happened in our state, but everyone wants to make it happen. Scaring the hell out of buyers is the best way we can end this industry.”
When I ask her after class about her claim that Texas wants to change first-time solicitation charges from a misdemeanor to a felony, Sicora said she was “just spitballing.”
Demand Abolition, another organization fighting human trafficking, is looking to work this felony angle on a national scale. The group’s founder, Dallas native Suwanee Hunt, is a leading Democratic figure, who has raised millions for anti-prostitution activities and programs, including john schools in 11 American cities.
Remarkably, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services lists the contact details of no fewer than 30 different anti-human-trafficking organizations operating in their state—and that’s without including Jesus Said Love or Demand Abolition.
“There is [sex]-trafficking going on, no question about it—but the stats have been grossly exaggerated, particularly in the United States,” says Alison Bass, a West Virginia University journalism professor and author of Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law.
Bass recently uncovered financial ties between prosecutor’s offices and Demand Abolition’s multi-city anti-trafficking initiative, CEASE (Cities Empowered Against Sexual Exploitation). In Seattle, the group provided almost $200,000 in funding to the King County prosecutor’s office over four years. In return, law enforcement carried out regular john stings, and the prosecutors framed the activities of those johns as sex-trafficking.
“If we want to look after women, we need to put our resources into social services resources and housing, not into having them arrested,” Bass says, adding that sex work can often provide a living wage—which can’t always be said for women working in restaurants or cleaning houses, particularly in big cities.
“Everyone says they’re going after the big guys, as they should be, but it’s the small fish that are being targeted—both the sex workers and the clients themselves,” Bass explains.
Ayesha, a 30-year-old sex worker who has been working the Texas Triangle for 15 years, says she was recently arrested for the first time. “I got caught in a sting in Dallas,” she tells me. “They didn’t want to let me go. It was the FBI’s human-trafficking squad. They were trying to make me say that I was a victim. I’m like, look at me, check my demeanor—I don’t look like I’m being forced.”
A Texas native, she ran away from home at 14 because she didn’t get on with her grandmother, who became Ayesha’s caretaker after her parents were both incarcerated for low-level drug offenses.
“I’m done,” she remarks. “It’s not how it used to be—stress-free—with the police and all. And there’s a lot of violence, there are girls getting raped—those are the guys they should go hard on.”
Ayesha counts a former sheriff among her mostly older, white clientele, but points to mug shots of her colleagues and clients to illustrate who is actually being arrested. For her, full legalization of sex is the only way forward—not least because fucking is only a small part of her work. “A lot of my guys can’t perform,” she says. Many of them just want company, as Tanner said he did.
The operation that nabbed Tanner shows that beyond not-for-profit organization pushing anti-prostitution policies nationwide, local law enforcement agencies are reaching out across jurisdictional borders to crack down on commercial sex.
Stings are increasingly focused on johns rather than janes, usually by police posting ads on foreign websites that were set up in the wake of the U.S. government shutting down Backpage, the major online sex-advertising site.
Tanner’s arrest—and subsequent trial by television—was part of a Bell County show-and-tell operation, an on-the-job training exercise for officers from other counties. Sergeant Mahoney, whom I accompanied on a sting that day in Braze County, was there.
“We arrested a lot of johns that day, but I remember Tanner,” he says. “I was on surveillance. I saw that he had put his big bowie knife on his hip. They dunked him pretty hard ‘cause they knew about this knife.”
“He was a squirrelly dude,” Mahoney continues. “I remember after they arrested him, he wouldn’t tell them his name, wouldn’t say he was buyin’. Maybe he wasn’t going to kidnap her. I don’t know.”
Sheriff McNamara was jubilant after Tanner’s bust, telling local papers, “I’m so proud of Bell County for jumping on the bandwagon.” The Bell County Sheriff’s Department had learned everything they knew from McNamara’s McLennan County team, which began conducting stings as a part of the first “Johns Suppression Initiative” in 2014.
Speaking to cameras at the end of the initiative, McNamara used the phrase “weird sickos,” which was picked up nationally, and a law-and-order star was born. Today, he invites television crews to his many busts, and has been working on his catchphrases. During our chat, he appears to riff on Tolstoy when I ask him why people buy sex: “There are all sorts of excuses, like unhappy homes. But there’s no excuse for someone like that.”
In 2015, buoyed by the effectiveness of cross-county prostitution busts, McNamara started another posse of a kind, called FAST—Fugitive, Apprehension, and Special Tasks. What he calls his “personal SEAL team” is “runnin’ and gunnin’ day and night,” powered by homeland security clearances that allow them more or less free rein to conduct operations all over the country.
The FAST unit spends much of its time chasing down pimps. Their work has taken them all the way to Las Vegas and New York City. Recently, they tracked down a Waco brothel owner in Dallas.
A 90-minute drive from Waco, the Big D, though no Austin in terms of its politics, is less deep-red than most other parts of the state. Republicans such as Sheriff McNamara see the city as a blot on the moral landscape of Texas, a place where pimps, prostitutes, and illegals run the streets and threaten old-fashioned values.
The day had barely broken over the city, but Kimberly Duran didn’t care. She was too busy administering a wake-up call to 13 johns, her voice stronger than any coffee. Duran is the programming clinician at the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, and waking johns up is part of her job.
“I wanna fuck you up for your next buy,” she begins. “I know some of you will go back, but I hope I’ve fucked you up.”
If the church-basement john school was airless, this place just feels grim. We’re next door to the morgue in a row of dull bureaucratic buildings.
“Dallas is a mess, the john class is terrible,” Brett Mills had warned me. “Theirs is $250 on a Saturday with a payment plan. There shouldn’t be no payment plan—and johns should have to take a day off [from work].”
The johns are a familiar bunch—four African-American and nine Latino, with some of the men wearing factory uniforms. I see a lot of tattoo sleeves. Their stories are notably similar, too, most involving this basic scenario: They were at a gas station and a pretty girl offered her services for $20, and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Fifty-something Joe, a soldier turned trucker, says his bust was entrapment. A detective from the human-trafficking unit, who is there to answer questions, begs to differ, saying it is only entrapment if the female cop put a gun to his head, demanding he complies. To which Joe replies, “No, that’s a fucking robbery!”
Duran softens a little and says that she wants the johns to think of the day as a behavioral therapy session. Her class presenters lack the TED-talk snappiness of the ones in Waco. It isn’t quite the hug-athon Brett had prepared me for—it’s just incredibly boring.
The Dallas school mostly mirrored Waco’s program in terms of instructional agenda until the end of the session. That’s when three white guys from Sex Addicts Anonymous—all named Brian—take the johns through how the 12-step program saved their lives.
“We’re not here for addiction, we don’t need treatment,” Luis, 43, protests. Adding his own comment, Joe shouts, “The treatment was when I came in here and paid $250!” Everyone laughs except the Brians.
After the laughter dies down, Duran tells the johns, “You know, the governor is trying to get y’all on the sex-offender registry.” At this point, the Brians leave, but the johns stay behind to ask questions, including whether they would be able to see their kids if they were to be put on this registry.
Duran didn’t say that for rhetorical effect. Earlier this year, Texas governor Greg Abbott began an anti-prostitution law and order campaign, saying that “anyone who commits these crimes should be behind bars.” Under his proposal, “sex criminals” would be incarcerated and forced to register as sex offenders upon their release, while the minimum age for workers at sexually oriented businesses like strip clubs would be raised from 18 to 21.
“We’ve seen a lot of bills introduced in line with the end-demand philosophy, which also prop up civil forfeiture, and this is already a really sketchy business, and technically illegal in the United States,” says Christa Daring, executive director of the Sex Workers Outreach Program, founded in the Bay Area in 2003. In civil forfeiture, the government takes possession of property suspected to be part of a crime. Adds Daring:
“Legislation we’re seeing being introduced could result in people having their cars seized if they [don’t] pay their john-school fines of only $250.”
It’s clear to me that police operations are targeting a certain type of john. In 2012, Rachel Lovell of DePaul University studied mug shots taken by the Chicago Police Department in the preceding two years. Lovell found that almost all of their stings took place in poor, African-American neighborhoods, targeting clients of street-based sex workers. Over 85 percent of the men arrested were African-American or Latino.
Luis, who objected to one of the john-school Brians telling him he was a sex addict, agrees. “I grew up in south Dallas,” he tells me. “I know it’s where they do most of their surveillance and stings. Prostitution is more discreet in higher-class neighborhoods, but it goes on. There are just more palms being greased.”
To escape having to sit through another STD horror show, I made my excuses at the Dallas john school and went for a drive to clear my head. As I traveled the city streets, my thoughts kept circling back to the realization that end-demand policies and programs like the ones I’d witnessed in recent days appeared to be the next big thing in law and order.
Moral panic takes many forms, and sex is its current obsession. With marijuana legalization, the prison industry can no longer rely on weed-smokers to fill their cells, so it’s looking to sex offenders—and that’s the classification johns will increasingly be tagged with—to pick up the slack.
Right now, there’s not much public outcry over this. But the fact is, people are having their lives turned upside down for doing things like unwittingly sexting cops. John-school alumnus Tanner is effectively in hiding, jobless and living with his parents, understandably struggling after being publicly branded a would-be serial killer.
Meanwhile, Brett Mills is searching for a repentant john to round out his school’s curriculum. That is, an ex-john repentant enough to join his JSL team. There is no one better equipped to counsel the sex-addicted than a former addict, and the number of jobs that sex addicts are welcome to apply for is few. The only option, then, is for humiliated johns to turn pro—to become part of the system that destroyed them.
