Party in the Back
The main thing that has discouraged me from starting a pornography business for a long time has been my inability to follow through with things. No matter how hard I seem to try and deviate from the obligate salaryman and paranoid antisocialite I am tediously comfortable being, I inevitably seem to end up being that way anyways, with nothing to show for my unremarkable subplots but entrepreneurial souvenirs, obsolete contacts and underwhelming stories.
But all this is a problem from the context of a pornography business: There is so much hostility and regret alongside even a brief involvement in the pornography business. You cannot say to people, “Well, I was making some pornography for awhile, but then I got offered a steady job again, and I hadn’t been to the dentist in a year, so…”
Even a dentist would hear nothing in the latter parts of that sentence and, fairly, neither would you – months and years after you quit the pornography business, you’ll get the occasional residual cheque, or have to look up something for a prior tax return, and you’ll really roll your eyes. “God,” you’ll say, “That whole pornography business. That was not for me.”
And what about your friends and family? The people you need by your side when life sends a pulse through the market realities of your existence? They’ll all say, “We’re not helping you this time – you made a bunch of pornography. Some people we know bought it.”
My point is that it is one thing to take a brief foray into real estate, or Amway, or a new group of friends who you aren’t sure you’ll ever be comfortable with – it’s another thing entirely to scar yourself with underworld porno money. After all, who wants to live with a reminder of how badly they really did want to break out of their shell, long after they abandon that ambition and go back to the sort of thing you can discuss at a barbecue? And now what are you? You are in two worlds and in neither of them.
And so, whatever you do, don’t undertake a career in pornography unless you’re an extremely decisive person. Don’t do it unless you really have the courage to change who you want to be. Don’t do it unless you have mountains upon mountains of character to withstand nearly everything life can throw at you, and if you can live without everything that sustains you as who you would otherwise exist as.
After all, it’s tough to just make something for a dollar and sell it for two nowadays. The whole era of starting something from scratch is really moving behind us. You hear about a guy who begins a company expressly for the purpose of selling it to some other company, and then you hear about his well-connected parents, and where he went to school, and then he is on television talking about how the secret to success for everyone is to work hard. He wears some very casual clothes to assure you that he has never been involved in anything unkind. None of these events surprise anyone. Complete and utter stupidity and absurdity is the infinite broadcast loop of our culture, and this is no opinion or threat: It simply sells.
The whole point is to make everyone who is really brave and interesting extremely, extremely poor, and to do this until people forget what these things are; until the whole world is sports and fucking and sleep and age. Maybe you see through it, but by then they’ve got you locked in, and you can’t do shit. In the meantime, I don’t mind the person I default towards while between voluntary (OK, mostly involuntary) spurts of trying to emerge as a once-destined-self-made-man. A little security never hurt anyone, or at least not nearly as much as insecurity does, and I am older now and I know this.
But what then?
So if you suffer all these doubts, I cannot think that a career in pornography is right for you, even though I have never had one, and know absolutely nothing about it. Besides: There are many great futures, even though they end, so long as you are in love.
