Hella Nation - Evan Wright [115]
“Problem,” a young man from a suburb of Philadelphia, wrote to Girl Talk, the advice column I wrote: “I am a 21 year old male who has never had a girlfriend in his life and is quite sadden by this fact. I do have Tourette’s syndrome, and when you are considered as a ‘f**king retard’ in high school, you don’t get real far.”
That so many readers believed models in a porn magazine offered the prospect of authentic human warmth and understanding was all the more bizarre given the crude, over-the-top nature of the girl copy that accompanied their images. I wrote to alleviate the boredom of producing thousands of words of hack copy every week and strove to make my bios as disturbing as my editor would allow. Fortunately, LFP provided a safe, nurturing environment for disturbed individuals exorcising their personal demons through pornography writing. So long as I stated that the models were at least eighteen (a law stringently followed at LFP) and had consented to engage in the acts described, I was free to develop stories with incestuous overtones and strong hints of violence, stalking, mental illness, self-hatred and death.
A typical bio, one for “Dee: Dementia 19,” opened by saying that Dee was “now free of the psychiatrist’s drugs that once made her a complete zombie with no will of her own, nor any control over what she did with her body.” “Natanya: Nice and Nasty” began: “Natanya’s a nice girl most of the time—except when she’s nasty. The nice girl plays with Mr. Pookie, the stuffed animal Daddy sent last Christmas before they fried him on Death Row. The nasty girl fingers herself and dreams of a bad man coming to get her. Nice and nasty. Cops are like that too. First they give you a candy bar, then they take Daddy away.”
Not all of them presented sexuality with unrelenting gloom. The bio for “Heather: Holy Sister of Fellatio” was an attempt at the transcendent. Heather, a girl with a beatific smile, was described as a student at a junior college run by nuns. She concluded her treatise on oral sex: “The sisters in school tell us that all art is God-inspired. My artistry is a means of bringing man closer to the divine. Picture my face with your dick in it and know how it feels to come in the mouth of God.”
The most peculiar aspect of the fan letters was not that the men believed the ludicrous sagas of the models, but that they responded to the graphic imagery by seeking intimacy with them. If pornography indeed objectifies women—and it’s hard to argue that a magazine with an amateur photo section called “Beaver Scouts” didn’t—many readers sought to flesh out the objectified women in their imaginations. Their sexual fixations blurred into romantic dreams.
The most lyrical note, a mixture of hackneyed erotic clichés and poignant expressions of longing, came from a man whose return address was the cryptic “Lock Bag R.” A prison address, a bizarre P.O. box or a location in his head? He wrote to “Dottie: Dirty, Flirty, Delicious,” a girl in a baby tee with the word “Flirt” written across the front.
Dear Dottie:
Here is one for you, can we be writing pals? . . .
I wonder where you are from, only because you seem like to my words, A Hip Hop Hollywood Hootchie . . . Those clothes you had on were very nice. You could get right into my world at a breeze on your perfume or maybe on the regular scent of your body