True Porn Clerk Stories - Ali Davis [28]
I think a woman in a porn movie, as a rule, is taken as a general woman rather than a specific woman. She is there to stand in for general womanness. (And, based the number of rewind fees I dish out, once the viewer comes she ceases to exist.)
I think guys rent porn as a way to have the pleasure of sex without the added complexity of having to tend to someone else's needs. Which doesn't mean that he's a bad guy or won't do plenty of tending later, it's just that right now he just wants to wolf down a burger.
In a way, a guy who is renting a porn video is courteously having his selfish sex on his own time so he won't bother you with it. And "selfish" isn't a bad thing here. It's also selfish to take a hot bath and read a book by yourself, but it's important to do that every now and then.
And besides, if you had a choice between your guy renting a video and renting a person, which would you choose?
Now that I've cleared up that little misunderstanding for all time, here's what men don't understand about porn: Women do take it personally. When a woman sees your porn rental, she is likely to conclude that that is what you want. The sex act in question, the level of communication, the inflated porn body -- all of it. In all likelihood, she doesn't see the woman on the box as a convenient avatar of general womanness, she sees her as tangible proof that what the owner of said box really, truly wants is a nineteen-year-old emaciated blonde with enormous fake breasts and a deep desire to take it up the ass.
This is why a gentleman is very, very careful about leaving his porn lying around the house.
Communication can also help and all that, but, hell, I'm not an advice columnist. I just think, based on what I've seen, that men and women look at porn very differently and it can't hurt for both sides to take that into account.
I think it's cool when couples rent porn together, and I'm impressed with how much they had to do to get there, or with what I hope they did, anyway.
I know it's fashionable again to say that men and women are fundamentally different -- God, I cannot wait for that particular social pendulum to swing back -- but I don't think they are, or at least not in this case. I think attitudes toward porn have a lot to do with socialization. There's a pressure to overpersonalize sex on one side, and to depersonalize it on the other. As always, I think moderation is a good way to go.
Figuring this out has helped me understand my customers better, I think. Knowing the guy is watching for general sex and not specific sex makes it easier to see why we have those four-hour clip jobs of just come shots. Keeping in mind that what our clients are renting is physical and not emotional or mental keeps me from caring too much about what they're renting, and in many ways that detachment is a key part of my job. (Trust me: the guy with the Iowa driver's license and the wedding ring does not want me to care about the fact that he's renting gay porn.)
In a way, I keep learning the same lesson over and over again: just because people's tastes don't match mine doesn't mean they're wrong. Soon, I hope, it'll stick.
Do Not Feed the Clerks
I've never understood why people give us food, but they do. I mean, yeah, none of us are working there because we're so bored with collecting those interest checks on our trust funds, but there are plenty of starving brethren in the customer service industry. Why us?
The first couple of times a customer offered me food, I kept saying "No, thanks" as politely as I could. One guy kept pressing an "extra" doughnut he'd bought on me so eagerly that there was no way in hell I was going to eat it. I was new then and the possibility of someone replacing the Boston Creme with roofies seemed like a very real possibility, so I finally just took it and threw it away as soon as he was out the door. I couldn't figure out the impulse. While I've been fond of many