True Porn Clerk Stories (11 page)

I feel bad for guys. There's definitely a lot of male pressure involved, but women are guilty of their share of tiny penis jokes. It's awful to feel like your body is inadequate -- I wish we as a gender wouldn't participate in perpetuating that particular bit of hurt.

There's a "clinic" that drops fliers in our store every few days. They say "BIG ENOUGH?" and of course they're for penile enhancement surgery. What I've heard about breast enlargement surgery is that it's painful and dangerous, that the implants can leak or harden and cause all kinds of physical problems. I can't imagine that penile surgery is any safer or less painful, and all for what sounds like less than an inch of "improvement".

The fliers, when I see a new batch, become my good deed for the day. I throw them out.

Can't Stop the Music

I'm a monster.

Since my purchase of the second Aqua CD I've become positively Satanic about my musical choices. I do genuinely love it, but I also have to admit it's feeding a mean streak I never knew I had.

It started with just a nearly two-hour Aqua block at the beginning of my shift. Then I dug out the Right Said Fred CD. Right Said Fred are those British weightlifter/musicians who did "I'm Too Sexy," though if you ask me, the best cut on the album is the magically bouncy "Don't Talk Just Kiss."

That was an excellent three-hour set (OK, yes, that's cruel and unusual. But damn it, if you're looking at porn for three CDs worth of time you've got to be prepared to take the consequences.), but recently I've started mixing it up. I'll play two of the three, then slip in a CD of something other people actually like and then go back to the dance music. I stun them with two quick jabs and then make them wait for the haymaker.

Again, my primary purpose is not to torture my customers. It just happens to work out really well that way. (Actually, they don't all hate it. Every now and then I'll catch someone dancing on the security monitor, which pleases me to no end. One guy who was all alone started doing the Bus Stop.)

I'm still closeted about it with the other clerks. I tend to time the more socially acceptable music for when my relief comes in. I don't know what I'll do when they discover me. Run into the swamps, I guess, and spend the rest of my life in hiding, quietly humming "We Are the Cartoon Heroes".

I don't know when it will end. I can pull an opener without caffeine, but not without Aqua.

Women Who Aren't on the Boxes

Today was a banner day, of sorts. Four women went into the porn section. They went down in pairs, a couple of hours apart.

Two were straight girls out for an afternoon who went down to browse. They had shopping bags with them, and seemed like they pretty much just wanted to see what it looked like. They just sort of wandered around a bit, keeping their distance from the shelves except for the occasional swoop in to look, and then left without getting anything. (The store is a bit notorious in the neighborhood and people do sometimes just wander in to see that, yup, there's porn, and then leave.)

The other two were a lesbian couple. They were there with more purpose. One came up to the counter and asked if we had lesbian porn, then they both went downstairs to look. They scoped the place out pretty thoroughly, made a couple of selections, then came up and set up a membership. I was glad they found something they liked. While we do have lesbian porn, we don't really have porn that's aimed at lesbians. I'm not sure how to back up that statement. Arguably, hot chicks having sex with each other is aimed at much at lesbians as at straight men... only it isn't. It's just the feel of the thing - a general "Hey, fellas! Getta load of this!" vibe.

Maybe I'm imagining it, but I don't think so. We don't get much repeat lesbian business. In fact, there's only one I've seen who has ever come back, and her visits are months apart. I just don't think there's much here for her.

Anyway, I was surprised at the sudden surge of female traffic. I can go for weeks on end without seeing a woman down there at all.

I know there is porn aimed at women in the world, but we don't really carry it. I try my best to help steer the women who do come in towards something they'll like, which is difficult. For one thing, porn is a pretty personal choice, and for another, I don't actually know that much about it. The last thing I want to do at the end of my shift is check out a little porn. (This is true of the guys too, actually, and sometimes it freaks them out. To be a 20-year-old male and numbed out to porn is, apparently, a scary thing.)

In the interest of good clerking, I did finally ask my manager and learned to steer my straight female customers towards Wicked Video stuff, which have budgets and stories and nobody gets called a dumb cunt on the box copy.

I think I'm a pretty good guide. The women who do come in solo -- and they are very, very rare -- are usually pretty uncomfortable about it.

It doesn't help that our porn section is a completely white room with a white linoleum floor lit by bright white fluorescent lights broken up by security cameras and wall-to-wall orifices. It hits somewhere between futuristic alien clinic and porn carnival.

If our decor makes a statement, it's "Hey, fucko! Don't masturbate!" It's just not a cozy or welcoming place. So I try to be both as businesslike and as gentle as possible. I want them to know that it's fine and normal to rent porn, and that they're safe. Sometimes I'll ask another clerk or a manager to cover my register and go down with them. It seems to help get them acclimated.

Usually the women who come in are half of a straight couple. They cover the full range of comfort and discomfort. My favorite was a pretty girl with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a Laura Ashley flowered dress. When I went down to ask if she and her boyfriend needed help, she belted out "Yes! We want to BUY!" while he stood blushing in the corner.

Most are pretty quiet, though, and usually let the guy take the lead.

I don't think it's that women are less sexual than men. I think they could or would like porn if the situation were different. There are still fairly big taboos about women admitting to being interested in porn -- even for the ones who rent pretty racy stuff from upstairs. And the movies would have to be different, I think. There'd have to be more about why these people are having sex. A better reason than Tab A fitting into Slot B, at least.

And, from what I do know about porn, the sex would have to be different. It doesn't look like the women on porn boxes are having that much fun. They're always being bent or twisted into uncomfortable positions, or trying to avoid sperm being shot directly into their eyes. The fact that the men watching want to see as much as possible means that the women don't seem to be getting touched much. They're just getting poled by some guy who's apparently deliberately avoiding their erogenous zones. Whee.

So we don't get many women downstairs.

I hope the few brave feminine souls who do go down there find what they're looking for.

Oh, by the way...

Management found out about this journal and the NPR piece over the weekend.

I am not fired.

Men and Women and Porn

Here's what I've learned in my year-and-change as a porn clerk: men like porn.

Admittedly, my sample is skewed because many men come to our store just for the porn and have other accounts elsewhere, but almost all of the men who come in do eventually go down to the porn section. And I don't mean "almost all" in the 90% sense, I mean all but maybe two since I've started working there.

This is a lesson because I now understand that pretty much any man I date is going to at least occasionally enjoy pornography. I don't think a lot of women have fully dealt with that. If one reads the advice columns, a lot of women can't even deal with the idea that their mate masturbates at all. Ladies, please. Chill out.

What the porn section has taught me that I think many women don't understand is that porn is a physical thing for guys, not an emotional one. It seems to be a quick, physical release. It's a way of feeling good and making sure the plumbing is still in working order and that's about it. With the exception of the addicts, I don't think it has any more significance than grabbing a burger when you're hungry or standing up and stretching when you've been trapped in a car all day.

Many women are jealous of or threatened by porn, and we shouldn't be. The key is the difference between your dog, which is a Sheltie-terrier mix that hides under the bed during thunderstorms, has a passion for cat food and prefers tug-of-war to fetch, and the general dogness of the "dog" in the dictionary.

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.