The Last Real Porn Star
by Susannah Breslin
I want to quote you on this, the subject header reads.
The question: Did you jerk off to the Stoya session?
I click SEND and wait for an answer.
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The book arrives in a small envelope. The envelope is tan, padded. I rip open one end. I stick my hand in the envelope. I grab what's inside and remove it. It's a book: small, black. On the cover, there's a skull and crossbones, a heart, the word SUPERVERT.
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This is the number of people who have watched a video of porn star Stoya read an excerpt from Supervert's Necrophilia Variations: 6,986,096.
Stoya is not: naked, having sex, in a porn movie.
She is: reading a book.
By the time you read this, over 7 million people will have watched Stoya read a book.
"We were at a party, you and I," Stoya reads, and everybody listens.
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I put the book on my desk. Every once in a while I look at the book waiting for me to read it and remind myself I should put the book away before the cleaning lady comes.
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I don't remember when I met Clayton Cubitt on the internet. He was taking photographs of himself having sex with his girl and other women in what looked like a red cocoon. It was like watching someone through a telescope trained on a Petri dish a thousand miles away.
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I meet Stoya at a porn convention. I interview her. She tells me, "I never say anything good."
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In the video, she shudders, hesitates. Something is happening. What is it?
"You were tongue-kissing the personification of death," she confesses, all eyes on her.
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I used to seek out extreme porn movies. Scat videos. Ron Jeremy dressed as a baby. Girls puking on black plastic tarps spread over random beds in nondescript rooms as flaccid male costars looked on, bewildered.
In "Perverted Stories 21," a distraught man digs up his dead girlfriend and has sex with her. In the scene, the girl looks dead. Yet, she isn't.
Your mind flips back and forth, trying to figure it out. Is she or isn’t she?
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"You can't kiss death without death kissing you back," Stoya offers.
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Necrophilia Variations is a human centipede of short stories in which people have sex with the dead, a man gets trapped in a mausoleum, and suicide bombers have groupies. It’s a head-on collision of Eros and Thanatos that no one survives.
In "Smart Plots," necrophiliacs observe the dead in coffins outfitted with GPS systems and gravecams operated remotely by joysticks:
I smiled. The public could detest my documentaries, revile my reenactments, gag on my game shows, but this was one type of specialty programming that could not possibly fail to be popular. Even if it did, even if the public was appalled by this new pornography, I still knew that there was one audience I could be confident of. It was a tiny niche, to be sure, but it was one hitherto deprived of any imagery that catered to its particular interests. And I would become the baron and magnate of this market, the tycoon of an unusual titillation -- the Hugh Hefner of necrophilia.
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Bored with porn, we seek out snuff.
I want @drake to murder my vagina, former Disney child star Amanda Bynes chirps.
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Stoya is aquiver. Her fluttering fingers ruffle the pages. Her mouth opens and closes like a fish.
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A long time ago, I met a porn star. Several years later, that porn star died. People still watch her porn movies. In the porn movie, the girl is alive. In the real world, the girl is dead. The porn star is Schrödinger's cat, and no one knows what to make of her. She has entangled you.
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Is this porn?
Is this porn?
Is this porn?
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"See the world through my s-s-sockets," Stoya stammers, convulsing.
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At the 5:30 mark, she stops reading. Her hands splay on the table like starfishes. She emits a yelp. Her back arches, and she bites her lip. In a black and white world, her long hair brushes against her exposed collarbones, people hide under the table just to make you happy, and the camera never, ever moves from the one true thing to which we bear witness: her pleasure.
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I get an email from Supervert. I asked him if he jerked off to Stoya reading his prose. If he has, the circle is complete. The creator has witnessed his creation come alive (John 1:14: And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us) and made an offering in kind to the muse: the death of a billion soldiers. He is immortal.
Are you kidding? he writes. I was only able to watch Hysterical Literature once. It elicited intense feelings in me but none of them were lust. It's complicated to explain. The video made me feel rather like Icarus flying too close to the sun. It was beautiful but it hurt too. I sort of wanted to die after I saw it because I was afraid that nothing I would ever write could reach that high again.
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Stoya opens her eyes, smiles. The scopophilia is palatable. Across the divide, the male and the female gaze meet.
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In The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, Otto Fenichel writes:
Observation of a child who is looking for libidinous purposes readily shows what the accompanying features or prerequisites of pleasurable looking are: he wants to look at an object in order to "feel along with him."
We have transgressed.
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I giggle-pant, hands on the table. Once enough pieces of my mind have come back I deliver the closing line. – Stoya
Susannah Breslin is a freelance journalist who covers all things "vice" for Forbes.com. She's written for Harper's Bazaar, Details, Newsweek, Marie Claire, Women's Health, Salon, Slate, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, The LA Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, Variety, Inc.com, Esquire.com, and TheAtlantic.com. In 2008, TIME.com named her one of the best bloggers of the year. She's appeared on CNN, NPR, and "Politically Incorrect."