A review by audaciaray
We Did Porn: Memoir and Drawings by Zak Smith

4.0

A few disclaimers before I write about this book: Zak Smith is a friend. He writes about me (as Auspicia Clay) in this book. In general, he writes about my/our friends in this book and some of the events he writes about were ones I was present for or have heard stories about through other channels.

I took this pic of Zak and Mandy in July of 2007, when I was in Los Angeles on the book tour for Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration. They'd just moved to LA. This picture really cracks me up every time I look at it.

So, I'm involved.

All this means it's hard to write about this book. But here goes:

We Did Porn is definitely a page-turner, and not just because I was nosy about how Zak would write me (I was pleased and amused by what he said about me), but because it was a genuinely enjoyable read. And the drawings served as great punctuation to the written bits.

One of the things that struck me upside the head as I read We Did Porn is that most of the books I read about the sex industry are written by women who at some point are or were activists. Women who write memoirs or other stuff about the sex industry frame their work in some way in relationship to feminism. If you’re a woman writing about the sex industry, you kind of can’t help it. And that's a very different kind of read than this book. Zak just has a different perspective on the porn industry, which is not to say that he’s necessarily feminist or anti-feminist – the subject just doesn’t really come up (and I’ve never really hashed it out with him either, it’s never seemed like the most pertinent of conversations we could be having). He's not apologetic about the fact that he signed on to make porn because he made a joke to Benny Profane about fucking girls on camera. And this simple fact - that Zak would like to fuck more girls - remains his reason for being in the business. The rationale being: if you were a dude, and you got offered the chance to fuck hot girls and get paid for it, you'd be insane not to go for it.

The pieces of the book that really shine are the moments where he draws the parallels between the art and smut businesses. There's a lot of depth there. Though his style throughout the book is somewhat disaffected (see above bit about the simplicity of his porn-doing motivation), there are great moments of intensity, when he gets fired up and not just in a cantankerous way (though that stuff is delightful too). For example, this moment (pg 391 for those playing along at home) in which he's writing about a conversation between me, Bella Vendetta and Mandy Morbid that he listened to as we were doing late night food after the 2008 AVN Awards:

Their basic attitude -as they dissect the convention and the people in it- is that everything about sex and porn is really stupid, except the sex and porn that they like.
And this, again, is strikingly similar to the way I feel about art.

In writing about the sex industry, it seems that women have to more carefully negotiate the issues around exploitation, good and bad experiences of sex, all that touchy stuff that people get crazed about – but seem much less concerned about when it comes to thinking about men and the sex business. Zak runs with this, but also cracks open tough stuff around abuse, negative experiences of sex, and mental illness in porn business folks. Zak isn’t afraid of writing ugly things about the nature of the porn business and the sadness that touches the people who are in it – but he doesn’t get too heavy handed about it either. And actually, characterizing Zak and the writing as not being afraid is kind of silly and trite – that really sells it short, like it’s some other kind of book, like it’s a brave thing and there should be head patting and reverence. And that’s – just not really it either.

Let’s boil it down to this: I love how Zak mixes writing about porn and art without any of the tired old "is it porn or is it art?" garbage. It just is. These things are in parallel and also entangled universes. It's a mess. There aren't any stupid questions in this book and no overly simplistic answers, just tough, weird, messy stuff. Coiled together, this stuff isn’t nonsensical, but it doesn’t have a neat and tidy narrative either (and my use of the word “narrative” will be funnier to you once you read the book. Which you should).

Zak has a bunch of book events coming up in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle - you should see what he's up to and go to one of his signings if you can.