The nightmare of free porn

So I’ll be doing a lot of text posts for a while, until I get a new set of backwards-skating WordPress workarounds figured out — like sharing this scary-accurate retelling of what it’s like to be a porn reviewer: the highs, and oh, the lows… The Pro Circuit: Free Porn, A Nightmare could have easily been written by me, Jonno, any of us. But it was blogged by Thomas Roche:

In 2005, I started a new job where I wrote about porn. With a voracious appetite to learn about the field and, of course, be rapaciously titillated in the process, I sent out literally dozens of letters to porn studios, outlining my credentials and asking for review copies of DVDs. I’d already spent some years as a commentator and occasional pundit, drawling with great authority to mainstream journalists that “adult entertainment is a growing business,” and that “there sure is a lot of this stuff,” as if that was some kind of brilliant observation. Frequently questioned about the scope of the adult entertainment business, I’d tell writers something like “More than 12,000 adult DVDs were published last year,” secretly thinking to myself “And some day I’ll become a porn reviewer, and I’ll have it ALL!”

Now was the time. This was my moment. 12,000? Hell, send me every last porno disk, motherfuckers, and I’d finally have a stew going. Some guys dream of being porn stars; I wanted more than anything in the world to be the Lester Bangs of the pop shot.

Pretty soon, packages started arriving (…read more)