Nakedness. Everywhere. All the time. Running Juicy Pink Box, I look at women in various stages of undress all day long, every day. I think the nudity issue is one thing about my job that really fascinates people. I understand. I really do. When I was a little girl growing up in the south, I didn’t dream of one day becoming the lesbian Hugh Hefner; it just happened.
For someone who makes her living paying people to do private things in public, I am surprisingly shy. To be perfectly honest, I’m not totally comfortable with sex; it’s an ever-evolving topic in my life.
But that’s between me and my therapist.
Anyway, back to the naked ladies. Being on a porn set is very different from being on a nude beach. On a nude beach everyone is either naked or in some form of skimpy clothing, but on a porn set only the talent is naked. You’ve probably heard of movie sets where everyone gets naked for love scenes? Well, I don’t run that kind of operation! I wouldn’t tolerate ogling or disrespectful behavior on my set, so the crew certainly does not sit around and stare at bare breasts. Not on purpose, anyway.
However, the whole point of porn is sex, so you really can’t escape sex on a porn set. A typical day for me on set would happen something like this:
I arrive at 6 a.m. — before everyone else. Clean up. Do paperwork. Lay out breakfast. Hair and makeup people arrive and set up. Talent arrives. Talent starts hair and makeup. Stylist arrives. Stylist has talent undress. Nakedness. Talent tries on different outfits, including lingerie. I evaluate what works for the scene, what suits my taste, how comfortable the talent feels in the outfit, and how it will look on camera.
Nakedness.
Crew arrives and preps scene as talent finishes hair and makeup. Test shots with talent or a stand-in. We have a happy- go-lucky PA who often volunteers to act out the scenes for the test shots. She’s really good, and I have tried to recruit her, but she has no interest in being in front of the camera.
Once out of hair and makeup, we do a photo shoot with talent. Nakedness. When that’s finished, we do final prep for the scene.
Scene begins. I watch the monitor mostly, to see what the action looks like on camera. It’s always vastly different from the way it looks in person. I try to cultivate a sense of reality. I squelch anything that looks false or feels too “porn-y”. When the connection to sex is real, be it alone or between partners on screen, I find that I am glued to the monitor. I watch without any sense of separation — I forget, and I just watch. In the moments when I get swept away like that, that’s when I know I am making something special.
Scene wraps. Lunch. Rinse and repeat with the scene we shoot in the afternoon. More nakedness.
I never get desensitized to sex, and honestly, when I ask the talent to remove clothing, I often blush. Somewhere inside, there is still that little southern belle who was afraid to look at boobs in the locker room for fear that her classmates would know she was a “dirty lesbian.”
But I’m not a kid anymore. Sex is my business, and I am a professional, so at the end of the day, I have to move past my shame and focus on making excellent entertainment.
The show must go on — boobies and all.
Originally issued in This Week in Texas, Volume 1 Issue 4 on March 30, 2012.
