Stoya

I will admit that I started this blog entry thinking one thing: I need an excuse to talk about porn without actually talking about it. Because porn is disgusting, degrading, and yet a lot of people watch it. But it makes people uneasy. Which I find makes no sense. If you say a woman is attractive, you're saying that you're probably going to masturbate to her mere visage tonight, unless Scrubs is on, then the dynamic of the night changes.

Nonetheless, it's a pretty thin line between talking about the women of porn and telling the world your masturbatory habits, so I'll try to keep this as strictly intellectual as I can.

I begin by bringing up the amazing awesome lovely woman that thousands of strange men will know as Stoya Doll. Stoya is an anomaly in an industry of lookalikes. She looks incredibly gothic, and yet can convincingly look glamorous. She has wide-eyed innocence and yet has sex like a racehorse. And she probably didn't have to do porn as a career choice. Stoya also has the palest white skin of anybody I've seen since an old friend of mine who hung around pool halls with me. Which I realize is a terrible reference point. Which in turn just means that she's really really white.

But back to my point, Stoya is an anomaly because she is truly a sign of the youth movement in porn. Technically, every other year is a youth movement in porn, with old names cast aside to the barely legal hottie because every man in America secretly loves the barely legal hottie. But Stoya's the most clear example of a woman truly of her time. She is on MySpace, has a blog, and actually is so committed to her industry (i.e. to getting passion out of sex) that she completely avoids relationships. The only way she could be somehow more in tune with what teens and 20somethings around the world do, she would have to have sex while an iPhone is in her hand, sort of like that one Bijou Phillips sex scene in Bully. And that easily makes her more sexy. Because girls who know how to use things are sexy.

Most porn scholars would probably say that Stoya's continued intimacy with her fans is only a natural evolution of her surroundings. Names like Lily Allen in the music industry have already used the internet and MySpace as promotional tools. But at the same time, going to a store to buy a Lily Allen record is completely within the means of most people, and isn't really a decision that you have to go very far to find. There's at least five to ten department stores that stock a Lily Allen album. Whereas in my town, there's only one porn shop, and it's way on the outskirts of town. And we're on the internet, so...even pornography is about as vibrant and accessible on here as music. Thus, porn is directly etched with the internet and needs that figure that brings casual and hardcore porn addicts together. Is that Stoya? Well, that's obviously not certain. But she's perfect for the classification of the internet porn celebrity.

Now I do take into account things like Danni.com and Kate's Playground as far as the porn celebritocracy goes, but both sites have proven that they are painfully dated. While Danni Ashe and her website were pioneers in the sense of getting guys to download porn on the internet, she's essentially the Aerosmith of the porn industry. This is to say that she's still relevant to the right people, but nothing of what she does holds young people's interest whatsoever. Even if I enjoy Erica Campbell's freakish boobs, I don't see a fantasy object that might just happen to be real. I see a freakishly attractive woman that's merely of her realm. And while porn and enjoyment of porn is based on fantasy, it is based on real archetypes. On what we as a viewer perceive as a woman (or man) we would like to have sex with. Which might be fantasy, but my personal fantasy needs to be realistic, if that makes any sense. She needs to be homely. The kids need to be fed and the chores need to be done and oh yeah we can have sex sometime after that.

I guess what I just said makes me the opposite of...well, every other viewer of porn. Especially the people who are married and love porn. But the fantasy aspect of porn is kind of lost to me. It disconnects me from the action of sex, masturbation, or whatever the woman is trying to do. And not in the "I feel like a have a relationship with them" sense, but rather the "would this person have ANY appreciation for her audience" aspect. And yes, this could be a poor argument as well. After all, without an audience, a porn star's as good as dead. But Erica Campbell and Danni Ashe don't feel real to me. Erica Campbell always leans to doing something, but there's a model-esque aura to it. She doesn't seem legitimately having fun, even if she can fake enjoyment as well as any model can. Danni is much the same way. Sure, she probably enjoys making money and paying women to make her more money, but her satisfaction doesn't come out in the product. Rather, it merely comes out in the company's financial statements.

Now I also brought up Kate's Playground, another site with insanely beautiful women that also I feel don't connect to me. Kate herself is a looker, and even posts webcasts through her lovely website, which I guess is supposed to be more daunting than what Stoya does. But it's far too intimate. One thing Stoya accomplishes is erotic distance. You can see her have sex in high quality anywhere on the web, and in well lit, well filmed settings with anonymous guys. Kate resorts to low quality, poorly lit settings to try to show off her goods. She's like the long-distance girlfriend who you want to see naked again, but you get the idea that the thrill in the relationship is gone. She's hot as hell, but you'll never get it into your head that you want to see her in person again because the thrill is gone. She's completely vapid. She even brings her playful female friends over, but it's a mere exercise in naked faux-lesbianism. And nothing about faux-lesbianism is really that interesting. Sure, porn's based around this idea, but most lesbian porn is also filled with vibrant passion, genuine emotion, and probably fake orgasm. Which is about 2/3rds more genuine than anything Kate's Playground produces.

Stoya is, however, the perfect mix. She has the basic element of attractiveness down, as her frame is just petite enough to not be ridiculous and just right in all of the appropriate areas. She's not ridiculously proportioned like Danni Ashe or Erica Campbell or even the lovely Shay Laren (who is completely unrelated to the both of them, I realize). She's exactly a woman who could be seen easily on the street, but yet, she can't. She looks in the face like Selma Blair, but yet she doesn't. And I don't think that's based on the fact that I can't see the woman on the street (or Selma Blair for that matter) naked, despite the fact that Blair was naked in Todd Solondz's ultra depressing Storytelling.

Stoya's exactly the perfect mix of innocent and guilty this generation needs in its masturbation material. And yet, just her facial reactions belie an intelligence no other porn star can convey. And then it's proven by the content of her blog. Even when she gets into a petty issue like what to wear at the AVN awards, she manages to be a little snarky and intelligent all the same. (I.E. She geeked her way to a man's heart by referencing Kafka.) And yes, it might be a good show. She might hate the works of Franz Kafka. But she's smart enough to play up her personal intelligence. She's working a persona that few porn stars can. Hell, she got me to write a blog devoted to how utterly ridiculous every other porn star seems compared to her. Whether she's really super amazing or not, she's played to a crowd that porn rarely taps, and that's the bookreading, snarky, teenage and 20something males who are vastly underserved in porn. While porn always plays up the stereotype of the sexy librarian, there's no one that realistically could be feasible as that sexy librarian, or as someone you could have an awesome conversation with after sex, or even as someone that has an opinion that's interesting to the ear. Stoya is all of those things, plus she's attractive, and seems like she could have sex with any guy.

Even the one who gives her a copy of The Trial.