"How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" by Jenna Jameson
(« BACK) In this book, Jameson gets you rooting for her. Written with New York Times contributor Neil Strauss, the book is a captivating mess -- with autobiography; celebrity dish; tips on making it in porn; transcribed conversations between Jenna, her brother and her father; pages from her teen diary, photo albums with everything from childhood snaps to skin shots to wedding pictures; comics; a "Ten Commandments of dating" (along with a list of the ones her husband has broken), all tossed together. A celebrity bio has to be judged on whether it's entertaining and whether, despite the ghostwriter, a real person comes through in its pages. Here, one does, and that's as much a tribute to Strauss' ability to merge with his subject as it is to the strength of Jameson's personality. "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" is lively, hellaciously entertaining, sharp, feisty and touching enough to earn Jameson the right to wear that "Heart Breaker" tattoo on her right butt cheek.
Not that she ever asks for anyone's pity. Not once. The voice of this book belongs to what's usually called "a troubled kid." The difference is that in "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" that voice reaches us directly and not in the way in which we usually receive such voices, as part of a sociological study or as supporting evidence in an editorial.
The outline of Jenna Jameson's life so far (she's only 30) sounds like the typical run-up to a too-fast, too-soon outcome: Mother dead of cancer when she was 3. Loving but devastated father ill-equipped to raise her and her older brother. A series of negligent and abusive stepmothers. A generally unsupervised upbringing, leaving her and her brother free to get into drugs and other serious mischief. Moving from town to town. Gang-raped during her family's stay in Montana, in an attack she very plausibly claims she was not meant to survive. Live-in girlfriend of a biker tattoo artist. Raped by his uncle. Work as a stripper, leading to appearances in men's magazines leading to adult movies. A growing fondness for smoking crystal meth and bad relationships. Thousands of dollars made and blown. Eventual fame in adult movies and accompanying 'tude. Unhappy first marriage to a controlling fellow porn star. Periodic lapses into drugs and booze.
That Jameson is alive to tell this story would, in best "E! True Hollywood Story" fashion, dictate an end replete with tears, redemption and "If I knew then what I know now" contrition. In fact, there is a happy ending: Reconciliation with her father and brother. A position as CEO of her own company. A happy second marriage to porn director Justin Sterling, now her only male partner, on-screen and off. A contented domestic life in Scottsdale, Ariz. Eager anticipation of motherhood. But the strength of "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" is in the way it shows that sheer, lived experience makes a hash of assumptions and ideologies.
The reason Jenna Jameson has become the friendly face of porn is that she is so reassuringly familiar. She has always looked like the prettiest girl you saw hanging out at the mall (in a recent interview she talked about how excited she was that her image was appearing on a ski board, like a girl whose boyfriend has painted her name across the back of his Trans Am). Hers is an accessible, American middle-class prettiness, blond and sunny, not exotic. She doesn't possess the forbidding fashion-model beauty of a porn star like Tera Patrick (a former Ford agency model). Nor does she have the up-for-anything trashiness of the countless girls who pass through the industry.
Ten years into her career, Jameson doesn't look used up or hard-bitten. Possibly that's because she limits what she does on-screen. The same avenues that made porn more available, home video and the Internet, have also made it more private, able to cater to any fetish from the most benign to the most repulsive. In an industry that increasingly relies on pushing the envelope, she has always refused double penetration and gang-bangs, and has kept anal sex for her private life.
Reading "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" makes her seem even more familiar. Most of us have known someone, a friend or sibling or cousin, who made lousy choices and somehow come through it all OK. Often those people wind up living traditional middle-class lives -- they get married, have kids, buy a home. But the route they take to get there is one that -- often recklessly -- shuns all the traditional middle-class safety nets of college or vocational training or settling down in one place.
What could seem a better way to flout middle-class values than going into stripping or nude modeling or adult movies (even though, for some of the people who go into them, they are the quickest route to middle-class stability)? But though sex workers have often been looked down on in the name of middle-class propriety, it's interesting to think about what they share with the middle class.
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