We Did Ok, Kid

How do you understand an industry that sells the most private feelings in the most public way? In this book, the narrator-artist argues that pornography is less a moral aberration than a full system—of performance, logistics, commerce, law, and memory—that engineers intimacy for profit. He contends that sex on film looks spontaneous but runs on rules and compromises, and that the most revealing truth isn’t what happens on camera but how people organize themselves to make it happen. To see that, you must read porn as a technology of persuasion and a workplace, not just as images (think of Shoshana Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism or Erving Goffman’s social performance; the book stands at their intersection).

Across studios and hotel lobbies, clinics and casinos, you follow a painter from Brooklyn into pornworld. You start with a date—Valentine’s Day with Tina DiVine—that feels like a movie and a trap. Then you roam sets where skateboard dollies, AIM clinic printouts, and sandbags run the day. You meet people with ambitions (Leom McFrei, Rob Chuckler) who try to make alt-porn—cinematic, odd, art-school smart—only to collide with gatekeepers (GSP/Hustler; Bill and Hillary Productions) who prefer reliable beats to risky vision. You learn that Vegas concentrates the industry’s contradictions into garish anthropology; you discover that Los Angeles is not just where porn is made but how it is lived: in rentals, clinics, and side hustles.

Where you enter: romance as labor

The Tina DiVine date is your portal. You eat in a foam-colored restaurant on a bed; a club manager with a walnut head dispenses shots and coded humiliations; Tina oscillates between princess and porn persona, between tears and a wish to be spit on. The narrator’s rule—“act stupid”—is survival coaching for a room where everyone performs. The night ends with Tina having sex with the manager, turning what looked like intimacy into public work. The line between date and job smears; the book never lets you forget it.

How it works: persuasion and money

The text insists that porn isn’t mere display; it’s designed to “work on you.” Leom McFrei times music (Wolves in the Throne Room) to Sunny Carmichael’s monologue so your attention spikes; cuts and lighting push desire through a repeatable arc. Producers like Max Clamm optimize for footage and sellability—long scenes, clear finishes—because the market pays for loops and signatures, not nuance. Money’s gravity compresses art into “beats” that metastasize desire across catalogs and years (note the business analogy to Marvel’s cinematic universe rhythms).

How it’s made: rules, risks, and craft

On set you find contracts, STI tests from AIM, and a question that guides consent: “What are your rules?” Male performers must deliver visible orgasms; female partners often shoulder the burden of completion. You watch “fake internal pop” versions get shot for cable while directors juggle Swede-penetration cams and Cockney close-ups. The craft is technical and ethical at once, a choreography of boundaries and camera angles designed to finish the day without anyone getting hurt.

Art vs. distribution: the alt-porn bind

Leom wants octopuses and tarot cards in Far Gone and Out; distributors cut them. Rob Chuckler shoots elegant, arousing scenes; Bill and Hillary label them “unhealthy” and seize control with a “sexual review policy.” The same work that earns applause at SFMOMA is defanged by a DVD buyer. Alt-porn lives where cinema and commodity collide, and the collision usually favors the pipeline over the poem (compare to Sundance darlings recut for streamers).

Cities as systems: LA and Vegas

LA teaches survival: Bad Religion’s Suffer on repeat, aviators and Hawaiian shirts to project a role, Scientology centers and strip-club strips as landmarks. Vegas (AVN weekend) condenses everything: autograph lines of solitary men, Coco’s on Tropicana at 3 a.m., the Pimp House’s foam-hand chair, and Pussy-darts in the kitchen. The Strip stages porn’s mingled glamour and decay under casino light.

Memory, stigma, and law

Trauma threads through the book without becoming a cudgel. Candy Crushed’s Catholic guilt and medical suffering map onto her erotic life, but the author resists tidy causality. Meanwhile, law and media shape the arena: the 2005 ID regulation scrambles foreign performers’ lives; Tyra Banks’s show corrals Tasha Rey into public shame. Politicians like Huckabee denounce “sadomasochism” as studios sanitize content for markets under the banner of “health.”

By the end, you grasp a coherent claim: porn is a culture-industry that manufactures intimacy under pressure—of desire, cash flow, distribution, stigma, and personal history. If you want to understand it, look at how people solve problems when everything breaks: pigs with diarrhea on Stagger Lee, missing lights in Eastern Europe, a sick performer, a law rewritten mid-shoot. The industry you meet is improvisational, communal, and precarious—and that, more than any single scene, is the truth on film.

Key Idea

Porn is not a set of images; it is an engineered workplace that turns memory, performance, and logistics into repeatable intimacy for sale.

You enter the adult world the way the narrator does—with a date that feels staged and ordinary at once. It’s Valentine’s Day with Tina DiVine, an actress who is both fragile and theatrical. A shoe-shaped chair, a restaurant where you eat on a bed, and a manager with a walnut head create a set that teaches you the first rule: in porn-adjacent life, intimacy is always half-performance. Gifts—like a painting—get absorbed into the night’s choreography, and even kindness becomes part of the act.

The choreography of desire

Tina cries and asks to be treated like a princess; then she talks about liking to be spit on and called a whore. You hear contradictions that sound like cliché but aren’t; they are private logics born from wounds and habit. The narrator coaches himself: “act stupid,” a tactic that lowers threat, buys time, and lets the scene unfold without demanding coherence. You start to recognize how sex work and date-night borrow from each other: cues, props, time blocks, measurable outcomes (attention, drinks, a ride, a room).

Public space as stage

The Amuse Bar manager feeds free shots, performs status games, and cultivates humiliation as ambient mood. You’re in a place where the audience is everywhere—bartenders, waiters, strangers hovering in reflective surfaces. The private becomes public without anyone naming the shift. When the night ends with Tina having sex with the manager, the reveal is not scandal but inevitability: what felt like a date was part of a shift, and the manager was a boss playing a role.

What this teaches you about porn

This chapter isn’t just a quirky meet-cute; it’s fieldwork. It shows how people move between modes—girlfriend, performer, salesperson—without clear seams. Power circulates through props and rooms: a bed becomes a table; a bar becomes a set; a compliment becomes labor. The painter learns status the hard way, discovering that psychic safety depends on reading cues and choosing complicity or exit. That skill—seeing the script inside the scene—prepares you for sets and studios where the contract is literal and the clock is running.

Ambivalence without moralism

The narrator doesn’t condemn Tina or the manager; he observes how needs, habits, and cash weave together. He notes Tina’s talk of feminism beside her desire for degradation—an apparent paradox that dissolves if you admit that fantasy and politics don’t share a single grammar (note how Andrea Dworkin’s anti-porn critique misses this granular ambivalence). You’re left with a practical motto: some dates are work; some work is a date. The border is porous, and your feelings cross it whether you want them to or not.

From vignette to method

As a method, the chapter asks you to stay close to surfaces—the shoe chair, the foam tones, the bed-table—because surfaces reveal systems. It also primes you to notice tears without fetishizing them. Tina’s fragility is real; so is her agency. The point is not to resolve contradiction but to work within it, like a camera operator who keeps the subject centered while the dolly squeaks. That stance—empathetic, alert, non-naïve—carries through the book, from AIM clinic lines to AVN autograph queues to hotel-room reshoots at 2 a.m.

Key Idea

Your first lesson is not about sex but about staging: learn to read rooms where desire, money, and performance swap masks without warning.

Porn “works on you” because people design it to. The book takes you inside that design, showing how attention is captured and recycled until it pays rent. Directors like Leom McFrei build scenes around your obsession—“think of that thing”—and time stimuli to keep you watching. Sunny Carmichael’s monologue in Girls Are Liars floats over Wolves in the Throne Room; the sound and cut blur internal thought with sonic pressure. It isn’t just sex; it’s persuasion engineered to synchronize your arousal with the film’s rhythm.

Attention as product

You can map this to ad-tech: shots are placements, loops are retargeting, cum shots are conversion events. Producers optimize for these KPIs because markets reward reliability. Max Clamm sells “a porn version of a mainstream movie” not to innovate but to ride brand familiarity. Hustler/GSP buys distribution with conditions: trim art, punch up sex, lengthen the money shots. The result is a catalog of repeatable beats that metastasize across sequels and spinoffs (like MCU action beats, but with genitals).

Aesthetic knobs and levers

Music sets tone; lighting hides labor; editing conceals negotiation. A director tweaks these knobs to mask fatigue and maintain fantasy. A performer’s agency surfaces in micro-choices—where to place a hand, when to slow the pace—but the cut reorders those choices into a story of inevitability. You learn to see how the edit manufactures a feeling of surrender or control (compare to how horror uses off-screen sound to force dread you then “resolve” with a jump scare).

Economics at scale

The narrator notes that a single title can keep someone housed for years. That longevity pushes producers to standardize. Contracts and compliance shape content as much as taste does: records of IDs, STI testing windows, and regional rules (cable FIP vs. DVD pop) carve multiple cuts from one day’s work. Companies privilege rentable footage over narrative nuance; a tarot motif or octopus prop disappears if it complicates deliverables. What survives is what sells fast and clears legal hurdles.

Consequences for viewers and makers

For you as a viewer, this means your cravings are trained. For makers, it means creative risks need distribution allies. Leom’s alt-porn instincts flourish only when a buyer tolerates ambiguity. When they don’t, the market trims until only utility remains: genitals centered, light clean, sound denoised, story subordinated. The book doesn’t lament this so much as insist you name it: porn is optimized persuasion whose clarity is itself an aesthetic (Brecht might call it alienation masked as immersion).

• Sunny Carmichael’s scene: music + voiceover as a compliance engine for mood.
• Clamm’s mainstream mimicry: the gravity of brands over originality.
• Distributor cuts: the octopus and zombie vanish, the hand-drawn cover replaced.

Key Idea

Porn is a persuasion machine with profit as its metronome; the beats you see are the beats that pay.

On a porn set, you meet a blend of film school and triage. Contracts, checklists, and consent are as present as gaffer tape and skateboard dollies. The Adult Industry Medical (AIM) clinic prints STI clearances on a schedule that determines who can work that week; a public clinic in Chelsea, by contrast, humiliates and delays. This is a workplace that must pretend not to be one on camera—so you learn to keep two truths in your head: the scene is fake, and the risks are real.

The logistics of desire

You watch halogen lights wash color, sandbags keep tripods honest, and a Lincoln Continental corpse stand in for “cool.” A Swede runs penetration angles while a Cockney fetish photographer punches in on close-ups. Shoots run two hours across multiple setups because distribution demands coverage. Cable buyers want a “fake internal pop” version; DVDs require visible completion. Every take is a negotiation between performance and product spec.

Consent as choreography

“What are your rules?” anchors the day. Gina Giles bans aggressive head-grabbing after a bad experience; that single boundary reconfigures the blocking. Male performers shoulder a unique pressure: the plot can survive a dropped line, but not a failed cum shot. Directors like Osbie Feel coach with odd prompts—“imagine the best thing ever”—to trigger arousal on cue, a method that blurs acting and intoxication.

Pretending your task is not degrading

One of the book’s bluntest lines—pretend it’s not degrading—doesn’t deny harm; it names a protective fiction that lets professionals move. You perform to the camera, to the director, and to distribution economics; each wants a different truth. The camera wants abandon; the director wants continuity; the buyer wants runtime and categories. So you learn composure, pacing, and crisis management (a condom break, an asthma flare) while staying emotionally available enough to sell chemistry.

Craft as care

The most humane insight here is that technical competence protects people. A steady dolly reduces retakes; clear call sheets minimize waiting-room anxiety; a respectful boundary talk reduces the chance of on-set harm. This is the ethics of craft: not piety, but process that keeps bodies and bank accounts intact. In the book’s world, the person who brings doughnuts and fresh batteries does more for safety than any grand speech about empowerment.

• AIM vs. public clinic: streamlined dignity vs. bureaucratic shame.
• FIP variants: one shoot, multiple markets.
• Boundary scripts reshape blocking in real time.

Key Idea

Porn’s fakery is a system of protections and pressures; mastering the craft is how people make it livable.

Alt-porn names a hope: that porn can be cinema, that sex can carry story without drowning it. Leom McFrei frames Far Gone and Out with tarot and inserts an octopus like a sly totem; distributors cut both. He scores scenes with Wolves in the Throne Room to inject dread and wonder; buyers turn the volume down to hear flesh. The narrator toggles between a museum show (SFMOMA) and a distributor’s office (GSP/Hustler), where the same work gets inflated into theory or deflated into SKU.

Distribution as aesthetic filter

Bill and Hillary Productions make “positive and healthy” their brand and hire therapists for a “sexual review policy.” It’s PR that doubles as censorship: Rob Chuckler’s precise, erotic scene gets labeled “unhealthy,” then recut and reclaimed as theirs. Osbie’s footage loses its odd edges; ass-slapping sounds get removed, then quietly restored after politics shift. The health label polices images while insulating the company from moral panic (compare to Hays Code-era Hollywood: morality as market control).

Stagger Lee: ambition under constraint

A pig named Puggsley stands in for an illegitimate child (no kids on porn sets)—until the pig gets diarrhea. Lights are stuck in Eastern Europe. A property manager is rumored to have given weed to a special-needs kid, blowing up locations. Ron Jeremy wears a barrister’s wig. What should be a weird, electric film turns into salvage as studio demands and bad luck shear off the narrative. By the end, sex remains; the delicate parts of the story don’t.

The structural dilemma

If you make alt-porn for people who dislike porn, they won’t find you; if you make it for porn’s base, you’ll compromise until it’s mainstream. The book mirrors art-world economics (limited audiences, prestige prizes instead of margins) and asks whether “better porn” can exist at scale. The unresolved answer is practical: yes, in pockets; rarely in pipelines. It takes a tolerant distributor, flexible performers, and a schedule that can survive three disasters and a law change.

• Hand-drawn covers replaced by glossy photos: branding over authorship.
• Alt labels split intent: art object vs. alternative mass product.
• Museum applause doesn’t translate to DVD bins.

Key Idea

Alt-porn survives where ambition finds allies in distribution; without them, the market trims art down to utility.

Los Angeles and Las Vegas aren’t backdrops; they are engines. In LA, the industry breathes: AIM clinics, casting offices with old-school desks, Craigslist rentals, and the Boulevard Internet Café at 1 a.m. The narrator learns survival the local way: aviators and Hawaiian shirts for armor, Bad Religion’s Suffer as a manual, and a network of couches (Alice’s Hollywood apartment, Birch the cat) to land on between shoots. You live inside the industry’s rhythms—testing windows, doughnuts on set, cash advances from a producer like Max Clamm who hustles funding and talent, sometimes at the ethical margins (soliciting at AIM).

Vegas as a microcosm

AVN weekend on the Strip is porn turned inside out. You walk mauve casino carpets past charred pizza ruins and poles wrapped in ads for “twat.” You find the Pimp House party: a foam-hand chair in the living room; in the kitchen, Pussy-darts—watching a girl try to burst balloons with air blown from her genitals through a blowgun she holds with her feet. It’s not metaphor; it’s inventory. The spectacle feels both too much and too small, which is the point: porn’s oddest rituals look normal under Vegas light.

Fans, stars, and social loneliness

At the expo, fans line up for autographs but don’t talk to each other. The median man is white, 36–37, married with kids, watches football. Unlike comic-con crowds, porn fans are socialized to privacy; in public they look even more alone. Stars like Courtney Tables develop tactics—professional warmth, quick exits, managing “residue” left on clothes—and a strange pride some take in a secretive, jizzed wad. Vegas reveals the asymmetry: performers must be public while fans remain partly hidden.

The city as accelerator

Vegas amplifies friction points: karaoke-house owners demand cash for unpaid prizes; Intensity fights Bill and Hillary over content; Chuck Devil is stationed by the restroom. Meanwhile, Coco’s on Tropicana becomes a nightly refuge where everyone levels out over pancakes at 2 a.m. You learn the map: liminal hotel corridors, misdirecting elevators, balcony parties that tilt toward arrest. The city turns porn’s daily compromises into neon-visible sociology.

• LA: infrastructure and image; you perform survival.
• Vegas: concentration and display; you witness the system’s moving parts at once.
• Both: communities built in diners, motels, and green rooms more than in institutions.

Key Idea

To grasp porn’s culture, learn its cities: LA teaches you how to work; Vegas shows you what the work adds up to under bright, indifferent light.

The most delicate thread asks why certain desires take hold. The book refuses a single answer. It treats Freud’s compulsion-to-repeat as historically interesting and clinically thin, then adds two practical models: control and taboo/endorphin. Survivors sometimes re-stage what hurt them because staging it now confers control; others find arousal where prohibitions broke, since transgression came paired with powerful bodily states. The author adds a memory-salience model: peaks of feeling—good or bad—become reference points; later, you map meaning onto experiences that rhyme with those peaks.

Candy Crushed as case study

Candy’s life—Catholic schooling, family illness, chronic medical trauma—threads pain through religion and the body. Her neck reads, “Suffering is justified as soon as it becomes the raw material of beauty.” That’s an ethic and a coping method. She finds power in turning hurt into performance, not as redemption narrative but as practical survival. Others in the book carry different cargo: poverty, family rejection, unmanageable shame. Some were abused; many were not. The point is that trauma is common in life, and porn concentrates people who make use of extremes (as firefighting concentrates people who use risk).

Against reduction

The narrator listens more than he diagnoses. He rejects daytime-television scripts (see Tyra Banks grilling Tasha Rey) that flatten people into victims or cautionary tales. He also sidesteps the porn-apologia that insists desire springs pure from nowhere. Instead, he offers layered explanations and attends to economic context: when rent is due, repetition is also a paycheck. That doesn’t make desire fake; it makes it contingent.

How to read desire humanely

If you’re a clinician, policymaker, or friend, the lesson is methodological humility. Ask what scripts a person is using, what they get from them—control, attention, income, identity—and what alternatives exist. Look for peaks that shaped their sense of what “counts.” Then build supports around consent and health rather than moral panic. The book’s moral is simple and hard: listen first, legislate later.

• Freud: narrative seed, weak mechanism.
• Control: re-stage to own it.
• Taboo/endorphin: transgression bonds to arousal.
• Memory-salience: big feelings define future thresholds.

Key Idea

Desire is a negotiation between memory, culture, and opportunity; treat it as history in motion, not a diagnosis.

Politics and publicity keep remaking the industry’s ground. A 2005 federal ID rule says foreign government IDs are fine only if both performer and producer are outside the U.S.—a clause that gums up shoots, strands performers, and forces producers to audit addresses like cops. Osbie calls it “a fucking nightmare.” Customs officials thumb through memory cards; the FBI loses wiretaps when it can’t pay a phone bill; judges in obscenity cases marinate in the evidence they’re meant to police. Governance looks inconsistent and often performative.

Moral theater, studio PR

Mike Huckabee denounces “sadomasochism and necrophilia” on TV just as Candy posts a tentacle clip; the timing is perfect for outrage and meaningless for policy. Meanwhile, studios deploy “sexual review policies” to shield brands. Bill and Hillary’s “positive and healthy” mantra justifies cuts to Rob Chuckler’s footage and Osbie’s edits, dressing censorship as care. The result is sanitized products that travel farther in retail while leaving performers’ material needs—healthcare, contracts, legal aid—under-addressed.

Public shame as content

Tyra Banks’s segment with Tasha Rey shows mainstream media’s habit: frame wardrobe, bait with anal and gang-bang questions, cue audience moral dread. Shame sells daytime ratings the way cum shots sell DVDs. The book links this to a broader hypocrisy: a culture that buys porn in private and punishes the people who make it in public.

Community and collapse

Under these pressures, people break. Osbie Feel attempts suicide; the House of Pies conversation reveals a man whose memories run “much further” than others’: old hurts, new debts, production chaos. Suzanne cries in her car, fearing family exile; Ella’s name in a police blotter kills bookings; Candy cycles through hospitals. Friends gather at Coco’s, share booths and cigarettes, and keep each other alive a little longer. The network is intimate but thin. It saves people some nights, not most systems.

From outrage to reform

The book’s political ask is not for praise or bans but for labor realism: clear ID rules, accessible healthcare, STI testing support, contract enforcement, and safe reporting channels. Moral panics are cheap; compliance and care cost money. If you want fewer tragedies, fund the boring parts: clinics, lawyers, accountants, and producers who pay on time.

• 2005 ID rule: border theater that redefines hiring.
• Studio “health” labels: censorship disguised as wellness.
• Community care: strong, improvised, never enough.

Key Idea

Control without care produces spectacle and collapse; durable reforms look like labor policy, not culture war.