"I'm Ready for My Come Shot Now, Dear"

They have lost an orgasm someplace. Damn. It was here a minute ago. John, the young stud, sits upright, flogging his nude eel. But he can't quite get off. There are some bricks missing from his erection, and male panic has set in. Rachel, John's wife and co-performer, is spread beneath him like a fireman's net opened to catch some falling child. And offspring it will be—an oyster baby made from spit and sperm. Precious little thing: On it depends their sexual self-image.

"Come for me, baby," says Rachel. "Do it for me now." Her voice is serrated: Love there, but also irritation and shame. "Come on my tits, baby. Come on my face." The video camera strip-searches Rachel. Indeed, what more can she do? Each breast is bigger than a moussaka. The sensual blonde's face could put gamy back into monogamy. Still, John can't yank that darn rip cord. He groans with passion he doesn't feel, hoping he will be aroused by the sound of his own fake arousal. "Yes, yes, yes," he says. But it is really, "Not quite, maybe, try again." It looks like Rachel and John are going to flunk their screen test.

What went wrong? Porn performance art is as formal as Olympic ice dancing: points added for technical skill, passion, presentation and degree of difficulty. In the oral prelim action, Rachel had given John's John a great uvula bath. He reciprocated by eating her sushi. Then came the compulsories—doggy, missionary, catbird seat, spoon—all done with panache and love. No judge could award less than a 5.9 score. But now this. "You can do it, baby. You can." Rachel and John lean over his marrowbone like CroMagnon folk keeping a tiny fire alive in high wind.

Finally, John, with more relief than pleasure, gets his nondairy creamer going. "Oh, baby. Oh, baby." Rachel takes it splat-on, as if she were in a miniature pie-throwing contest. They are validated. Their sexuality, now on record, will play back again and again for however long VCRs are sold. They are immortal. This 15-minute encounter is their progeny. And they don't have to put it through college.

"Not so easy, doing it in public," says the camerawoman.

"I was a little nervous," John agrees. "Boy, I need a drink."

"Yes, you do need a stiff one," Rachel says, unaware of her cruel double entendre.

Get your weird visa out—we have entered the Dukedom of Amateur Porn, where things inguinal rule, where men and women risk sexual failure and embarrassment to breast-feed their narcissism. This hidden land is much larger than you thought. Tim Lake of Homegrown Video—a California video factory with its own retail and mail-order systems—says that amateur-style tape has captured about 60 percent of the adult VCR trade. Dwell on it. The porn-video gross take is known only to John Gotti and three other men, but according to Adult Video News magazine, there were more than 600 million adult rentals in 1995. At, say, $3 per transaction, that would be about $2 billion, enough to jeopardize anyone's amateur standing.

Professional porn, featuring the likes of Amber Lynn or Seka, plus some production value, is expensive to bump and grind out. With the market flooded, no one can get $49.50 per video anymore. But for an amateur production, just borrow a neighbor's camcorder and start filing jointly in bed with your wife. Homemade porn is low-overhead head: A retailer can sell amateur for the same price as pro and rake in $10 more per cassette. Furthermore, market A and market P seldom overlap. "Men who buy amateur always buy amateur," a porn purveyor told me. There is a strange fascination and even a touch of sentiment and innocence in all of this.

Well, be honest. Would you really want to make groin cheese with a pro porn star like Amber Lynn? Bull. You'd be scared stiffless. A woman like that has call-waiting in her twat. She's used to men who are hung bigger than the Saturn I booster stage—by comparison you have this prawn. She's all acrylic and collagen and epoxy-resin hair spray—she hasn't felt emotion since her mirror broke—and she'd reduce your maleness to a lily's stamen. Amber Lynn may be fun to watch, like prowrestling, but she's about as real as Jessica Rabbit.

Add some cellulite and a few stretch marks to her fuselage. Draw him pattern bald or paunchy. Suddenly we recognize these people: They are a kind of us. Amateur porn is set in real time, real space and real incompetence. It has, oh, charm. And, though laughter is the worst enemy of successful coition, it has humor as well. He, for instance, fitutzed by lust, will jerk off his shirt without first undoing the cuff buttons—and end up in a windmilling straitjacket. I've done that. Or a coldnosed schnauzer may jump up and sniff a scrotum, the sensation of which is enough to cure manhood forever.

And throughout, the real threat of sexual humiliation snakes around, adding tension and urgency and, yes, humanness to this cooperative enterprise. For—don't underestimate the possibility—relationships can unravel here. Whatever the reason (lust, exhibitionism, thrill-hunting, cussedness), amateur porn people challenge their manhood or womanhood. This subtext of bravado and uncertainty invigorates amateur porn. The viewer can empathize. In pro porn men are spigots of some kind. In amateur porn a husband may be broken by failure. There are aspects of blood sport in it, like bullfighting or falconry.

This past spring I screened five dozen hours of amateur porn in one week. Never before have I known such intense monotony. But it illuminated the human sexual transaction for me, and that's understandable: Whenever spontaneity and chance invade a powerful ritual, the concealing fabric of ceremony may be torn open. Here are 11 important things I learned while watching amateur porn.

(1) Beware: Just because it's stupid and inept doesn't mean it's amateur. Under the category Amateur, the professional porn consortium markets a hybrid genre that I call rookie sex. Jim and Lulu, say, want a career in raunch. They approach Homegrown Video and offer to exchange fluids on camera for the first time ever. Are they amateurs? Yes, in one sense—their initial shoot will probably have the tension and awkwardness of a true greenhorn screw. No, in another sense—they qualify as rookies because their intent is professional and they will be taped in an alien environment. Pure amateur, like charity, must begin at home (or in a private swingers' commune). And last you have the bogus and sick-making pro-am category produced by professionals, starring amateurs, perhaps looking to become pros—most often a video virgin sacrificed to some grizzly veteran hung like a .50-caliber bratwurst. The rookie, overcome by peer pressure and camera angst, will inevitably do something (anal sex or deep throat) that she isn't ready to do and that hurts like a frozen tampon. Never buy or rent any video made by pro-am maven Max Steiner: His cruel, neurotic face is right out of Wehrmacht Central Casting, and he has a truncheon soul.

(2) The fast-forward button is king. Technology has turned us all into Speedy Gonzalezes. The slow, sensual striptease and my childhood are gone. When your VCR remote says, "Take it off," she has to take it off—and as fast as Charlie Chaplin motorcycling through a wash line. Amateur porn—no plot, no dialogue, no foreplay—has profited from this. "People want action, and there is more action in amateur porn than in professional porn," one smut seller told me. Cut to the unchaste. Video viewers want speed and control. Pretty soon all porn sex will be like making love to Evelyn Wood.

(3) No one, but almost no one, uses a condom. Draw your own politically incorrect conclusions from this—I don't have the moral fiber to do it for you. HIV testing is standard at most pro-am and rookie production houses, but just how accurate can that be? I don't speak here for swingers' sanitation: Maybe they drop health certificates in the fishbowl these days. But wherever people cherish hardness, rubber is like trolling your pestle through a sensory deprivation tank.

(4) The 69 position looks athletic and efficient—though actually, no one has ever gotten off in it. There's just too damn much to do. Like playing a clarinet while chewing gum.

(5) Aural sex is as important as oral sex. I don't care how many fine, highcrotched women you've had in your sexual career. Probably not one of them gave you the vocal response an average amateur porn female puts out. "Oh, yes, yes-yes, oh-ohhh-yeah, yeah oh yeah!" And so forth. The greatest sexual gift a woman can proffer is the pleasure of her pleasure. But most women are shy. And they figure, If I show enthusiasm and come real loud then he'll think I'll want it tomorrow, too. Which he will. And which she, because her sexual metabolism is different, may not. For all the faked orgasms we hear about, there are at least as many acts of phony indifference. Women withhold, and often wisely. But a female's pain-joy cry on your porn soundtrack, even when acted, is full of fantastic complicity and exuberance. Remember, most men are somewhat guilty about imposing on their loved one. They want an accomplice in this event—which can seem brutal and remorseless—not some supine martyr.

(6) The secret significance of "Oh, yes-yes, oh-ohhh-yeah, yeah oh yeah!" While I was watching tape number 30 or so, my wife screamed from our bedroom, "I can't stand it, I can't stand it, aaaargh, they all say the same thing, 'Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes, 'aaaargh."

She's right. And, after some thought, what at first seemed mere histrionic affectation took new form as a rude signaling system—though much debased by exaggeration in amateur porn. The "oh" can have several values when (continued on page 143)Amateur Porn(continued from page 82) spoken to a rutting male. It can mean, "Oh, that rhythm is different." Or "Oh, you've reached some new place in me." Or, more fundamentally, "Oh. I'm feeling pain, give me time to evaluate it. Hold on. Is this bad pain or good pain?" Her "yes" signals, "OK, continue to the next 'oh' spot." "Yeah!" means "continue at cruising speed." It wouldn't surprise me to learn that our English word yes came down from some archetypal female's exhalation of pleasured breath. Which would explain a lot about the French.

(7) Women in amateur porn can't catch a break. They fight the gag reflex for 15 minutes, trying to turn his luncheon meat into hard Nerf—then, as a reward, they get ramrodded by it. Though they may grease up beforehand or during a break, never is lubrication of any sort made available on camera. Vaginal wetness for porn women has the same symbolic weight as erections have for porn men: Without either, he or she cannot be authentic. So delicate pink tissue frays and the female orgasm is as rare as an arctic fox. Worse yet, no woman can look sexy (or even just coordinated) climbing out of pantyhose.

(8) Women in amateur porn don't know how to give head. I take that back: Women in general don't know how to give head. Accept this axiom: The more imaginative and resourceful a woman is with hand or mouth, the less likely it is her man will achieve climax. No points for creativity. The male choad is wired to accept in and out strokes, period. A vagina doesn't kiss or lick or nibble. Such deviations are pleasant enough, but they have nothing to do with sump-pumping sperm up. They distract and annoy eventually. Which is why—out of more than 100 blow jobs I saw—most ended with simple male masturbation. In the rest, well, Mr. Organ held his poor partner by her hair and ground out secret rhythms in her constricted throat. I know it isn't pretty to say, but in fellatio, the female mouth is a receptacle, not much else. For men blow jobs derive their emblematic power either from domination or love (or both), depending on the state of your relationship.

(9) Women don't really want an orgasm between the eyes. I mean, can you blame them? And yet, ke-rist, almost every groin-locking sequence in porn ends with a come facial. Believe me, no matter how eager they may claim to be, all women register some reflexive frisson of disgust when reproductive jism has clotted up their lip gloss: God, those are his motile cells, his brine shrimp, on my face. Why then, I thought, was this peculiar and inorganic sexual act chosen as the signature event for all porn? Well, yes, a male has to dig up some sperm, otherwise the tryst is not consecrated. But on the face? Maybe that globbed, thick clam sauce is meant to mask the female partner, depersonalize her and remove further consequence: After all, she wasn't worth propagating with. The whole arrangement just isn't civil. And I disapprove of it.

(10) Most women have no idea what male sexuality is about, and vice versa. Why should they? God, in his infinite peevishness, created two absolutely opposite sets of sexual expectations.

(a) The female, who can have multiple orgasms in one encounter and be satisfied until next Boxing Day.

(b) The male, who can have one dang orgasm per dang encounter and who won't be satisfied until every day is Boxing Day.

Imagine these thought balloons rising above your standard act of copulation.

Her: He says he's horny, but then he makes me suck him off right through Jeopardy! before he's hard and then he withholds until I'm sore and I've got to make believe I'm Nympho Nanette down here, otherwise he'll pout tonight and won't walk the dog.

Him: Look at her, that's three times she's come already while I'm doing all the work up here and by the time she's through my sensitivity will be past its peak and I'll have an orgasm that's like a moth's death.

It's a wonder that any children at all are born.

(11) When a loving couple does get in sync—as will now and then occur in amateur porn—nothing outside of maybe Chartres Cathedral at dawn is more wholly transcendent: Gender has been overcome and they are one animal complete. Amen.

All right then, let's say Esmerelda and you qualify as one of those transcendent couples. Sex at home is so supercharged that Standard Power and Light had to install an antisurge device. You want recognition for your hard work and maybe some lucre for your filth. What to do? One or more of three things:

(a) Know what you're getting into. An industry insider points out the obvious: "First of all, remember that public tape is public information, and consider that your co-workers, your mother and your neighbors may see you. Be comfortable with that or don't do it."

(b) Get into the swing of things. Amateur porn, as we now know it, was invented about a decade ago. Video cameras became affordable (18 percent of us own one today), and members of the swing set, particularly in San Diego, had begun to make contact with one another through tape. One swinger, Greg Swaim, started duplicating and trading cassettes. On that modest premise he founded Homegrown Video in 1983—the first amateur-porn mail-order house. Now under Tim Lake's management, Homegrown (800-544-8144) will accept any legal sexual material. A'Mature Video (800-397-4780) offers its own compendious swing magazine wherein you can search for your co-star. One better than that is Amateurs in Action by Metro (800-394-7298), which is essentially a swap magazine on tape connected to some sort of voice-mail service. And then there's A&B Video (800-526-8618), whose owner wrote, "Our actors are swingers or couples who range in age from 19 to 72. Our lady in AB #30 is 72 years old and once was Al Capone's favorite stripper, working under the stage name 'the Body.'" Americana like that would go well with your Ethan Allen barstool.

(c) Try the sexual equivalent of a vanity press. According to Homegrown, Esmerelda and you can pull down as much as $20 per minute and not leave your bedroom. Here are some cinematic pointers. Stay natural, don't play to the lens: For us it may be porn, but for you it's love. One stationary vidcam is still acceptable, but competition has, uh, stiffened, so try getting a neighbor to film your wife's Amateur Open in tight focus. Bondage, golden spray and animal participation are un-American or something, but well-lit, well-miked gynecology is patriotic and essential. Most firms pay up front, though some also offer a 15 percent royalty option on gross box office. But cash aside, why are so many otherwise "normal" men and women displaying their intimate software? Zita, age 26, secretary, said in Adam Presents Amateur Porn magazine, "Sex tapes are a place where I'm free to express myself. I like to suck cock, and I enjoy how I look doing it."

Zita has hit on a revealing line of thought. Remember this: Professional porn is made for an audience, amateur porn is made for the performers. "I like to suck cock, and I enjoy how I look doing it." Zita has learned how she can be a voyeur during her own sexual experiences, and that is quite a titillating point of view—as the first madam to install mirrors on her brothel ceiling knew well enough. But a reflection is stuck in present time. Your VCR image, by contrast, can be recollected and reviewed at some later moment of tranquility. (Sex is a confining exercise: In the commonplace missionary position, for example, neither participant sees much beyond face and chest.) Moreover, there is no climax in amateur porn—or, rather, there can be an infinite number of climaxes. Men aren't restricted to one orgasm per act. And women can no longer withhold. Just press rewind and play, rewind and play. For once, at least in a symbolic way, you control both yourself and that other aspect of you, the partner.

The truth inheres: No matter how rich or handsome or libertine we may be, there remains one provocative and atavistic sexual act that no Kama Sutra has ever described. Men and women cannot make love to themselves, and cannot close the circuit on their sexuality. I don't judge whether this is good or bad. Yet, through amateur porn and through the control we have over it, men and women have learned to objectify their own bodies, and this seductive self-exploitation will no doubt continue well into the future. We are, after all, in the virtual reality era. How long before we can computer-generate a female me, a male her—and pursue both through artificial space and the heated psyche. In time some woman-man will sue herself-himself for sexual harassment.