My Favourite Porn
Yes, this is an essay about my favourite porn video and website.
Hello readers! As always…you can READ this piece or LISTEN. It is 5300 words or a 30 minute listen. So it’s a long one. I hope you make it to the end it is kind of the point of the entire piece (the last 5 minutes of audio and the last 3 paragraphs). I wrote 90 percent of this 6 weeks ago and it didn't feel complete. Then I wrote the end last week and it’s very personal but honest and I felt like it was the reason I felt compelled to write about this in the first place. I hope you get something out of this and if you do please feel free to comment or send me an email. Thank you for reading.
My Favourite Porn by Kevin James Doyle
I got into a debate with a friend about my favorite Coen Brothers film. They were our favorite directors and we loved every film they have made. I have seen everyone repeatedly. I think their best film by a long shot is No Country for Old Men and that is my favorite. If you have seen it, you will know, it can be a tough watch, scary, violent, and meditative. They also made The Big Lebowski and that is one of the funniest films of all time. We both had seen The Big Lebowski more than any of their films.He says that means it’s the favorite. He claims your favorite film has no bearing on quality, it is the film that you always go back to, it never changes, it always brings you the same feeling of joy and comfort with every single viewing. So according to him, whether I like it or not, statistically, The Big Lebowski is my favorite Coen Brothers film.
1998
I remember the amount of work I had to go to to see boobs back in the day. In 7th grade I was on the bus and my neighbor Terry brought a floppy disk onto the bus and gave it to me. I went home and put it into my Hewlett Packard while my parents were away and printed out 6 pictures of grade A, top of the line breasts. Well, they weren’t breasts, they were more in the genre of tits. The girl had extra large breast implants and was pouting her lips and squinting her eyes to make a very porny face. I printed them out, they were wallet sized, there was so much printer ink the pictures were wet and had to dry off. The files were 10 kilobytes and if the pictures had been bigger than wallet sized they would’ve been so pixelated it would’ve diminished the quality of the product. The next morning on the bus I passed Terry his floppy disk back and thanked him. I kept those pictures under my bed for whenever I needed them. These were my first naked pictures, a lot of older men talk about coming across their dad’s playboys. My dad never had playboys so I had to rely on my friends like Terry.
I have told many of these stories on stage in my stand up act. Every male comedian has about 12 minutes of material about their penis and it’s always hack and it’s never that original but I will tell you this, it always works on stage, at least for the male half of the audience. I have a story about when my Dad sat me down to talk to me about sex and masturbation. My dad knew it was about that time to have ‘the talk’ with me because my mom went to apply some of her $50 Mary Kay moisturizer and it was completely empty, it was time for an intervention. He came into my room and asked if I could chat for a minute. I knew the second I saw his face what was about to happen I ran to my bed and put my face in the pillow and told him to leave. He didn’t leave, he sat next to me patiently, occasionally laughing and gave me a chance to ask him all the questions I might have about those things. Sex, masturbation, girls, no shame, no embarrassment, just a chance to speak about what felt, at the time, unspeakable. He gave me a chance to understand what was happening in my mind and my body without making me feel dirty. He told me about when he first happened upon a Playboy and also that he never had a talk with his Dad at a young age when he had many questions. And let me know that Mom’s lotion was very expensive and it would bankrupt them if I continued using this luxury product at this pace.
My Dad has never been one to ogle at women or comment on their appearance. He’s not the type of guy who likes to gather groups of guys around to tell dirty jokes or nudge you as a sexy girl walks past. The dirtiest thing I’ve ever heard him say is whenever Scarlet Johansson shows up on screen he says ‘Now she is CUTE,’ and the first time didn’t feel dirty but he’s said it 5 times now and never remembers he said it. After Match Point, after Marriage Story, after Jojo Rabbit. No amount of murder, divorce or Nazi’s can get in the way of my Dad’s feelings for Scarlet, she is CUTE. But in that first conversation as a young hormone fueled boy until now, it’s always been clear through my dad’s words and actions, that it’s important for a man to view women as a three dimensional person who is more than just their body parts. There was not much that had changed since the Playboys of the 1960’s he happened upon and the floppy disc that Terry had passed me on the bus. The format had changed a little but not so much,13 year old boys were navigating the same visuals they had since the advent of photography. But the next revolution was just a few years away.
2006
The biggest porn streaming sites still in use today were all invented in 2006 and 2007. This was all part of the same revolution that has changed all forms of media. Netflix a place to watch endless films, YouTube to watch endless videos and YouPorn a place to watch endless pornography. Each site accessible via the same browser on my computer. You could have a tab open of a Bob Dylan concert from 1967 on Youtube, Fargo on Netflix and whatever shit you are into on Youporn. This revolution took all media: film, tv, news, porn and flattened them all onto the same screen.
Youporn was invented when I was in college. A time when most red blooded American males like myself are, scientifically speaking, horny as hell and finally free from parental supervision. It was a miracle. YouTube + Porn = an end to viruses on your computer, the 12 pervy pop ups that would jump out with each click. It was a one stop shop for your fantasies and desires and a chance to endlessly explore the human body and its every crevice. And of course, rankings and lists, just like on Netflix and Youtube, you can find out about what everyone else was watching. The most watched channel on YouPorn was Backroom Casting Couch. The premise of this channel was simple. It would feature new girls who had never done porn before and tape a casting video for the casting director, Rick and he would send it out to porn producers and then they would start getting jobs. He would always say his famous tagline.
‘Well, you would be making anywhere from $1000 to $5000 dollars a day? How does that sound?’
Of course the girls would say it sounds good. It sounds good to me too, I think most human beings like the idea of making $5000 dollars a day. But of course this is not the job, this is the audition video in order to GET the job. I haven’t told you the twist though, it was in the intro to the video. Before anyone, the girls or Rick, even shows up on camera there would be a title card that would say:
‘These are real GIRLS trying to get cast in REAL jobs. Except…There is no job’
So, we the viewer, were already set up to know the irony of it all, Rick, the casting director, would fuck all these girls on camera. Finish. Then have his casting video. But that was the end. There were no jobs. This was all just for us, the viewer.
This of course was fictional, the women were in fact paid for this casting. It was all in good fun, it was just a modern twist on a porn premise. No different than a working class plumber coming to fix a pretty married ladies sink but instead it was an older casting director introducing new talent to the porn world with a little twist.
The premise was fictional but the girls were real and they were always brand new. You could tell. That is what was amazing, not the pixelated double D tits and porn faced girls from the floppy disk. Real girls with cute smiles, when they would take their clothes off they weren’t wearing lingerie, they had on normal underwear, a normal person would wear. And when they took their bras off they would smirk with embarrassment just like anyone who had never undressed in front of a camera would do. This is what separated Backroom Casting Couch from the rest of the 1000’s of channels on YouPorn. This was the magic touch that it had that made it the number one porn channel in the world for a decade.
Once I had watched every single Coen Brothers film I remember googling ‘directors like the Coen Brothers’. Thinking there would be a bunch of other directors just like them. I found other great directors but nothing like their unique cinematic world. Thankfully, Backroom Casting Couch created a perfect format but it could be copied easily and be improved upon. I found two more that were gaining even more popularity than BCC on the newer and better optimized site PornHub, there was a better algorithm and it just was a more seamless site. They recommended Exploited College Girls and GirlsDoPorn. These featured hotter girls and they got rid of the couch opting instead for a bed for the girls lounge on, maybe this an aesthetic choice but I think it was more logistical, they were using hotel rooms rather than an office with an address. Why wait for the girls to come to your casting office when you can meet them in a neutral place without a brick and mortar address. After all, all you need is a 4K DSLR camera and 2 panels of LED lights and you have a professional quality porn film. You can work remotely like any other industry and a hotel is the perfect co-working space.
Backroom Casting Couch was created in 2007 it was the first casting site and it paved the way but its imitators surpassed them, in reality, quality and output. By 2009 my favorites were
1.Girls Do Porn
2.Exploited College Girls
3. Backroom Casting Couch
This was all at the very beginning of the media culture we are now used to. Content, Content, Content. What better business model than a low overhead and a naturally replenishing supply of 18-22 year old girls. Magazines, floppy disks, HBO late night, DVD’s, porn shops didn’t stand a chance.
2022
A few months ago I was hanging out with my friend Cory and he mentioned his girlfriend Callie, I quickly interrupted him.
‘You mean Callie Calypso?’ I said jokingly.
‘No, my girlfriend Callie? Who is Callie Calypso?’ he asked unaware of the joke I just made.
‘It’s this girl from porn. Nevermind, dumb joke.’ I said.
Later, I looked up Callie Calypso on Twitter, not to look at her porn but to see if like every politician and musician and corporation, if the girl from my favorite porn video had social media. Turns out she did. I looked through Callie’s twitter feed.
She was never featured on any of my previously mentioned websites, she was on a channel called Private Casting. Their output was less consistent and the guy behind the camera's voice was occasionally a little too creepy and had a tone of lasciviousness that took me out of the mood at times. But Callie’s video was my favorite by far, favorite of all time. I have gone back to it many times. My least favorite part is when she is naked, although that part is great. My favorite part of the video, the part that excited me the most, is when she has just taken her shirt and pants off and she is in her underwear and the man behind the camera tells her how sexy she is. She smirks and is clearly flattered and she blushes a little. It’s the sexiest thing I have seen in porn, perfectly authentic. Then the video continues through all the traditional porn bases. But that smirk. That was my favorite.
Callie filmed that video over a decade ago. The day I looked up Callie on Twitter was August 7th 2022. Her bio read:
‘Retired xxx Performer/trafficking survivor/recovered addict. Finding freedom from trauma & oppression thru music.
And on 1/26/22 she tweeted ‘Back in the day…during scenes I would close my eyes, not in ecstasy or carnal pleasure, but so that I could dissociate and pretend that I was somewhere else. Heartbreak emoji’
Her pinned tweet: Ppl knew me in porn when I was a scared & addicted trafficking victim. I didn’t understand the nature of the crimes I was enduring nor what rights/recourse I may have had. Allow me to reintroduce myself: I am a survivor. 5 years free of drugs & NOT afraid of ANYBODY in that biz.
Seeing Callie’s twitter certainly put a damper on my enjoyment of my favorite porn video. I decided not to watch it ever again. It did peak my interest to look into my other favorite sites.
In 2019 the creators of Girls Do Porn named Michael James Pratt, Matthew Wolf and Andre Garcia were all charged with sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. Pratt was also charged with producing child pornography of a 16 year old girl and sex trafficking of a minor. Wolf and Garcia were arrested and charged. Pratt fled the country and was put on the FBI’s Most Wanted List
A lawsuit was filed in 2016 by 4 women who shot videos for Girls Do Porn against the creators of this channel, Pratt, Wolfe and Garcia. Half a year later after it was filed 10 more women joined the lawsuit, one year later, 22 women. Every plaintiff was between the ages of 17 and 22. Half of the women reported asking to leave midway through the shooting and were forced or coerced to finish the video. The 3 men accused of "intentional misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, unlawful and fraudulent business practices, and the intentional infliction of emotional distress"
After both the civil suit and the criminal charges the videos were still available on PornHub.
The women were connected with the creators of Girls Do Porn through Craigslist. They would respond to a posting about a fake modeling job and they were put into contact with another woman who had good experiences filming with this particular company, but the woman they were put in contact with was not real. The women were offered between $2000 and $6000 to be filmed having sex for 30 minutes. They were promised that the videos would not be released on the internet in the United States. These videos were for DVD’s and private collections only in Australia, New Zealand and South America. The contracts they signed never mentioned Girls Do Porn the website. Some of the woman reported that filming lasted up to 7 hours and multiple woman say they were sexually assaulted and raped.
A judge finally gave all the 402 women featured on GirlsDoPorn ownership rights to the videos they were featured in and all the videos and images were removed from all websites.
Pratt fled the United States and has been on the run since 2019. Since then he has been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Interpol issued a 'Red Notice’ which is a ‘request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and arrest a person pending extradition.’ Just a few months ago on December 21st, 2022 Pratt was found hiding in a hotel room in Madrid, Spain. Garcia and Wolfe were both sentenced to 20 years in prison. Pratt was extradited to the United States and is now awaiting trial.
As I said, my favorite filmmakers are the Coen Brothers. I have seen all their films multiple times. The Coen Brothers have put out 18 movies at an average of 2 hours a film, that is about 36 hours and with rewatches I would say I have seen 70 hours of Coen Brothers work. And I have probably seen exponentially more hours of Casting Couch porn than Coen Brothers films. Let’s say that each video is about 15 minutes and let's say that the three sites I cited in this article each put out about 250 videos. That would be 11,250 minutes of casting porn. Divided by 60 minutes. 187.5 hours. That is without rewatching anything and I assure you I rewatched many of those videos. I have watched 3 times as much Casting Porn than I have watched the work of Joel and Ethan Coen. I have told many people about my love for the Coen Brothers. I see their films the first day they come out, I read essays about their films, I am still trying to figure out what they mean by the ending of A Serious Man, I am still enraptured by the Anton Chigurh Coin Flip Scene in No Country, The Hudsucker Proxy makes me laugh as much as any film ever made. I guess Coen’s make the ‘best’ films. But when I look at the numbers they are not my ‘favorite’. When I am looking for that same familiar feeling of comfort, I pop on Girls Do Porn. It’s a documentary of a man who posts modeling ads craigslist, lies to young woman and films himself and his friends fucking them for hours and posts it on PornHub. My favorite filmmaker Michael James Pratt: Rapist, a human trafficker, pornographer.
No one goes around talking very specifically about what they watch, that is weird and I get it porn is a private thing. Maybe a comedian from the stage will ask the audience what kind of porn they are into and someone might say something like MILF’s or Threesomes or a famous site like Brazzers or performer like Riley Reid. Despite being one of the top watched channels in history I have never heard anyone acknowledge they watched Girls Do Porn. The only acknowledgment of casting porn in general is a meme posted to Reddit that went viral a few years ago with just a picture of the couch from Backroom Casting Couch that said ‘Statistically: 80% of males will recognize this place.’ I think the lack of acknowledgement of Girls Do Porn and the genre in general is that we all knew what was going on. Sure, when a guy has his dick in his hand he probably wasn’t thinking ‘I bet some of these girls are being trafficked!’ but it was clear from the style of the production to the premise to the attitudes of the performers that this was a different type of pornography.
There was a SubReddit that featured the instagrams of the women who were on Girls Do Porn. A group of GDP viewers would find their personal accounts and post screenshots from them and then the men would discuss how hot it was to see real girls. These internet sleuths would find out where they went to school, where they worked, where they lived. These were not just Real Girls like on Girls Gone Wild VHS. These were Real girls, with real social media accounts, that featured pictures of their real parents, studying for real majors at real universities and this all added to the realness of the videos. It was fan produced behind the scenes content. I looked at the SubReddit once and from then on I knew what the site was. Maybe not to the extent that was eventually revealed but I knew what it was. Anyone who knew of that Reddit, knew long before before the lawsuits, before the criminal charges that this was fucked up. The veil of the Backroom Casting Couch ‘premise’ of ‘there is no job’ was torn away. These girls were clearly lied to and manipulated and anyone that watched those videos knew that. I never looked at the reddit again but I kept watching the videos as they were released.
I noticed there started to be occasional comments from viewers that called out the male performers for being too rough with the girls, it was turning them off. If you know anything about porn you know how the videos end. A cum shot. A sex act that wasn’t popular until the 1970’s when people started consuming hardcore porn on video. The girls of Girls Do Porn would get on their knees, the actor would ejaculate onto their faces and in many of the videos the girls would immediately get up and run to the bathroom that was found in the hotel room they were filming in. The camera man would quickly follow them into the bathroom and film them as they washed the man’s semen off of their face. The girls would chuckle awkwardly, they would make small comments that clearly telegraphed they wanted to be alone, now that the sex was done they were finally looking for a moment of privacy and many of the women were holding back tears, well the sex might have been done but the video wasn’t. Those moments weren’t edited from the final videos, they were features of what Girls Do Porn was known for, real girls and real moments. There started to be time stamped comments showing when a girl was uncomfortable asking other viewers if this was too much because the girl really did look uncomfortable. I continued watching this porn even after this. I preferred the beginning, when the girl was sitting on the bed talking, when started taking her clothes off, before the choking started, before the bathroom chase, before the risk of seeing the sad reality break through on her face even for a moment.
I finally quit a few years ago when I came across a Times article about the charges against the creators of Girls Do Porn. When I read the article I felt like a uniquely dirty disgusting pervert, then I remembered the view counts on these videos and remembered there was nothing unique about me, there are millions of us all around the world, watching this disgusting, perverted porn, we just kept it to ourselves. For a time this was among the most viewed porn on the entire internet. Girls Do Porn videos have all been taken down but Backroom Casting Couch is still number 1 on YouPorn right now (Although Rick’s main talent scout was just convicted of producing child pornography). Exploited College Girls now goes by ExCoGi, yeah, changing the title will make the viewers much more comfortable trying to get off without having to think about the word Exploited.
When I think about that change, that moment when YouPorn came out, when I was in college, I wasn’t aware of what I happened upon. Imagine being in high school and happening upon a beer, that is what playboy was. Now imagine you are in high school and happen upon some bottles of oxycontin and heroin. That is Porn Hub. It's a drug more powerful than anything my dad ever could have dreamed up when he was a kid or when he was giving me the sex talk. And there are growing effects of all of this on the next generation. There is a new phenomenon where guys can't ejaculate because of death grip, which is years of holding their dick too tight when they are jerking off. There are girls in high school telling guidance counselors their boyfriends want to do anal at age 15. Or asking on internet forums ‘I don’t really want to do a cumshot, it’s kind of gross but my boyfriend really wants to, is that normal?’ Well, it wasn’t invented until the 1970’s but yep it’s totally normal now. I don’t have any prescription to any of this, for society or for individuals. I can only speak from my experience that I consumed what was put in front of me, without knowing its power and its impact and it affected my life for the worse. Not much different from the stories I have heard from smokers, alcoholics or opioid addicts.
What stood out to me when I first came across Callie’s twitter account is how much deeper my connection to this particular type of porn was. The familiarity and comfort this particular genre brought me, for whatever reason. The main reason I came to a breaking point with porn (besides the small fact that a majority of the porn I watched was revealed to be the vilest form of exploitation) was boredom. Realizing I had spent 16 years taking in dopamine rushes off the same shitty drug. It led me to think about what I was first looking for when I first got on YouPorn, I was looking for real girls and they were provided by the hundreds in 2 dimensions until it was finally revealed how real they actually were. Going forward I would like to see women in all three dimensions and I don’t see porn being a part of that.
People are obsessed with debates, of setting up the 2 opposite competing sides of an issue and squaring off. I want to make clear that I am not on any side of the issue of the morality of porn or the ethics of it. I am not a newly converted anti porn crusader ready to debate the pro porn lobby. And I didn’t spend hours and days on end looking at porn. I bet if there was a study I consumed about the average amount of porn. I am sharing this because I think my habits and desires are probably the same habits and desires of the average guy and that there are many guys who are in the same position as me. I am not an advocate for anything, I am only sharing my experience. Part of that experience recently has been the acknowledgment to myself, for the first time, that the thing I was seeking with porn was a cure for loneliness and I began to finally come to terms with the fact that it was not giving me what it used to give me, a temporary respite from it. Instead, it started to exacerbate the loneliness. The beginning of this change was the shame I felt when I saw Callie Calypso’s twitter, then embarrassment and disgust I felt as I read all about the Girls Do Porn saga as it unfolded and then I arrived with the fact that I was faced with only me, myself and my future. Do I want to spend the rest of my life watching the same things, getting the same outcome or was there more to see, more to experience and maybe an actual cure to that loneliness that I felt. A loneliness that comes to every person in this life. People with friends, people that are going on tons of dates and even happily married people. A friend told me that when he stopped drinking he had to look at what he was trying to get out of that drink and then he would close his eyes, he allowed himself to feel that deprivation, not having the comfort the drink brought, not having that temporary cure for anxiety or stress. He allowed himself to feel all the feelings he was feeling as clearly and intensely as possible. Then he opened his eyes and decided for that day and only that day he would choose not to drink and search for a deeper cure for his anxiety and stress and deeper comfort than that drink could provide. A cure that could only be found within himself.
The first day I decided to quit looking at porn I decided to quit using shame and embarrassment as a tactic to avoid it. It wasn’t so hard actually, I decided to stop and a few weeks went by because I was busy and I was working on some fun projects and meeting some cool new people. Then one day, out of nowhere, I had the intense desire to go look at the screen of my computer and go to a website that would show a video of a girl on a casting couch who had never filmed a porn video before, I don’t know why I had that urge that is what I wanted to watch because it was just what was put in front of me for years and became a familiar thing to watch when I felt lonely. Instead, I got up and I made a cup of tea and then I sat on my couch with my eyes closed and though I felt embarrassed to myself at the time, I decided to talk out loud. I said…
‘I feel lonely right now. I miss my friends. I miss my family. And I miss that one girl I was dating last year. And I feel very very lonely’
And then I sat there for about 15 minutes with my eyes closed. My tea was in my hand getting colder by the minute. I was breathing heavily at times and I began to cry just a little bit. Not a sob, just a few tears. And I think for the first time I actually allowed myself to feel actual loneliness fully without my usual cure. When I opened my eyes, I set my tea down without taking a sip. I didn’t have the desire to look at porn after that. I was tempted to watch a movie, read the news, scroll my phone, chat on the phone with my dad or text with a friend. I didn’t want to look at porn but I was still feeling lonely. I went to the bathroom and I washed my face. I put my shoes on, grabbed my jacket and a scarf and I went outside. I got a coffee, I put my phone on ‘do not disturb’ and went on a 3 mile walk and tried to keep my eyes as open as they have ever been, trying to take in all the details big and small of each shop I walked past, of each bridge I walked over, of the sky and the clouds and on the face of each man or woman I walked by and I began to see life in all three dimensions.
This was great, Kevin! Insightful, honest, emotional, and humorous in just the right places. Just subscribed. BTW, Alex Dobrenko sent me here.
Kevin, I love you more than ever. DAD