Pandemic Porn

In March of 2020 at the height of the Coronavirus Pandemic, the world had become a different place. 6 continents had just shut down. I like millions of others around the world was burning money with little savings and was trying to think of some way, any way to keep the lights on and some food in the fridge.

Now I had been training at Social distancing for quite some time. I'm quite certain that were it an Olympic event, I could take at least silver were it held in summer.  I've been more or less living like Howard Hughes without the jars of urine (or money) since 2011. 

One afternoon I was catching up with adult film star Ivy Wolfe, Ivy and I met through mutual friend Sam Phillips a veteran radio personality and now, an executive at Penthouse Magazine. Coincidentally a few months after we met, I was booked by Penthouse to shoot her cover & Pet story. 

I did it under a pseudonym, because I was worried about my advertising and fine art career, but have decided fuck it. I've never had any secrets anyone could blackmail me for. Why start now? My superpower is not giving a fuck what anyone thinks anymore. I've been watching porn since I was 10 years old and stole my dad's Beta tapes of "Deep Throat" and "Behind the Green Door". This generation similarly learned about sex from PornHub. Fortunately all millenials and Gen-Zers have been programmed to believe anal is 2nd base. This is perhaps their most redeeming feature.

We're all dead soon anyway and that's the truth. 

Ivy and I were talking about how we were dealing with the pandemic. And how neither of us could work. 

I had just done my first video conference meetin and asked... 

ME: What if we could create a series and new genre of porn centered around social distancing. 

IVY: What would that look like?

ME: I'm not sure. You're an A lister. What if we wrangled a few more superstars, invited them to a video conference and you all had virtual sex? We'll then all sell it on pay per view. . 

IVY: Sounds fun. If you organize and cast it, I'll be there.  

Our first episode was a 4 girl lesbian orgy. Each one of them at home with their ring lights and webcams. It got press around the world in dozens of outlets around the world reaching 10's of millions of pepole. The press was no accident. I learned how to be my own publicist through a woman I briefly dated who worked at The White House under Obama.  She imparted some simple principles. 

1. Journalists are inherently lazy people. Write the story WITH the headline AS the press release.  

2. Never make it about your product. If you do, no one will help. Create a tailor made story that gets easily approved by their editor and gets them paid. The pitch to the Wall Street Journal is different than the same pitch to Esquire. The headline at very least. is. 

3. Look up journalists that have written about anything in your space before, then find them, stalk them, pitch them. 

4. Subtly tailor each pitch to the particular writer or media outlet.  

Headlines varied from writer to writer, but the gist was "How the Adult Film Industry not only surviving thriving during Quarantine". The pitch was interesting, clickable and not too dirty. It opened us to many media outlets. I pitched a dozen writers. Got 4 stories that got picked up around the world by news aggregators around the world and reached more than 100 million readers, then it 

We're now on episode 7. The first one did well. All the performers were bored and basically did us a favor but all made thousands of dollars off of it for 40 minutes work.  

It remains to be seen if it will make the pain go away, but for the moment, it's slowing the bleeding.