This is - almost - a story of triumph.

I've always been worried about what I'd do if I actually caught a jerker in the porn section. I mean, of course, while I'm physically in the porn section. Catching someone on the security camera didn't bother me - call the police and collect a bonus for busting a creep. My only concern on that count was who's responsible for cleanup.

But actually catching someone while down there has always been a concern. I'm 5'3" - not a terribly imposing presence. While, as I've said before, most of the people who attempt to masturbate in the store are cowards, there are no guarantees. I've read more than one study that indicates that rapists start off with indecent exposure before graduating to scarier, more violent stuff. It wasn't like it was a constant fear for me, but it certainly popped into the back of my mind more than once.

And it had been in my mind recently because Jonathan caught a jerker a couple of weeks ago. By the way, it turns out the managers are willing to take care of the mopping.

The porn section is not completely isolated from the upstairs counter, but it's a hike. You could get around (or over) the counter and downstairs in a few seconds. The whole section is covered by the cameras, but we usually have the sound off unless we're watching someone in particular. On the other hand, you can hear someone making loudish noises like knocking over shelves in the straight section. Essentially you could get help from upstairs, but not without a few seconds' delay.

OK, so I have thought about it some. But I've honestly never known how I'd react. Scream? Run? Quietly go upstairs and then get help? What?

I found out this weekend. I was bored out of my skull about halfway through my usual nine-hour Saturday Shift of Doom, and I was downstairs putting tags back out. There was only one other person down there - a young guy, not a regular. I'd been keeping one eye on him anyway because he was wearing way more coat than he needed, which is the I'm-gonna-steal-a-box uniform.

We were on opposite sides of the room with our backs to each other. Gradually, I became aware of movement behind me. I turned around. His pants were drooping a few inches below the waistband of his boxers. He had snaked his right arm up underneath his coat and it was moving rhythmically.

For a second, I just stared.

Then, before I knew it, I heard a voice coming out of my mouth. It was a furious principal's voice, a drill seargeant's voice, Sigourney Weaver's voice just as she's about to wax an alien. It came up from the diaphragm, resonating through my chest, deep, powerful and furious.

PUT IT AWAY AND GET OUT!

He dropped the box he'd been holding and whipped around, eyes huge with astonishment.

He had been scratching his stomach.

1. Beth's First Law of Tag Replenishment:
Of any ten tags you need to put away, nine of them will be in front of the big creepy guy who won't move.

Ali's Corollary:
Of these nine, at least five will require you to bend or crouch in such a way that your head is right in front of his groin.

2. Porn Trance
This is the odd, timeless zone that people go into when studying the boxes. Lone porn renters go into it immediately and resent being pulled out. Group renters never intend to go into the Porn Trance. They start out laughing together, pointing at the boxes and reading particularly ludicrous copy out loud. They are far too hip to really be interes... and then they see an orifice that really strikes them and one by one they get sucked in and the porn section is quiet again.

Couples do not go into Porn Trance. There has already been a great deal of negotiating in getting both parties down there together. If either partner gets even a tiny fraction more interested in a porn star body than the other, the delicate balance - and quite possibly the relationship - is destroyed.

We have two rooms of floor-to-ceiling boxes. People in the Porn Trance methodically look at every single one in their section. They don't realize they've just rented new releases because they didn't realize they'd moved around the entire circumference of the room. They don't hear announcements over the Voice of God mike until you get drastic. ("YOU! In the red jacket! With the baseball cap! YOU! We're closing! BRING UP YOUR MOVIES RIGHT NOW OR YOU DON'T GET TO RENT ANYTHING AT ALL!") People literally spend hours in the Porn Trance. I see people look at box after box for two hours at a stretch all the time, and three hours is not uncommon. These are the same people that tell you they're in a hurry when they hit the register.

I think finding the right video is such a primal, visceral thing that people really can't think about time or comprehend verbal announcements the first time around. They've gone back down to the reptilian brain and it takes a few seconds for those higher lobes to kick back in. Or maybe, since to choose the right tape they have to sort of mentally masturbate to it, they have also mentally locked themselves in the bathroom and all other stimulus is just so much faint knocking. I don't know. I haven't asked.

Porn Drift
People who have been in the straight section for a while will, more often than you think, get progressively more adventurous. Suddenly videos featuring pre-op transsexuals (sensitively called "She-Males") start showing up. Sometimes that's all there is, but not necessarily. We do feature bisexual videos (and by that, of course, we mean bisexual men - bi-girl action is pretty much a given in the straight section) and every now and then someone you didn't expect will dip his first toe into the gay end of the pool.

There are way more bisexuals in the world than you think. I know there are way more than you think, because there are way more than I thought, and I'm bisexual. People who've finally gotten rid of all their inhibitions in that regard rent all over the Kinsey scale - there are a few 50/50 renters, but more people just seem to throw in what suits them. It still freaks out many of my fellow clerks when people do that. "Weird. That guy rented three gay videos and two straight," comes up a lot. I usually gently mention that there are more than two options in the world, but they tend to just give me blank looks. Oh, well - most of them are still in college. They'll learn.

I tend to notice bisexuals a lot because it's fascinating to me that there are so many more than I ever knew, but also because I really don't want them to be creeps. Some of our coolest customers rent bi, but then some of the biggest freakos do too. I'm keeping an informal mental tally and frankly it doesn't look good. I'm hoping some nice bis will step up to the plate.

But I digress. We actually hardly ever turn people gay or even bi. The clerks at our all-porn branch have noticed a fairly strict progression, because their porn is broken up by far more than gay and straight. According to them, the most likely Porn Drift path for a straight male goes from all lesbian to straight sex (some guys are so freaked out about seeing another guy's penis that straight sex videos are called "gay male" in some circles) to she-male. We keep the she-male stuff in the straight section - straight guys don't want to go to the gay section for their chicks with dicks videos, and for the most part gay men don't rent them.

(I have been given two interesting explanations as to why straight guys like women with penises. The first is that men don't believe that women like or want sex as much as they do. A chick with a penis, then, is a woman who has a full, hearty, male sex drive and must want sex as much as he does. The second one is almost touching to me: Vaginas are mysterious, and penises are by comparison fairly straightforward and easy to satisfy. A guy knows what to do with a penis, so if a woman has one he can be sure he knows how to satisfy her.)

I am actually sort of heartened by Porn Drift. I like seeing concrete evidence that sexuality is a more fluid thing than people like to admit, and I like seeing people stop worrying about what they're supposed to be turned on by and just go with what they like. I feel like the more people stop trying to fit themselves into rigid little boxes, the more they'll be able to cut people slack when they fit into a different box, or don't fit into a box at all.

So depending on your point of view, we're either helping people to open up to a new understanding of themselves and others, or we're helping to turn previously normal people into depraved freakos.

What else is new?

Last edited by Ali Davis on 05-07-2002 at 02:36 PM

I never thought I would be the sort of person who would mentally categorize people as "dirtbags," but I am and I do. In a way, it’s part of my job. Dirtbags rip up boxes, tamper with tapes, and try to steal the DVDs. They try to peel off pricing stickers and put them on movies that aren’t for sale. They claim damages on tapes that are fine, they try to scam us with the punch cards, they keep movies for weeks on end and try to weasel out of the late fees. They try to masturbate.

Sometimes I don’t know what they’re doing – I just know they’re dirtbags and need to be watched. It bothers me that I can spot them when they hit the door. I don’t like the fact that I’m categorizing people, but then I hate getting scammed or taken more. It makes me angry, it makes me tired. So I keep an eye out for dirtbags.

There is, as you might expect, a healthy intersection between dirtbags and heavy porn renters. I think it’s partly due to the expense involved in a porn addiction – scamming is a way to cut corners – and partly that anyone renting six hardcore videos every single day of his life has already at least to an extent said his goodbyes to the laws of society. But you’d be surprised: not all porn addicts are dirtbags and not all dirtbags rent porn, though they do seem to have a common fondness for backyard wrestling videos and the Faces of Death series.

I couldn’t tell you what makes a dirtbag. It’s like obscenity: you know it when you see it. If I had to put it into a word, I’d go with "shiftiness". Dirtbags are trying to do something wrong and deep down in their dried-up little dirtbag souls they know it and somehow their mental can-I-get-away-with-this? calculations show. One guy actually has shifty eyes. I couldn’t believe it – I’d always thought that that was one of those Victorian techniques for recognizing the Criminal Type, but damned if it isn’t true. I was stunned when Mr. Creepy came up to the counter, claiming that an entire stack of porn he’d rented should be free because somehow the clerk had given him six wrong tapes, and there were his eyes, shifting shifting shifting around like beady, guilty little gnats, looking at anything in the room but me or the incriminating videos.

Mr. Creepy is the one that makes me meditate on the nature of dirtbagness the most. He is always, always, always scamming. Bogus damage reports, punch card scams, claiming he got the wrong videos, and of course moving pricing stickers around. The first three bother me the most because they take advantage of our good nature. I hate it when people chip away at our likelihood to cut a good person a break. Especially when they’re just trying to save up for the next entry in the Stop! My Ass is on Fire! series.

The thing is, Mr. Creepy always thinks that we’re the ones trying to scam him. He sometimes will pre-pay for a movie. The flag that shows a credit to someone’s account is a smallish one, and the clerk won’t always see it unless the customer points it out. This is especially true in Mr. Creepy’s case, since there are so many notes on his account that it lights up like a Christmas tree. In the process of making sure he didn’t tamper with the tapes he’s turning in and making sure he acknowledges that the one’s he’s checking out are correct and he isn’t stealing anything and he isn’t trying to get his card double-punched and wondering why this fucker still has an account with us at all, it’s easy to miss the credit. And he flips out. He thinks we’re trying to cheat him, even if the clerk who did the prepayment gave him a receipt, even if we apologize.

I wonder how many times you have to get cheated or scammed or worked over by life to turn into Mr. Creepy. Did his parents teach him that or was it one event or was it a long, slow process? How do you decide that it’s OK to be a dirtbag, and at what point is it OK for me to write him off as one? Yes, I know – ideally, never. I sometimes wonder what it would take to turn him around, although I am honest enough with myself to admit that I wouldn’t want to be the one to do it. Could he be turned around at this point? Or will he just spend his life committing petty scams and getting creepier? As a good liberal and a caring person who recognizes that life is a web of interconnecting influences, I feel sad for Mr. Creepy. As a clerk, I want him to get the fuck out of my life and never come back.

As I said, I am conflicted about my growing instinct for spotting dirtbags. I think I’m an equal-opportunity spotter. I’m pretty sure that I base it on shiftiness rather than any other factors, but I worry. My friend Eric, a six-foot-something black man, was once telling me about his frequent trips to Canada. His favorite thing about Canada, he said, is that white women who see him coming down the street don’t clutch their purses like they do here. Gah. Spotting dirtbags always brings up the worry that I have prejudices that I don’t know about. We did used to have a clerk that, some of us noticed, only kept an eye on our black customers. An old manager had a problem with people who didn’t speak English like a native. One of our local policemen once warned me that I need to be especially careful of my register when "fags" are in the store. Me, I used to feel happy for elderly gay men who rent porn because they finally have an outlet after all these years, but completely creeped out by elderly straight men. Now that I’ve been at the store for awhile, I’ve progressed. I’m creeped out by both.

I like to think of us a very diversity-friendly store. While many of our titles are certainly indelicate because of porn's cut-to-the-chase nature, we do feature porn starring as many different ethnicities in as many different combinations as we can find. I didn't think of this as a public service until one of our customers brought it up. He had come to our neighborhood from way, way downtown, which a lot of people do. People sometimes come in from a state away, especially gay porn renters, so crossing town didn't seem that odd to me until he commented on it: "You know how hard it is to find porn on DVD with people who look like me in it?"

So I at least had an odd pride about us providing equal access to porn... until the guy in the wheelchair came in. Our store is deliberately designed to make the porn section hard to get to. We want people to have to pass the register so the clerk can see them and we make them snake through the shelves a bit so it's hard for kids to get down there. Turns out it was a nearly impossible gauntlet for a wheelchair.

The guy was surprisingly nice about it. He'd already had a shitter of an evening. All he wanted was to rent some videos, which many of our customers do on autopilot. He had to wait more than an hour for a cab to pick him up - he was on some kind of subsidy for taxi transportation, but that meant he had to wait for a specific company to bother to send a driver around. Then he had to get over our doorstep, which is wheelchair accessible in a theoretical sense at best, and weave his way through too-tight aisles only to hit a freaking staircase.

Luckily he could walk a bit. He took the railing with one hand and my arm in the other and we went down, then I went back and brought the chair down for him. With the taxi, getting him in the door, and getting him downstairs, I was now the third person who he'd had to ask for help just to rent some frigging porn. I was torn between sticking around to help - from the chair he could only reach about three shelves - and giving the poor guy some privacy. I went with moderate privacy, leaving him alone and checking out the security camera every now and then until it looked like he was done, then going down to help him back up.

...And then he had to wait over an hour yet again for another taxi, which never showed. We finally hailed him one, and a friend of mine who happened to be passing helped me help him into the not-at-all wheelchair modified cab, bringing the total number of people who'd helpfully intruded on his porn rental to about 7. I think the whole trip took about 4 hours. Except to return the videos, he hasn't been back and I can't blame him. A year ago, I didn't think of porn as a basic human right, but now I sort of do.

Several of our regular porn renters are mildly retarded, which brings up another prejudice I didn't know I had until I started clerking. It's amazing how little our society recognizes that the mentally challenged have adult sexual impulses, but they sure enough do.

We thought Mr. Stiff was just a pain in the ass at first. He always needs to restate everything: how many days he gets to keep his movies, what each will cost individually, what the total will be, what specials he's eligible for, and that, yes, he will in fact get them. After a few visits, I realized that he's just covering his retardation really well. He wants to make sure he understands everything, and I think he does it in the angry, pain-in-the-ass tone of voice because it's better than being vulnerable. I think in a way he's coming from the same point of view as Mr. Creepy - he's so used to not understanding things or the rules apparently changing on him that he feels like people are trying to cheat him all the time. Mr. Creepy uses that as an excuse to scam us, Mr. Stiff just tries to make sure everything is clear.

I think he's stiff and stilted partially because he's working so hard and partly because he's nervous; he never knows when the situation is going to fall apart and turn humiliating.

I feel bad for Mr. Stiff because at some point someone apparently told him that either porn or sex itself is dirty and bad. Every now and then he'll get mad at himself, come in, cancel his account and announce that he's never coming back. He cancelled and re-opened his account so many times at one of our other branches that they told him he couldn't re-open his account any more. Now he comes to us, but he still hates that he does it.

The Symbiots used to freak us out pretty badly. It was a retarded gentleman and his nephew - or, as we feared, his "nephew". They did have IDs with the same last name, but it was a pretty common one and we were worried we had some kind of chickenhawk situation on our hands and didn't know what to do about it. The nephew was too young to go downstairs (it wasn't ridiculously creepy - he was maybe 18 or 19) but was caught down there with the uncle and rousted several times.

The problem with rousting the nephew was that the uncle couldn't pick out porn by himself. Every time they came he went though the entire gay porn section one box at a time. He couldn't remember what he'd seen before. He couldn't remember that you bring up the tags and not the boxes. He couldn't spot the difference between the for sale stuff and the rentals. He couldn't remember that you only get to check out six movies at a time. He only wanted the cheaper old releases, but couldn't distinguish the old and new release sections. It would take him hours and hours, and he usually got something wrong and had to go back down. We actually debated saying screw it and letting the nephew, who was of normal intelligence, go downstairs to expedite things, but our manager nixed it.

Finally he'd get back upstairs. The nephew would help the checkout go smoothly; his job was to make the world easier for the two to negotiate. Then we got to the uncle's half of the relationship: he had the money. He had all the money, and what's more he knew it was the source of his power and kept a pretty tight reign on it. Occasionally the nephew would pick out a video from upstairs, but his uncle had the account, so he had to check it with him first.

The whole thing freaked all of us at the store out very, very badly.

There were a lot of clerkly notes on the file. We didn't know what was going on, just that it was creeping our shit. Were we supposed to do something? There was an ongoing debate as to who was taking advantage of whom.

I served the Symbiots several times and, though nobody at the store agrees with me, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't a sexual relationship. I'm even pretty sure that they really were uncle and nephew. I think they had somehow discovered that they were both gay and formed an interesting team - separately, they couldn't get porn, but together they were unstoppable.

Unfortunately, sometimes our mentally challenged customers cover so well that at first glance they come off as dirtbags. It's hard, in a quick transaction, to tell the difference between someone who is genuinely confused about the rules and someone who's trying to get around them. I usually slip a note on the file suggesting that the customer in question may need some extra assistance, but there's only so much that can do.

It can get frustrating, and I worry that I'm not doing enough. That's why I try to do my best: at least that way whatever else happens, at the end of the day I can rest secure in the knowledge that I have done all I can to make sure that every adult has an equal shot at renting Fuck Pigs 5.

Last edited by Ali Davis on 05-16-2002 at 09:56 PM

You may be wondering how to scandalize a bunch of jaded porn clerks. I'll give you a hint: it's not with porn.

S. was a weird clerk to work with. For one thing, he was really into 80's hair bands. Also Nickelback, which only really became difficult after, say, the third consecutive round on the CD player. I didn't really mind that so much, though, because not only did S.'s presence drop me down to the rank of second oldest clerk at my store, it also meant that I was only the second least funky. Our store is sort of aggressively funky, but I still felt better being knocked out of the top slot.

But that wasn't the really weird thing. We all have our musical quirks, and tolerate each other's pretty well. What was weird was S.'s Superclerk persona. Like the rest of us, he wasn't at the video store bucking for a management position. He was a computer programmer, having recently graduated from DeVry ("Oh," said my mother, "Then he's really just *sort of* a programmer.") and was looking for a job. The store was pretty cool about keeping him working five shifts a week with the understanding that he'd pretty much drop the job with very little notice once one of his interviews paid off.

So he made no secret of being on his way out, but insisted on playing Superclerk. Actually, he was really more HallMonitorclerk. He'd automatically check the clock to see if other people were on time for their shifts - and in fact he'd even comment on it if I were only on time instead of a few minutes early. Every time I relieved him he'd gleefully show me how many sales he'd made, even though we're not on commission or anything. We don't even really sell people movies except in the sense that we accept money for their purchases.

He'd always bitch when his shift was slow, saying he'd rather keep busy, and took careful notice of who was not as particular as he was with their cleaning assignments. He'd complain when he found little doodles on Post-it notes around the counter - how could the night shift do these damned things when nearly every morning he came in to find the vacuuming below par? He'd get jazzed up about staff meetings for weeks ahead of time.

In short, S. was a nice guy, but an incredible pain in the ass.

A week ago Friday, I got a call at home from Matt, the guy who does all the scheduling. Would I be able to take an extra shift or two?

S. had been arrested.

In the seven months S. had been working at the video store, he had embezzled nearly six thousand dollars. And that's what they can prove - my manager thinks it may have been more like ten thousand.

The managers were all furious - they felt they had basically treated S. like part of the family and he had betrayed their trust. The reaction of the clerks was less visceral, but the same across the board: Wait a minute - if he was already stealing from the store, why did he have to be such a self-righteous prick about the cleaning assignments? It still doesn't make sense.

The bizarre thing is I don't think it was a cover. I'm pretty sure that in his own mind, S. was far and away the best clerk at the store. I don't even think he thought of what he was doing as stealing, and certainly not as grand theft. He was, after all, doing his thieving three bucks at a time.

It wasn't even a programming trick (thus adding credence to my mother's assessment of DeVry...). We're pretty sure he was just telling the customer the prices for their returns (which wouldn't be hard - the same combinations come up a lot) and then zeroing out the numbers in the computer as though they had free rental cards. Then he just pocketed the overage at the end of his shift. It wouldn't be hard, and actually the anal-retentive way the store handbook suggests counting out our drawers facilitates it.

On the other hand, it was really really stupid. It's not like we don't have accountants. It didn't take all that long to notice that S.'s drops averaged anywhere from $50-$100 less than any other clerk working the same shift, or that he gave out way, way more free rentals than anybody else.

I can't believe they waited as long as they did to nail him.

But nail him they did. They had him arrested and cuffed right off the register in the middle of his shift. Pretty hardcore. Apparently his parents are paying back the money he stole (he's in his thirties...) so he'll have a misdemeanor instead of a felony on his record. It's tough to think of many things I'd want to do less than explain to my parents that I'd been arrested for seven months of petty theft.

So S. goes free and the store gets its money back. It's the remaining clerks, of course, who will end up taking the brunt of the fallout. The upstairs security cameras, once aimed so that we had a good view of the hands and faces of people browsing the for-sale movies have been re-aimed. Now they give a good view of the hands of the clerks. I was so insulted by this that I considered walking right off the floor. It's ridiculous. You can see our hands, yes, but it's not like you can tell if someone is zeroing out the prices on the computer screen. The thief-magnet sale racks are now only vaguely visible in the background. Incredible.

We also got a letter in our paychecks from Bob, the owner. It describes the arrest in lascivious detail, then has a message for the rest of us about how he's sure we're all great people with big plans for the future, but he will not hesitate to bust our asses if it turns out we're not.

So there's a bit of a clampdown. Everyone's afraid to give a good customer a break on, say, accidentally bringing up the wrong tag and getting the wrong movie because we know our free rentals are being gone through with a fine-toothed comb. The cameras are always pointed at us and the general managers call about fifteen times a day to make sure everything's OK.

On Tuesday Bob stopped by at 7am - NOT to check up on me, mind you, just because he was in the neighborhood, But while he was there, how was everything going?

S. is truly amazing. He managed to be a pain in the ass one last time.

Last edited by Ali Davis on 05-28-2002 at 03:29 AM

I caught another jerker in the porn section today. It's amazing - I'm already jaded about it. Part of it was that I just caught him on the security camera, so I had that distance, and he was really more of a stroker than a jerker. I don't think he had come in intending to masturbate - I think he just got aroused by some of the boxes. He had one hand in his sweatpants and was just sort of giving himself the occasional stroke or two as he went along.

Still, discretion doesn't make it OK to whack off in my store. I popped him up for a close-up on the monitor and, yup, that's what he was doing.

I thought about calling the police, then figured screw it. I got on the Voice of God mike and said "Sir, you need to keep both hands where I can see them."

He looked up at the camera, pulled his hand out of his pants, and continued the rest of his porn box perusal whack-free.

As he was leaving the store, I went up to him and said "Next time you don't get a warning - I'm just calling the police." he looked at me and nodded OK. There wasn't any guilt, but there was no defiance either - he'd tried it, I'd caught him fair and square, and we both knew I'd been way nicer about it than I had to be.

To be honest, it made me feel sort of bad-ass to be so calmly and firmly in control of the store. Once I thought about it, I realized that I felt like a jolly, middle-aged madam - ready to take care of my customers' needs in a friendly and straightforward manner, but with a strict policy against taking any guff. Shoot - they're just men. I can handle those whippersnappers.

The store is definitely changing me. I can't tell if that's a good thing or not.

This is the letter we got after S.'s arrest. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

I quote here, of course, for review purposes only.

"To the staff of [My Video Store]

For purposes of clarity, and knowing how stories can change and have a life of their own as they go from person to person, I want everyone to be aware of the basic events that occurred last Friday, May 17th, and company policy pertaining to the issue.

We had reasons to believe there were theft problems at [My Branch]. After careful investigation we had evidence to prove our charges. At about 1:00 p.m., I had an employee arrested and taken to jail for theft at [My Video Store Again]. He was handcuffed, searched, and removed from the [My Branch] store by two officers of the Chicago Police Dept. in the presence of myself, [My Manager], [The Assistant Manager], [A Clerk Who I Wish To God Had Been Me] and an interested customer. Later that evening, after being fingerprinted, photographed, and while still handcuffed, he was presented with the evidence against him. He acknowledged to me, in the presence of a detective, that he was guilty of the charges against him. Rather than risk spending a night at Cook County jail, he contacted his girlfriend and his parents to assist in his release. He was released late that night. Currently there are theft charges pending against him and a court date set for June.

I know, and respect the fact, that we have one of the most well educated and intelligent staffs in the industry. The vast majority of you are idealists full of integrity and cool plans for the future. I will never forget that fact and am sincerely impressed with it.

But for those few less than mediocre souls who are lacking integrity and were mistakenly hired and stay there, the remainder of this letter is strictly for you. Beware, this company policy is rigid:

If anytheft is uncovered it will be documented, and I will contact the appropriate authorities and have the guilty party arrested and taken to the police station for processing. Felony or misdemeanors will be handled with the same degree of attention, potentially resulting in a permanent criminal record.

I will never feel guilty about sending a "wake-up" call in the form of the police, theft should result in arrest. Your choice.

Bob [Last Name]

Several of our straight porn boxes have a cheerful little blue circle on the front. It's designed to look like a sticker and it says "Gaping Asshole Inside!" in the same sort of cheerful font one might use for "Now with more fiber!" or "New fresh scent!"

It is clearly meant to be a feature, a sort of guarantee of quality: whatever else may or may not happen in this film, you are guaranteed at least one gaping asshole. Frequently there is also a gaping asshole holding the box, but that issue is not addressed.

It baffles me.

I understand, on an intellectual level, why porn is so focused on anal sex. It's taboo and a large segment of the female population will have no truck with it. Of course that's what guys, or at least a lot of them, fantasize about. But why even the biggest butt freak in the world would want to hunker down and take a look inside is beyond me.

But porn, or at least the porn we're carrying, is very big on taking cameras up and in and through anywhere they can go.

Part of it is a general gross-out, can-you-top-this thing that seems to be part and parcel of the adult industry - world's biggest cocks, the century's most extreme penetrations. I think part of it is that porn, which doesn't have much in the way of scripting or acting chops to move it along, has to rely on other ways to convey intensity: bigger, harder, faster, freakier. There is a new title in the straight section: V8. The caption says "Four in the ass and four in the pussy!" It was the first box that has given me pause in a while. "Sweet Jesus," I thought, "Where would everyone stand?" Calmer reflection and the laws of physics have convinced me that they can't possibly mean penises, or at least not all at once, but I'm afraid to turn the box over and find out for sure.

I think heavy porn renters must get jaded to watching plain old sex - how could they not? - and that's what leads to the bizarre for its own sake: obesity porn, little person porn, old person porn, bondage porn, foot porn. Double penetration. Cartoonishly huge sex toys. Sticking a camera up someone's urethra. Can it possibly be sexy?

It's easy to dismiss "gaping asshole inside" as just another instance of breaking a woman down into her component parts instead of dealing with the whole being, and I almost did. I mean, ew.

But a part of me thinks it isn't just objectification. I wonder, sometimes, if the appeal of "gaping asshole inside" is one, oddly, of intimacy. Maybe deep in his creepy little social leper soul, what the guy who picks up these boxes really craves is a woman who is so close to him that she will completely open herself to his view, someone who knows and loves him well enough to let him see absolutely everything about her. Maybe these men are looking for an act of trust as much as an act of sex.

On the other hand, maybe they're just dirtbags.

Last edited by Ali Davis on 06-08-2002 at 03:37 AM

I reached an interesting new level with one of my regulars this week. He's one of my early morning guys. My favorite, in fact.

On weekdays the store opens at 7am, and I've been doing that a lot lately. Mr. Gentle comes in early - not with the first rush that comes when I open the door, but before the on-the-way-to-my-9-to-5 guys. He's quiet. He always comes in not-quite-awake with his coffee and gives me a little wave before he goes downstairs.

He doesn't fuck with the boxes, he doesn't drool over the new releases, he doesn't move the tags around. He just chooses a movie or two and comes back up.

Then he turns in his old tapes (rewound, on time, and clean) and says "How are you?" And means it. He listens when I say "OK," is sensitve to the variation in my tone of voice when I say it on different days, and gives me a genuine answer when I ask him how he is back. He's quite literally softspoken, in deference to the earliness of the hour, I think, and he always says a few kind words about how godawful early I must have had to get up to be there. I like him.

It's sort of soothing to have him come by in the mornings. At least one other clerk has noticed that too - there's a note on his file that says "I wish I could option him to come in instead of some of my other customers."

Mr. Gentle is an academic of some sort. A fair chunk, if not all, of his frequent renting is due to his working on a project about representations of gender in film. It didn't occur to me until I started writing this to wonder if that's true or not, but I think it is. He's clearly both very smart and very well educated, and one day he rather fervently mentioned looking forward to the day he could stop renting all that porn. There was a note of desperation in his voice that I've only heard before from my fellow clerks.

I've asked Mr. Gentle about his project a couple of times, while we're, say, easing into the day by waiting for our ancient Etruscan credit card machine to crank up, but he's pretty vague about it. He's always said something along the lines of "You wouldn't be interested," in a friendly way. He could really mean "you wouldn't be interested" or he could mean "you wouldn't understand". I'm not sure. He's never been condescending about it in any way - as I said, he's always been friendly - but there is as a rule a tacit assumption among most customers that their video clerk has perhaps not been keeping up her subscription to the New England Journal of Medicine. (In all fairness, I haven't.)

Wednesday Mr. Gentle was in and in a fairly bad mood. Not snippy, of course, but definitely unhappy and sort of exhausted. He said he'd just been discussing his paper with someone and was upset because he thought he might have to switch the focus. He couldn't decide whether or not to risk his academic credibility a bit and write for a more popular audience.

"Worked out pretty well for Margaret Mead," I said, and looked up in time to see his head snap up and three thoughts go through his face all at once. The first was the realization that writing for a popular audience had, in fact, brought worldwide fame and respect to Margaret Mead for a solid 50 years. Hmm. Thoughts two and three were, in rapid succession, the realizations that his video clerk had not only just referenced Magaret Mead but seemed to have at least a basic handle on her career.

And suddenly we were friendlier. As I said, he's always been great, so the change was a tiny one. Now we're friendly-friendly instead of transaction-friendly.

He's always been very aware that there was a worthwhile human being behind the counter, it's just that now he's had a hint that there's a brain in the worthwhile human being behind the counter. We chatted more. I recommended an article in Salon, which he wrote down eagerly, then he went away.

Today when he came in instead of hello and isn't it early we talked about the FBI scandal and what we thought the fallout would be.

I was very happy at the new nuance in our customer-clerk relationship. My intellectual vanity is, I think, the personality flaw that I've done the most work on and made the least progress with. I like him. I want him to know I'm smart and trust me to understand what his paper is about, and I like getting to talk to him a little longer in the quiet of the morning.

The downside is that now I seem to make Mr. Gentle a little sad. He seems to be fairly sensitive to nuance himself, and now I think he knows how much I don't want to be there. I want to tell him that it's OK, that things are looking up and even when they're not I'm using it all for writing fodder. But I can't tell him that because, in another nuance, while we are friendlier, we are not friends.

I'm looking forward to the day I can resign now more than ever, and in a new way. There will be a quiet pleasure in telling Mr. Gentle, when he asks, that today I am not just OK.

Last edited by Ali Davis on 06-08-2002 at 03:54 AM

First off, two updates:

1. I am pained to admit that my informal bisexual tally is not going well. The ratio is something like one incredibly cool person to every 200 complete freakballs. I am beginning to understand the origin of the unpleasant stereotyping; I'd be wary of dating me too.

2. I am deeply relieved to report that V8refers to fingers. How sad that I've reached a point in my life that the fact that a woman is only having four fingers jammed up her anus while another four are jammed up her vagina is a relief.

…Which brings me to M. I never actually met M. She was a new clerk we hired who quit after one day. She left a note on the manager's desk saying that she couldn't stay because the job was too degrading to women.

When I told the story to my friend Jenny, she said "Good for her!" I was taken aback for a moment, because my reaction had been "What a wuss!" Most of the women at the store had said some variation on "What a wuss!" I had told the story to Jenny in anticipation of her saying "What a wuss!"

I think the right response is somewhere in between. Some porn is degrading. Hell, a lot of it is degrading very much on purpose. It's hard to look at the box for Young, Dumb and Full of Cum and think they had anything else in mind.

(On a side note, I hate it when people use the spelling "cum". I HATE IT. What, it's supposed to be dirtier that way? Just because it's supposed to be all raw and sexy doesn't mean you have to be an idiot about it. Jesus.)

But the more I've worked at the video store, the less I'm convinced that porn is inherently degrading, and the line between degrading and not gets blurrier.

For example, the [My Store] chain, (and by "chain," I mean four stores, three of which actually deal in porn) does not carry pregnancy porn. My internal reaction to that is "Good," but I couldn't tell you why. I know that pregnant women have sex. I know that some pregnant women have been frustrated by their partners' reluctance to have sex or queasiness over seeing them as sexual beings.

For that matter, it's arguably a good way for a resourceful mom to start off Junior's college fund. But we don't carry it because The Powers That Be find it inherently degrading and it's never been a point I've cared to argue. If I look at it dispassionately, though, I don't think it is. Or at least it's dependent on what the pregnant woman in question is beng asked to do.

We recently stopped carrying bukkake, also because it's degrading. When I first started working at the store, that one seemed like an easy call for me. Bukakke involves a circle of men with a woman in the center. The men jerk off, covering the woman in semen. It's hard to think of a way that that wouldn't be degrading. It certainly was hard for me. Until, of course, I saw the box for Gay Bukkake. Yup. Same deal, only it's a man in the center. I realized that I found straight bukkake degrading, but gay bukkake merely incredibly disgusting. Did that make me a sexist, or was I penalizing straight men for being straight? So except for the disgusting part, I had to pencil in a new opinion.

Occasionally I get caught up in the principle of a thing, and when my manager mentioned the no-more-bukkake decision I actually started to argue with her. It took me a couple of minutes to ratchet my brain down from the logistics of it and remember that I loathe having to look at the bukkake boxes and having them out of the store would suit me fine.

So I backed out of an ethical debate and went against my newfound principles for my own comfort.

What a wuss.

Last edited by Ali Davis on 06-15-2002 at 01:34 AM