A naked woman is sitting on a bar stool, her legs held open by two real-life customers who casually sip their beers as porn actor James Deen repeatedly slams into her. A couple of men stand next to the action with their iPhones held out at arm's length, but mostly the crowd seems more interested in the glasses of whiskey being passed around than in the moaning girl. They pour the shots down their throats and someone lets a burp rip. 
 
 It's a Tuesday afternoon but the windows of this bar in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood are taped over with black plastic to make it look like nighttime. They're filming a porno inside. 
 
 This is a shoot for one of Kink.com's many BDSM fetish websites, Public Disgrace, in which "women are bound, stripped, and punished in public." There are three porn actors and the rest of the 15 or so people at this tiny watering hole -- all male save for two women -- are fans of the site or just people off the street. My friend who tipped me off about the shoot is one of the latter: He happened to be walking by the bar when he noticed that something was being filmed inside and as a video editor he couldn't resist checking it out. After a quick background check and some paperwork he was instructed: You can touch her, slap her, spit on her and finger fuck her, you just can't have sex with her. He instead opted to talk to the crew about nerdy things like lighting techniques and camera equipment. 
 
 By the time I arrive, there is liquid dripping from the actress's chin, which I assume means that the scene is over. I soon realize that her face isn't glistening from the "money shot" but rather the saliva of all the men at the bar. "She begged each of them to spit on her," my friend explains, his eyes wide. It feels like he's trying to secretly communicate with me through his blinks, Morse code style. The message is a mix of repulsion ("They shocked her with cattle prods," he tells me later) and titillation ("I'd never seen a girl go down on another girl in person"). The scene is building to a climax and a sweaty, red-faced man yells, "Yeah, dig deep!" After some delay, the less experienced performer comes on the actress's face and James, who has been in over 1,000 porn films, immediately follows. This garners praise from an onlooker who shouts: "Nice work!" 
 
 Afterward, James pulls his T-shirt over his head and slides a cigarette into his mouth. This isn't the first time I've watched this man have sex and, if you've recently browsed online porn, chances are you've seen him before too. At 25, after just seven years in the game, he's one of the most visible men in the industry. I think of him as a cold, brutish performer -- but when he hears that I want to interview him, he comes right up with a warm smile on his face and juts out his hand to introduce himself. As I find when we go back to Kink's headquarters to chat, he is thoughtful, self-effacing and polite. After a quick shower, he meets me in a conference room barefoot, wearing plaid pajamas and sipping from a bottle of apple juice. He looks more like a kid ready for a bedtime story than the man I watched hock a loogie on a bound, naked woman an hour ago. I notice that his eyes, which are usually upstaged by his aggressive performances, are such a delicate, piercing blue that it just might excuse his choice of pseudonym. 
 
 While periodically lifting his shirt to show me the fresh bug bite swelling on his chest, we talk about sex as art, Viagra, fake orgasms and why people should never try to have sex like a porn star. 
 
 Can you remember the first porn that you ever saw? 
 
 Well, the first time I actually saw porn it was in a magazine. I was in kindergarten or first grade and I was walking along this horse trail behind my school and it looked like somebody had thrown out a bunch of porn. So there were a couple porn magazines there and I opened one of them up and there was a picture of a dude banging a chick and I went: "This! This! I wanna do this! This is awesome!" 
 
 Really, at that young age you thought, "I want to do this when I grow up? 
 
 Yeah. That's what it was. 
 
 Did you even really know what you were looking at? 
 
 Oh yeah. I knew about sex. 
 
 Well, how do you like it now that you've achieved that childhood dream? 
 
 Love it. Everything about it. 
 
 What is it exactly, though? You just love sex and get to have it all the time? 
 
 I love sex, I get to have sex all the time. Also, I like meeting different people and playing with people's personalities. As lame as it is to say, it's quasi artistic. There is art to what we do, there's a vision, a performance. It's like acting but you get to come. [Laughs] It's very fun playing characters and trying to mesh with people and figure out how you and a stranger can create some sort of intense moment where you're able to express something. I feel like sex is the most real expression. It's self-expression in its truest form. As holier and on-a-pedestal as that sounds, at the end of the day porn is fun because you get to have awesome sex every day with beautiful women and travel around and get paid. 
 
 The idea of seeking connection and self-expression goes against most people's assumptions about why a guy would get into porn. 
 
 Right, and it might be me just trying to justify something that I do. But, yeah, I feel like expressing ourselves sexually is something that is really true and honest. As far as just being able to fuck girls, that never entered my mind as a reason to do porn. 
 
 The guys at the shoot were coming up to you and saying, "Oh man, you have the best job in the world," which is something I'm sure you hear a lot. Is the job really as great as they think? 
 
 Mhmm, yeah, it is. Every now and then I'll work with a girl who is doing this just for the money and doesn't want to kiss, doesn't want to talk, doesn't want to do anything other than get her paycheck. But it's so rare. For the most part, everybody that is in porn now really genuinely wants to do porn. Nowadays, girls will come out of high school and say, "I'm gonna be the next Jenna Jameson! I'm gonna be a sexual creature of desirability for the world and it's gonna be amazing!" I think it's awesome that's happening. It's very rare that I meet girls who are like, "I just need to get drunk. I'm just doing this because I have to." 
 
 You have so many men, and women, making assumptions based on your movies about what normal or hot sex looks like. What does it feel like to be influencing the way that people have sex? 
 
 That's way more responsibility than I want. We do stuff for the camera, we are having sex for the people at home, so not necessarily everything that we do feels good. I once did a magazine interview where they asked me for tips on how to have sex like a porn star and one of my biggest pieces of advice was, don't. The key to sex is that you need to communicate with your partner about what they're into and what they're not into. If you're trying to have sex like a porn star, you're not -- [a guy walks by carrying a giggling, limp girl in a bathrobe up the stairs]. I think somebody made someone come until they couldn't walk. But, yeah, if you're going to try to have sex like a porn star you need to make sure that the person you're having sex with wants to be fucked like a porn star. I really hope I don't have that responsibility of teaching people how to have sex. 
 
 How has the industry changed over the years? 
 
 The industry's changed a lot. It used to be more fun. It's still fun, it's just that right now the economy sucks and, you know, piracy. No one is accustomed to paying for any sort of entertainment anymore. I work for burningangel.com which is run by Joanna Angel, and she says that now you have to work twice as hard for half the amount of money, and I think that's absolutely true. When people are complaining about the old days of porn she's like, "Did you really think that the days of showing up for three hours and making insane amounts of money was gonna last? It's a job." People who worked in porn during the days when it was one big party are always talking about the "good old days." I saw the old days, they were great, but it's still great, you just gotta work a little harder. 
 
 How do you manage to do as many scenes as you do and work for as long as you do? Male performers have to be turned on, there's no faking it, right? 
 
 Not really. But, I mean, girls are pretty amazing. It's very rare where I find a girl where I'm like: You are not attractive. I'm pretty much attracted to something with every single girl. As far as stamina and stuff goes, maybe it's because I'm young. Today I probably only did 30 minutes of actual work, the rest of the time we were setting up, taking breaks. 
 
 How common is it for guys to use Viagra? 
 
 Nowadays it's completely standard for guys to show up with their pills and say "gimme a 30 minute warning for the scene." When I first started, guys were like, "If you can't do it without it, you shouldn't be doing it at all." Me personally, I used Cialis one time because I was doing this scene with a girl and her husband and there was no reason for me to be there. I was like, "She doesn't even know I'm back here!" For me, if the girl's not into it, even in [rough] Kink scenes, that kills it for me. I always make this rape joke where I'm like, "Rape does nothing for me unless you're in on it." We joke around at Kink about how "frape" [fake rape] is awesome, but rape is serious, not cool. 
 
 What I don't like about a lot of the performers who are pharmaceutically assisted is that a lot of the passion is missing. They kind of have sex like robots. Their scenes will be emotionless and I just don't like emotionless sex. 
 
 What do you think of the pay disparity between male and female performers? 
 
 I think I'm overpaid. There are people who buy porn for the guys, they do exist, but the girls get paid what they get paid because at the end of the day most of the audience is buying the movie for the girl. There was talk years ago of starting a union so that guys could get paid as much as the girls and I'm like, dude, if every guy in porn quit tomorrow there would be a whole bunch of new guys lined up out the door with a bottle of Viagra. 
 
 How common do you think it is for women to fake orgasms in scenes? 
 
 I wouldn't say that a lot of girls are faking it. I've definitely had to tell girls, "Hey, I want you to at least pretend to have an orgasm so that the viewer can go, 'Oh well that girl's really enjoying herself and having fun.'" 
 
 What did you think of the frat boy types who showed up to this shoot? 
 
 They were a little drunk. Those guys were like, "You gotta come hang out with us and party with us." I'm sure they think I can pull any girl in the world. Most of the time when girls hear you do porn it's 50-50: Either they want to bang you so they can be like "I banged a porn star" or they wanna not talk to you because they think you're a creep who's just gonna try to fuck them. 
 
 How does what you do for a living impact your personal life? 
 
 I've never really had much of a personal life. I have people in my life that I'm friends with but there's nothing I really like doing so I end up pretty much hanging out at my house and working all day. Before I did porn I was a little gutter punk kid in Pasadena who got drunk in a park with my friends. I'm still friends with those same people. The last time I did something interesting, I hung out with them and we talked in an alley outside of a bar while the world passed by us. 
 
 What about your romantic life? 
 
 Porn hasn't really changed my romantic life. People always ask me if it's hard to have a girlfriend in porn and I always tell them that I don't think it's any harder than in real life. I've dated girls in porn and I've dated girls that aren't in porn. The same complications I had before I was in porn are the same complications I have now that I'm in porn. ||||| Dec 24th, 2009 The Top Five Most Unlikely Crossover Successes Posted by James Brady Ryan 
 
 You know how you have that friend who was always really great at one thing - like, let’s just say painting - and then one day they just decide to do something completely different - like, oh, I don’t know, join the soccer team - and it turns out they’re great at that, too? (Not that I would know anything about that situation, right, STEPHEN MELTZER!?) Well, that’s what these people did - only they’re more famous for it. These are the top five most unlikely crossover successes. 
 
 5. Zooey Deschanel 
 
 
 
 
 
 Okay, I’ll admit it - it’s not that shocking when an actor decides they want to be a musician as well. But considering the actress-to-singer acts Deschanel was following - the mostly bland J.Lo, the horrendous Lindsay Lohan, the dog-howlingly awfulness of Paris Hilton - the mere fact that she didn’t go for generic dance pop was a huge relief. But the fact that her band, She & Him, produced an album that was sweet, well-crafted, and flat-out catchy? Nothing short of a miracle. 
 
 4. Danica McKellar 
 
 It is entirely possible that McKellar became an entire generation’s first crush as Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, which is a fantastic accomplishment on its own. And while she kept acting - with a recurring role on The West Wing among other parts - what she’s really known for now is being a math genius, when most people assume actors can barely do addition and subtraction. She majored in mathematics at UCLA and now writes books that encourage girls to get into math and science. Does all that make her basically perfect? Yes. Yes it does. 
 
 3. Al Franken 
 
 Say it: Senator Al Franken. Again: Senator. Al. Franken. Now stretch it out: Seeeeeeenaaaaatooorrrrrr Aaaalllllllll Frrrrrrrraaaankennnnnnn. God it’s beautiful, isn’t it? No one was exactly surprised when Franken, who was one of the original writers on Saturday Night Live, started to get poltical with his humor. But when he actually ran for a US Senate seat? And won, (sort of) giving the Democrats a super majority? Yeah, that was more surprising. 
 
 2. Tom Ford 
 
 Tom Ford - the man who inspired this list - was well known as the creative director for Gucci (and, also, his provocative print ads, commercials, and Vanity Fair covers). So when he wanted to direct an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s short story A Single Man, people were…perhaps a bit dubious. (It’s all about the taste level, you know.) But the finished product - while it has some issues - has gotten almost uniformly excellent reviews. 
 
 1. Sasha Grey 
 
 Remember before, what I said about people’s expectations for actors’ IQs? Well, it just goes to show you what people normally assume about porn stars when one of them - that would be Grey - gets a slew of praise and an automatic upgrade to “thinking person” the moment they start doing what mainstream actors do. But Grey’s performance in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience proved that this wasn’t a case of dumb luck - she was a force to be reckoned with. ||||| If every era gets the sadist it deserves, it may not be surprising that we have ended up with Christian Grey, the hero of the runaway bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey. He is not twisted or frightening or in possession of a heart of darkness; he was abused as a child, a sadist Oprah could have dreamed up, or as E L James puts it, “Christian Grey has a sad side.” He is also extremely solicitous and apologetic for a sadist, always asking the book’s young heroine, Anastasia Steele, about every minute gradation of her feelings, and bringing her all kinds of creams and lotions to soothe her after spanking her. He is, in other words, the easiest difficult man of all time. 
 
 Ellen von Unwerth / Art + Commerce 
 
 Why does this particular, watered-down, skinny-vanilla-latte version of sadomasochism have such cachet right now? Why have masses of women brought the book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list before it even hit the stores? Most likely it’s the happy convergence of the superficial transgression with comfortable archetypes, the blushing virgin and the whips. To a certain, I guess, rather large, population, it has a semipornographic glamour, a dangerous frisson of boundary crossing, but at the same time is delivering reassuringly safe, old-fashioned romantic roles. Reading Fifty Shades of Grey is no more risqué or rebellious or disturbing than, say, shopping for a pair of black boots or an arty asymmetrical dress at Barneys. 
 
 Katie Roiphe on 'Fifty Shades of Grey' and Feminism. 
 
 As it happens, the prevailing stereotype of the Fifty Shades of Grey reader, distilled in the condescending term “mommy porn,” as an older, suburban, possibly Midwestern woman isn’t entirely accurate: according to the publisher’s data, gleaned from Facebook, Google searches, and fan sites, more than half the women reading the book are in their 20s and 30s, and far more urban and blue state than the rampant caricature of them suggests. 
 
 The current vogue for domination is not confined to surreptitious iPad reading: in Lena Dunham’s acclaimed new series, Girls, about 20-somethings adrift in New York City, a similar desire for sexual submission has already emerged as a theme. The heroine’s pale hipsterish ersatz boyfriend jokes, “You modern career women, I know what you like ...” and his idea, however awkwardly enacted, is that they like to be dominated. He says things like “You should never be anyone’s ... slave, except mine,” and calls down from a window: “If you come up I’m going to tie you up and keep you here for three days. I’m just in that kind of mood.” She comes back from seeing him with bruises and sheepishly tells her gay college boyfriend at a bar, “I am seeing this guy and sometimes I let him hit me on the side of my body.” 
 
 Her close friend and roommate, meanwhile, has a sweet, sensitive, respectful boyfriend in the new mold who asks her what she wants in bed, and she is bored out of her mind and irritated by him; she fantasizes instead about an arrogant artist she meets at the gallery where she works, who tells her that he will scare her in bed. So nice postfeminist boys are not what these ambitious, liberal-arts-educated girls are looking for either: they are also, in their exquisitely ironic, confused way, in the market for a little creative submission. 
 
 Further signals of the current cultural interest in sexual domination include the recent movie A Dangerous Method, which safely embedded spanking in a period piece exploring the history of psychoanalysis. Keira Knightley told interviewers that she was so concerned about the spanking scene during which her character was tied to a bedpost that, in order to get through it, she drank shots of vodka beforehand. 
 
 It is intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming myriad and disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in the workplace, when they make up almost 60 percent of college students, when they are close to surpassing men as breadwinners, with four in 10 working women now outearning their husbands, when the majority of women under 30 are having and supporting children on their own, a moment when—in hard economic terms—women are less dependent or subjugated than before. 
 
 It is probably no coincidence that, as more books like The Richer Sex by Liza Mundy and Hanna Rosin’s forthcoming The End of Men appear, there is a renewed popular interest in the stylized theater of female powerlessness. This is not to mention a spate of articles on choosing not to be married or the steep rise in young women choosing single motherhood. We may then be especially drawn to this particular romanticized, erotically charged, semipornographic idea of female submission at a moment in history when male dominance is shakier than it has ever been. 
 
 In the realm of private fantasy, the allure of sexual submission, even in its extremes, is remarkably widespread. An analysis of 20 studies published in Psychology Today estimates that between 31 percent and 57 percent of women entertain fantasies where they are forced to have sex. “Rape fantasies are a place where politics and Eros meet, uneasily,” says Daniel Bergner, who is working on a book on female desire to be published next year. “It is where what we say and what is stand next to each other, mismatched.” The researchers and psychologists he talked to for his 2009 New York Times article, “What Do Women Want?” often seemed reluctant to use the phrase “rape fantasy,” and in scholarly pieces, the idea makes even the chroniclers of these fantasies extremely nervous and apologetic. Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can’t control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn’t said. One of the researchers he interviewed preferred to call them “fantasies of submission”; another said, “It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought.” 
 
 Courtesy of Everett Collection (left); no credit 
 
 But why, for women especially, would free will be a burden? Why is it appealing to think of what happens in the passive tense? Why is it so interesting to surrender, or to play at surrendering? It may be that power is not always that comfortable, even for those of us who grew up in it; it may be that equality is something we want only sometimes and in some places and in some arenas; it may be that power and all of its imperatives can be boring. 
 
 In Girls, Lena Dunham’s character finds herself for a moment lying on a gynecologist’s table perversely fantasizing about having AIDS because it would free her from ambition, from responsibility, from the daunting need to make something of her life. It’s a great scene, a vivid piece of real-seeming weirdness, which raises the question: is there something exhausting about the relentless responsibility of a contemporary woman’s life, about the pressure of economic participation, about all that strength and independence and desire and going out into the world? It may be that, for some, the more theatrical fantasies of sexual surrender offer a release, a vacation, an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality. 
 
 Which is not to say that baroque stories of sexual submission are new. Sadomasochism is, of course, what someone I know referred to as “a hearty perennial.” It has always existed in secret pockets, and periodically some small glimmer of it breaks into mainstream culture and fascinates us. But the S&M classics of the past make fewer compromises with normal life; they don’t traffic in things as banal or ordinary as love. 
 
 In Story of O, the famous French novel written by Pauline Réage in 1954, the heroine is elaborately trained to be a slave, after being whisked off to a chateau where masked men whip her and abuse her sexually. O’s masochism begins as an intense devotion to her lover but quickly turns into something else: O begins to vacate herself; she loses her personality in the pure discipline of pain. The cool, elegant, brutal novel culminates in a scene where O is wearing an owl mask and is led on a chain naked into a party, where it occurs to none of the guests that she is human. When Susan Sontag wrote about O, she talked about “the voluptuous yearning toward the extinction of one’s consciousness.” Which is of course a far cry from Christian emailing “Laters, baby” to Anastasia. 
 
 Every so often a book comes along that absorbs us and generates discussion about bondage and power, with eroticized scenes of rape or colorful submission: books such as The Ages of Lulu and The Sexual Life of Catherine M. What is interesting is that this material still, in our jaded porn-saturated age, manages to be titillating or controversial or newsworthy. We still seem to want to debate or interrogate or voyeuristically absorb scenes of extreme sexual submission. Even though we are, at this point, familiar with sadomasochism, it still seems to strike the culture as new, as shocking, as overturning certain values, because something in it still feels, to a surprisingly large segment of our tolerant post-sexual-revolution world, wrong or shameful. 
 
 One of the salient facts about Fifty Shades of Grey’s Anastasia Steele is that she is not into sadomasochism, she is just in love with Christian Grey (“Deep down I would just like more, more affection, more playful Christian, more ... love”), so she is willing to give beatings and leather crops the old college try. This is important for a mainstream heroine appealing to mainstream readers: she indulges in the slightly out-there fantasy of whipping and humiliation without actually taking responsibility for any off-kilter desires. She can enjoy his punishments and leather whips and mild humiliations without ever having to say that she sought them out or chose them. It’s not that she wants to be whipped, it’s that she willingly endures it out of love for, and maybe in an effort to save, a handsome man. This little trick of the mind, of course, is one of the central aspects of sexual submission: you can experience it without claiming responsibility, without committing to actually wanting it, which has a natural appeal to both our puritan past and our post-ironic present. 
 
 When Maggie Gyllenhaal appeared in Secretary, a 2002 comic commentary on a boss disciplining his assistant, she was worried about a feminist reaction against the flamboyant depiction of sexual domination. But she said, “I found women, especially of my generation, are moved by it in some way that goes beyond politics.” 
 
 Explaining the endurance of submissive sexual fantasies, the feminist Katha Pollitt says, “Women have more sexual freedom and more power than ever before in our history, but that does not mean they have a lot of either, and it doesn’t mean they don’t have complicated feelings of guilt, shame and unworthiness.” Over the years researchers and psychologists have theorized that women harbor elaborate fantasies about sexual submission because they feel guilty or skittish about claiming responsibility for their own desires: they are more comfortable being wanted than wanting, in other words. But more recent studies show that the women who fantasize about being forced to have sex are actually less prone to guilt than those who don’t. In any event, that theory seems too simple or at least too 19th-century an answer for the modern woman: it is not as much guilt over sex but rather something more basically liberating about being overcome or overpowered. The thrill here is irrational, untouched by who one is in life, immune to the critical or sensible voice, the fine education, or good job. 
 
 Feminists have long been perplexed by our continuing investment in this fantasy, the residual desire to be controlled or dominated in the romantic sphere. They are on the record as appalled at how many strong, successful, independent women are caught up in elaborate fantasies of submission (and realities, of course, but that’s another story). Gloria Steinem writes that these women “have been raised to believe that sex and domination are synonymous,” and we must learn to “finally untangle sex and aggression.” But maybe sex and aggression should not, and probably more to the point, cannot be untangled. 
 
 Recently on talk shows there has been a certain amount of upstanding feminist tsk-tsking about the retrograde soft-core exploitation of women in Fifty Shades of Grey, and there seem to be no shortage of liberal pundits asking, “Is this what they went to the barricades for?” But of course the barricades have always been oddly irrelevant to intimate life. As the brilliant feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir answered when someone asked her if her subjugation to Jean-Paul Sartre in her personal life was at odds with her feminist theories: “Well, I just don’t give a damn ... I’m sorry to disappoint all the feminists, but you can say it’s too bad so many of them live only in theory instead of in real life.” 
 
 In her controversial and revealing meditation on her own obsession with spanking in the New Yorker, Daphne Merkin speculated about the tension between her identity as a “formidable” woman and her yearning for a sexualized childish punishment. She writes, “Equality between men and women, or even the pretext of it, takes a lot of work and may not in any case be the surest route to sexual excitement.” 
 
 It is perhaps inconvenient for feminism that the erotic imagination does not submit to politics, or even changing demographic realities; it doesn’t care about The End of Men or peruse feminist blogs in its spare time; it doesn’t remember the hard work and dedication of the suffragettes and assorted other picket-sign wavers. The incandescent fantasy of being dominated or overcome by a man shows no sign of vanishing with equal pay for equal work, and may in fact gain in intensity and take new, inventive—or in the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, not so inventive—forms.
– PETA loves to get normally-clothed celebrities to strip down for ad campaigns, but with the addition of Sasha Grey to the stable, the animal rights organization “is basically a porn site now,” writes Jen Carlson on Gothamist. Grey is, of course, “the charming young lady you've seen in films such as Fuck Slaves”—ie, an actual porn star. Check out her ad, as well as a few other recent naked ladies courtesy of The Frisky and PopEater, in the gallery.