I’ve watched porn professionally since 2008, which means pornography occupies an enormous amount of my working life. And when the workday is over, I still watch porn.
That probably tells you the most important thing about me as a critic: I genuinely adore pornography.
Porn isn’t a guilty pleasure, a novelty, or simply the subject of my profession. It is my favorite art form by a considerable margin. I love porn as performance, photography, filmmaking, fantasy, cultural artifact, and an endlessly evolving record of how we imagine sex.
Nearly twenty years of professional viewing hasn’t diminished that enthusiasm. If anything, experience has given me more things to appreciate.
Porn has always had artists with unmistakable identities. Suze Randall brought the eye of an erotic photographer to the medium after working for publications including Playboy, Hustler and Penthouse. Andrew Blake went even further into visual fantasy, creating the lush, high-fashion aesthetic of films like Night Trips, a movie influential enough to earn recognition outside the adult industry. Michael Ninn developed another instantly recognizable style through films including Sex, Latex and Shock, with Shock becoming a major awards success in the 1990s.
What fascinates me is that this process never stopped.
When Greg Lansky launched Blacked, Tushy and Vixen beginning in 2014, he helped establish another visual era: pristine photography, luxurious locations and an almost obsessive attention to production value, built for a web-first porn industry rather than the DVD market that preceded it. You could look at a Lansky production and immediately know somebody had made deliberate choices about how this sex should look.
Then you can watch creative careers evolve within that newer landscape.
Jacky St. James entered the industry as a writer before moving into directing, developing a reputation around character, relationships, and narrative-driven pornography. Her first screenplay, Dear Abby, won an AVN screenplay award, while her directorial debut Torn quickly brought further recognition.
Kayden Kross offers another fascinating progression: performer, writer, producer and eventually filmmaker with a remarkably distinct aesthetic of her own. Her work ultimately developed into Deeper, where she writes, produces, and directs the studio’s films.
That growth is one of the things I love most about watching porn over long stretches of time.
The same is true of performers. You can discover someone early in their career, recognize the charisma or sexual presence immediately, and then watch them learn how to use the camera, develop technique, find the right partners, and gradually become something much more complete. There is a special satisfaction in realizing that someone you first noticed years ago has developed into a genuinely remarkable sexual artist.
And porn itself keeps growing alongside them. Styles disappear and return. Glamour influences gonzo and then gonzo gives way to highly polished digital filmmaking. Cinematic storytelling returns in new forms. Each porn-lovin’ generation borrows something sleazy from what came before while finding a visual and sexual language of its own.
Sometimes, of course, none of that history matters in the moment. The chemistry is simply extraordinary. A blowjob is spectacular. The fucking is especially passionate. A performer finds some expression or rhythm that transforms good sex into great pornography.
But experience gives those moments context.
I don’t love porn despite having seen so much of it. In many ways, I love it more because I have. I get to watch artists develop, aesthetics change, careers unfold, and an entire medium continually reinvent itself.
After nearly twenty years, I still want to see what happens next.
