Via bookforum, Alison Lee in This Magazine:
After moving to Toronto in 2005 I'd been out of work for almost five months when I found an intriguing help-wanted ad on Craigslist. The company was looking for writers to review adult websites. With a deep breath and undying love of ridiculous situations, I sent my resumŽ. The company owner explained the site's concept to me a few days later. My job was to give positive reviews of websites to direct online traffic to such enticing sites as “Black Dicks, White Chicks” and “Big Tits, Round Asses.”
As someone who strongly identified as a feminist, I knew taking this job did not reflect my politics. I still felt the sharp division between “good” porn and “bad” porn, and this was definitely bad porn. I had no idea what to expect. The offices were nice, and the project was backed by a semi-retired millionaire who fed his love of toned Latino men by starting several small-time softcore gay websites. I expected that the job would be strange, and an experience unlike anything I'd ever done before, and it was. But I wasn't prepared for the overwhelming boredom that awaited me.
A year and a half into the gig, I was closing in on my 1000th review; it was becoming difficult to differentiate between websites. The names were nearly indistinguishable, the performers generally looked the same, and the content was often not just similar, but exactly the same, just sold under a different title in order to grab customers with an appetite for whatever niche the sites were selling. The work at this point was automatic. I could do it in my sleep: count the videos and photo sets, document the frequency of updates, and offer some kind of snappy line that made yet another mundane site sound sexily appealing.
Generally I didn't feel sorry for the women in these pictures, but to tell the truth I didn't really think of them all that much — the naked bodies blurred together. But then I came across photos of a woman I knew. Her face and naked body brought me back to reality: We'd had drinks together, talked feminist politics. I was shocked by the reminder that these were all real people with jobs that put them in the strangely public/private realm of porn. Viewing this content day in and day out, my desire to learn about porn as a cultural force and to think about it critically had been overrun by my blasŽ attitude.