“People call me a Renaissance woman, but I prefer ‘jack of all trades’,” Stoya, the writer, activist, and pornographer tells me over Skype near the end of our conversation. In my imagination, the term ‘Renaissance woman’ implies a sort of passivity that brings to mind a well-to-do woman in sumptuous gowns who has an interest in a lot of different subjects, and whose money and influence have perhaps allowed her to infiltrate mostly-male environments. Conversely, a jack of all trades knows their way around a variety of subjects, themes and situations. They not only have knowledge, but know-how. In case of an emergency, you want a jack of all trades to be with you. In case of an emergency, you’d definitely want Stoya to be with you.
It’s no surprise then that over the last two decades, Stoya has emerged as a sort of icon for a particular generation of women who grew up listening to Madonna telling them to express themselves, and who now loudly proclaim that “sex with me so amazing” when singing along to Rihanna. Pornography made over the last 30 years, largely by white heterosexual men (and usually for men), has promoted a ridiculous and often laughable beauty standard for women, leaving lots of people unsatisfied. Stoya, with her dissenting, not overly performative pornography, styled by herself for herself, hit a note with both women and men. But no, her looks alone are obviously not the reason for her success. On the contrary, Stoya’s platform has grown because she has never been afraid to speak up about real, fanfare-free sexual desire while pursuing her many different interests. These range from acting (this year she starred in the independent sci-fi movie Ederlezi Rising by Serbian director Lazar Bodroza), writing (her book Philosophy, Pussycats, and Porn, also published this year, features essays, blog posts and autobiographical stories), as well as directing and podcasting, among other things. You know, jack of all trades stuff.
Throughout her career, the 32 year old has always prioritised herself and her desires. Now, after years of performing while advocating for sex worker rights and trying to improve the porn industry — both for its employees and the people that enjoy it — this May she launched ZeroSpaces alongside comedian Mitcz Marzoni. This new website-cum-online magazine perfectly encapsulates her modern approach to sex work. Yes, there are erotic photosets and videos to get you off, but even those go beyond the usual wank stuff. Her recent video, entitled Around the World in 80 Ways, for instance, is available in both a traditional edit and an uncut version. More unexpectedly, the platform’s first online issue also features a sweet little homage to industry icon Annie Sprinkle by writer and illustrator Tanya Lam, a profile of trans and sex worker rights activist Ceyenne Doroshow by writer and comedian Luna Malbroux, and a piece of erotic fiction by author Chelsea G. Summers.
The thing about Stoya is that she’s really fucking smart. And just as other artists change and show a different side of themselves, she’s also looking to alter the way we approach and interact with our sexualities. We all have sex, and a lot of us watch porn. But despite the increasing demand for pornography, the rights of sex workers are constantly being attacked by regional governments across the US, where Stoya largely works. In Stoya’s view, the more we talk about these issues, the more we see those who engage in sex work as just regular people with a very specific job, and the more we can all free ourselves from the pervasive critical notions about pornography.
Laia Garcia: Tell me how you first came up with the idea for your new website ZeroSpaces. It really feels like a magazine to me.
Stoya: In 2009, the big porn studio that I was under contract with [the LA platform Digital Playground] wanted me to have a website. I was like, okay, I see your point about [having] video porno, but what about photo sex? Like, real photo sex and also words? For a website that’s a solo website, it made sense to me to show more than just that one hardcore fucking on video slice of me. They did not get it. I was a total brat about it, so we ended up with no website. In the beginning of 2017, when Mitcz and I started working on Zero Spaces, it was also just like something was in the air. I was seeing – and I’m still seeing – so many sex workers get bylines in legitimate publications. But – and I know this from my own experience – you have to fight the editor and you have to fight the editor in chief. Like, it’s like,“Hey, sex worker. Oh, your style guidelines say [you have to use]prostitute.’” Well, guess what? That’s not the reality. One of the things I’ve learned is the best way to introduce a new idea is to just do it yourself and be successful at it.
LG: Absolutely.
S: So we called it ZeroSpaces because there were zero spaces to have a lot of good reporting about sexuality and sex work.
LG: So how did the first issue change in the process of you actually putting it together?
S: It changes all the time, and that’s the beautiful thing about it being online. We put the first issue up, and we attracted the interest of a woman named Morrigan Eris, who’s a legal Nevada brothel worker. I was like, hey actually, that’s an angle on FOSTA [the ‘Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act’, a United States Senate and House bill which, combined with SESTA, the ‘Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act’, have made it illegal in the US to assist, facilitate, or support sex knowingly trafficking, and broadened the scope of the Communications Decency Act, making it easier for authorities to target online classifieds]. It became a law in April of this year [and] I haven’t seen [it] covered. What’s FOSTA doing to legal, direct providers? This needs a bigger platform. Let me see what I can do. Not that ZeroSpaces is that big yet. Yet.
LG: There have been a few different eras in which porn actors have been part of the mainstream, like in the Seventies and the Nineties. I feel like with social media especially, we are in a time where people are talking a lot more about sex workers’ rights.
S: Coming from the porn side of things, social media allowed us to take control of our own careers and our own narrative. Mean- while, the direct providers [of sex work] were able to use the Internet to organise really well. Now, because of FOSTA, a lot of our organising spaces have been stamped out. It is [also] much harder to be heard. [Internet] algorithms bury posts that look like advertising because they want you to pay for advertising, but people like me aren’t really able to pay for advertising. So it’s much more of an uphill battle. I’m literally on my phone, like, “Oh, you think I’m retired? No, go to ZeroSpaces.”
LG: Going back to ZeroSpaces. What is the makeup of your members? Is it mostly women or non-cis people? Mostly white males?
S: I’m just going to dive into it. One, [there’s the] GDPR [the ‘General Data Protection Regulation’ is an EU law on data protection and privacy passed in May this year], we’re on the internet, which means we’re global. [Because of] the very real risk of data being hacked, we retain as little information on our customers as possible. And two, binary gender leads to stupid thinking. “So we have this many percent women and this many percent men, so we should cater to those women, so now we’re making porn for women,”
is offensive.
LG: Why is porn for women always so weird?
S: They want to give us a cookie and paint us pink and throw a bunch of sparkles on us and keep us in a corner.
LG: But I didn’t ask this question thinking specifically of gender as binary…
S: The ways to track that kind of data are binary. Google can’t tell me what percent [of our visitors] are gender fluid, what percent is asexual or on the asexuality spectrum. It’s not that deep yet, so the data isn’t really all that good.
"Sex is messy. Sex is complicated. Sex is really hard to categorize neatly in specific words because we don’t have such a great language for talking about it yet".
LG: Okay, I understand that. I was thinking of how weird it is to go on a regular porn site, where sometimes you see things that feel like they are made with a sort of a not-progressive point of view, and you maybe have to compartmentalise those feelings and opinions while you watch something. Whereas when you go to ZeroSpaces, you can drop your guard, in that sense, because it feels safer. But I guess what I’m figuring out now is that it’s not actually ‘porn for X’ or ‘porn for Y’ as opposed to ‘porn for the person that is making it’.
S: Yes. I’m making the stuff that I want to make, and I’m bringing in the creators that I find interesting. And of course, that will change once we have a solid consumer base with repeat customers who keep coming back because they expect a certain something. Then we will start developing style guidelines and editorial guidelines, I’m sure. But for now, I’m really enjoying being like, “I want to make a porno about why Budapest has so much porno made in it. Go.” Who’s going to watch it? I don’t care. We’ll find out.
LG: In this first issue, there’s a movie called “Around the World in 80 Ways” starring you and Erik Everhard that’s available in both edited and unedited versions. Where did that idea come from?
S: Erik and I have very good chemistry. Halfway through the uncut one, I’m like, “Hey, I have enough footage so if you want to like, cum, you totally can.” And he was like, “I’m not done fucking.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool.” [So] the second half of the scene is just the two of us wrapped up in each other and I thought that was really beautiful, and that’s the kind of thing where it isn’t really live, but it’s the closest thing that you’re going to get to watching me shoot a porn scene live. And I also really liked making points about editing. Editing in pornography, but also editing in writing; self-editing the way that editing and headlines can be used to completely change a story. That’s the thing that I think is important for people to understand in today’s culture.
LG: Yeah, I mean it really opens your view of what porn is, which I think is really cool.
S: The thing that’s interesting to me is far more people like the uncut edition.
LG: You’ve been working in the porn industry since 2007, and I’ve read that performers usually have very short careers. Do you think you’ve enjoyed such a relatively long career because you didn’t take the usual route?
S: Yeah. Being a contract performer for the first few years was very helpful. Although, I wouldn’t recommend a contract at the beginning of someone’s career anymore. But having that protection and that guidance [was good] because at the time [on] the Digital Playground roster, all the women were so different and we knew we were team. And I would suspect that another part of my longevity is [because] I take a lot of breaks. When I was unhappy with Digital Playground, I stopped performing. I had to go wait tables at a Chinese restaurant for a year. They couldn’t believe it. Like, first they didn’t believe that I was leaving, and then they didn’t believe that I was waiting tables, and then they didn’t believe that I would choose to wait tables rather than perform for [them]. The whole thing was hilarious.
LG: It’s also a real power move.
S: I went on a one-woman strike and I got better working conditions for myself. I was so smug.
LG: We can all learn a lot from that. Where do you think is sort of the next level, or the future, of porn?
S: What I hope for is a diversification of pornography, or rather a re-diversification. We’re seeing this at the very small level. You have this company up here [gestures], and then a lot of very small performers with independent, clips-for-sale stores, or ManyVids or OnlyFans [pornographic video and webcam sites] doing very niche, specific content, and not much in the middle. I’m hoping to see more companies in the middle again. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more with teledildonics [remote sex technology]. I think [virtual reality] is a very interesting possibility to explore. I wish I had the bandwidth to dig into that right this second, too. I think, I mean, my thing is like, pornography that’s about pornography, which Rinse Dream did with “Café Flesh” [a cult sci-fi porno directed by Dream AKA Stephen Sayadian] all the way back in the Eighties. But not much has been done [in that regard] since [then] until I started doing it. Self-aware pornography. The golden loop of hoes.
LG: In one of your previous sites, Trenchcoatx, you were interested in changing the labels that are used to describe all the porn categories. Do you think it is possible to change that?
S: I do think so. With ZeroSpaces, we’re starting from the assumption that everyone is an actual adult, that everyone can prepare themselves to see who knows what before they press play on this video. A lot of the tagging is partially so you can type in, like, “schoolgirl anal hairy bush, red,” but I don’t really want to cater to the people who just want to order up precisely what they want. That market is already served. And the other function of the tagging is [that] it can be a warning system, where like, “Oh, I’m about to see some body hair. Oh, I’m about to see this fluid.” [At] ZeroSpaces, we’re like, look, we’re all adults here, right? Because we tell you multiple times, ‘if you’re not over the age of 18 we don’t want you here.’ So we’re all adults. Sex is more than just some kissing, some blowjob, some pussy licking, and then semen everywhere. Like, sex is messy. Sex is complicated. Sex is really hard to categorize neatly in specific words because we don’t have such a great language for talking about it yet.
LG: Yeah, I guess we’re really invited to just trust you when we open the issue, the same way that we would any other magazine, which I think is cool.
S: Yeah.
LG: Yeah, I trust you.
S: That terrifies me, and I’m honoured.
Photographed by Katarina Šoškić, Vienna 2018
Polaroids courtesy of Stoya.
Taken from SLEEK 59