As some commenters pointed out, Grey's words in Newsweek, though unfairly slammed by Kathryn Jean Lopez, were actually kind of annoying. In response to the Mark Sanford scandal, she wrote,

Americans act so shocked when they hear about politicians, celebrities, and athletes having affairs, but I have to believe that many women who are married to men with power are aware of affairs, and accept it. Don't ask, don't tell; as long as they receive something in exchange from their husband-whether that exchange be children, money, material items, or sex. We create our own morals. It's once the affair goes public that morals change. The wife feels shame and humiliation because of public awareness, yet felt no desire to speak out prior. [...] Ideally, we should all openly have something extra on the side.

Commenter Old Jean Gallagher called this response "shockingly victim-blaming," which is pretty accurate. Grey criticizes political wives for making a public stink about their husbands' cheating, and sort of implies that they are all violating some previously agreed-upon quid pro quo. But while we may "create our own morals," when we're in relationships we need to agree on some of them, and it's unlikely that all wives of powerful men agree, even tacitly, to infidelity. As to her suggestion that we should all have something on the side, that's just as prescriptive as saying we should all be monogamous.

Grey seems much more thoughtful in her Dazed Digital interview with John-Paul Pryor. Pryor asks, "Do you think without prostitution and pornography there would be more instances of rape and so on? Or do you think that they actually allow for an arena where those kinds of abuses can take place?" The idea that porn and prostitutes act as a safety valve for men's natural desire to rape isn't new, but it is offensive — luckily, Grey handles it pretty well:

I think it depends. You have women on the street who are obviously being abused and they have pimps, I mean all you have to do is watch a few documentaries to see what that's like and how raw it is. That just perpetuates the negative stereotypes of prostitution, or pimping, or the johns. And then you have the women like Christine – they are like call girls, and they might not have a pimp; they are doing it on their own. I don't think that those necessarily perpetuate the abuse and the violence, but in the same vein, I don't think they help stop it at all. But the guys who are paying for the higher echelons don't beat the girls up – well, that's generally speaking from the research we did, maybe some politicians are going to go out there and beat some girls up, I don't know.

She makes the streetwalker-versus-call girl distinction that's been so much in the news lately, but she's careful to qualify it. She recognizes that just because she hasn't heard of violence against call girls doesn't mean it hasn't happened. Here's Grey on sex and communication:

Well, I just think it's 2009 and we're still so afraid to talk about sex. I think ignorance breeds fear and vice versa and the less you know the more negative things can happen, such as teenage pregnancy or the skyrocketing rate of STDs in young adults. It is about sexual freedom but it's about more than that, it's about communication and talking and learning. I think people are so afraid to do that; people are afraid of the truth – we'd rather hide inside a bubble.

And on acting:

I think the technical aspects and the people and the crews are all very similar but as far as performances go, I really hate it when people say, ‘Oh this is reality porn!" No. Because any time you put a camera in front of anybody, even if they have never been in front of a camera, they are going to act differently. For me, pornography is performing – it is what it is and I am an extension of myself, I am hyper me, whereas in a film like this, I am doing character research and I am stepping into the shoes of someone else, and I am thinking about my mannerisms.

It's nice to hear someone point out that pornography isn't real without denigrating it — Grey's words remind us that we can enjoy porn as a performance without expecting our actual sex lives to mimic it. Throughout the interview, she comes off as smart and appreciative of nuance — Kathryn Jean Lopez is missing out by dismissing her. However, Grey's also only 21 years old. While in most of the interview she sounds very mature and articulate, she occasionally makes statements like this one: "Before Christianity and Catholicism took over most people were in poly-amorous relationships."

I don't have the entire sexual history of the pre-Christian world at my fingertips, but I do know a little bit about Greece and Rome in the centuries immediately BCE, and I know that while upperclass men there often did have sex with multiple partners, the lives of their wives were pretty rigidly circumscribed. Of course, this doesn't mean women never had "something on the side," and it's frankly a little hard to tell who was screwing who thousands of years ago, especially among groups that didn't leave written records. But men were trying to control women's sexual behavior long before Christ, and the idea of a polyamorous pre-Christian golden age doesn't really hold water.

Maybe it's ageist of me to chalk up some of Grey's more sweeping statements to the fact that she's barely old enough to buy booze. I'm a half-decade older, and while I bet I could beat her in an ancient-history trivia contest, I may not actually know more about relationships. K. Lo's apparently 33, but being old enough to run for Senate hasn't taught her not to judge other people's personal choices. Grey can be judgmental too, but even in her short and very public life, she's managed to learn the value of "communication and talking and learning." A 21-year-old could do a lot worse.

Sasha Grey / The Girlfriend Experience [Dazed Digital]

Related: Governor Sanford's Appalachian Adventure

Earlier: Newsweek Too Hot For National Review Writer

Newsweek.com's major crime seems to be allowing loose women to speak. These ladies of the evening include porn star Sasha Grey (pictured above), whose views on the Mark Sanford scandal have forever soiled Lopez's brain — she writes, "what's shocking is that I even know her opinion on the woman, on the situation, on politicians and their wives, and that she thinks we should all openly have something extra on the side." Also scandalously allowed to have an opinion is former madam Heidi Fleiss. Never mind that Newsweek tapped her to talk about escorts, a subject she presumably knows a lot about — according to Lopez, she's still gross.

But not as gross as a gay guy talking about sex. The final exhibit in Lopez's case against Newsweek is "crude sex columnist" Dan Savage, who mentioned blow jobs in a piece on Larry Craig (Lopez renders this as "b*** j**" — presumably so her readers' eyeballs don't explode). Savage is actually making a pretty conservative point — he writes, "It annoys people like me - openly gay men - when the Craig incident is described as a ‘gay sex scandal,' as if his actions in the toilet that day tell you something about gay men. Openly gay people - gay men with integrity - have boyfriends and husbands." But of course, gay sex is dirty, whether it takes place in an airport bathroom or a marital bed.

It's kind of hilarious that, given what's available on the Internet (though this too is a taboo topic for Lopez), she would single out Newsweek as "all about sex - perverse and paid for." What's not so funny is the message she articulates — that people who have sex she deems unacceptable shouldn't get to speak in the national media. It's especially strange that she doesn't really criticize Mark Sanford or Eliot Spitzer — just the porn star and madam who mistakenly thought they were allowed to talk about them. Of course, Sanford and Spitzer came in for their fair share of vitriol, but Lopez's piece reminds us who are the enduring enemies of the right's traditional-values squad: women, gays, and anybody they can dismiss with a claim of "perversity."

Sex Sells [National Review Online]

The film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday, will be released on May 22 in New York and Los Angeles and on demand on the TV network HDNet. It follows an escort named Chelsea who charges $2,000 an hour to act as a client's girlfriend for the night, providing more intimacy than just sex. (In the film's opening scene, Chelsea and her client are shown at a chic Manhattan restaurant discussing the film they just saw - Man on Wire - going back to his apartment and making out, and then having breakfast and reading The New York Times together the next morning.) The story takes place over five days in October 2008, and is partially improvised by the mostly unprofessional actors, who play versions of themselves, like New York magazine staff writer Mark Jacobson, who plays a journalist, and movie critic Glenn Kenny, who plays an escort reviewer. (Some readers may recall that Kenny served as writer David Foster Wallace's editor and sidekick when the duo attended the AVN Awards for a piece for Premiere magazine.) But the casting choice that has garnered the film so much attention is that the main character is played by real-life porn star Sasha Grey.

At the Tribeca Film Festival, Soderburgh explained that he chose Grey precisely because of her porn persona, The Guardian reports. "With Sasha, you can within seconds see her do anything you can imagine with her clothes off," he said. "What you can't see is what it's like to be her boyfriend, to hang out with her and be emotionally intimate with her. So my whole theory is that's the fantasy for those who've been double-clicking – that they want to spend 77 minutes being her boyfriend."

As Soderbergh put it, Sasha Grey is "not the normal adult film star." Grey is 21, but has appeared in 150 adult films and branded herself as a "new" kind of pornstar since beginning her career at the age of 18. According to the Associated Press, Grey is known for "pushing the boundaries of normal sexual acts," but, "she maintains she's always in control." Vanessa Grigoriadis, who profiled Sasha Grey for the new issue of Rolling Stone explains:

Sasha Grey is the adult industry's reigning princess of porn, a rock & roll 21-year-old with an actual mission statement - "Most of the XXX I see is boring, and does not arouse me physically or visually. I am determined and ready to be a commodity that fulfills everyone's fantasies" - and few taboos.

Grey, who is co-managed by former Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro (and appeared in the porn film he directed), has modeled for American Apparel, and sung with the reggae musician Lee "Scratch" Perry. She says she is striving to make porn more artistic; Grigoriadis asserts she is changing the relationship between feminism and porn:

"Porn has been one of feminism's most divisive issues because it hits on such a raw level to so many woman. Here are the fantasies of men, and it's of course better to live out those fantasies through pornography than to try to do them in the real world, but the fact is the real world is impacted by it. Grey says, ‘If you look at me and you think "Here's a woman who's intelligent, cognizant and making her own choices, and you still tell me that what I'm doing is wrong, screw you, because that should end the debate.' "

Grey's appearance in The Girlfriend Experience has been interpreted as the first step in her attempt to go mainstream like former adult actresses Traci Lords and Jenna Jameson, but according to our sister site, Fleshbot, (link NSFW):

If anything, we suspect that Sasha is attempting to remake the notion of what a mainstream star is, and does-much the way she's remade any notions of what an 18-year-old pornstar looks and sounds like .... it's also possible that Sasha could rise to fame in the mainstream cinema while continuing to work as an adult star-perhaps completely remaking our notions of what it means to have crossover appeal.

Though Grey doesn'tactually have sex on screen in The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh says that he felt comfortable casting her because "Porn is beyond everywhere now." He told Time Out New York that he thinks prostitution should be legal and does not consider the prostitute in his film a victim. When asked what he would say to someone who has been roped into a life of prostitution, he replied:

Well, there are people for whom that is true. That's not the case with Chelsea any more than it is with Sasha in the adult-film industry. But, yeah, I think whatever agreement two people want to come to about whatever is really none of my business. I don't know what the difference is between that and what I'm doing for Sony Pictures right now [directing Moneyball].

According to the Village Voice review:

Like Godard, Soderbergh views prostitution as the ultimate paradigm for capitalism. But where Godard saw the hooker as a tragic or exploited victim, Soderbergh suggests there are no victims, only failed traders, in the post-Reagan era of DIY capitalism.

And, says Variety's review, the film de-emphasizes the sex involved in Chelsea's work and portrays her as a woman in control of her own get-rich-quick scheme, much like her clients who strive to make a fortune in the world of finance.

From reviews and interviews, it appears Soderbergh was striving for some sort of meta commentary on how capitalism makes prostitutes and porn stars of us all. The johns in the movie delude themselves into thinking they're experiencing a higher level of intimacy with "the girlfriend experience" than they would by just having sex with a prostitute. Similarly, Soderbergh suggests that audience members, who have presumably seen Grey's porn films, will delude themselves into thinking they are experiencing her on a more intimate level by watching her act in a mainstream film rather than a porn film. But by focusing on a high priced escort who chose to get into prostitution, and having her portrayed by an actress described as an atypical pornstar who feels in control of her career, he conveniently ignores the fact that many women in both industries are exploited. Soderbergh is certainly allowed to use the old fantasy of a sex worker who simply loves her work. However, by ignoring the uglier side of the sex trade, he undermines his argument that his film reflects any underlying truths about sex, pornography, or society.

Trailer for The Girlfriend Experience:



Steven Soderbergh On The Girlfriend Experience: 'I Hired Real People And Turned Them Loose' [The Guardian]
Porn Star Sasha Grey Stars In New Soderbergh Film [The Associated Press]
Sasha Grey, The Dirtiest Girl In The World: The Story Behind The Story [Rolling Stone]
Sasha Grey, Crossover Star (NSFW) [Fleshbot]
Steven Soderbergh Interview [Time Out New York]
Soderbergh's Girlfriend Experience Porn-Star Is A True Character [The Village Voice]
The Girlfriend Experience Review [Variety]

Earlier: Dave Navarro Makes Porno Debut
American Apparel Now Sponsoring Bloggers & Porn Stars (NSFW)
Oprah Learns About The Ins-N-Outs Of Legal Prostitution