"What do you do when you're not feeling sexy, when you have your period?" Louisa asked.
"You want to know the secret?" replied Jenna.
"I really do," said Louisa, guessing, "A diaphragm?"
"You take a sea sponge from your makeup, and you wet it just a tiny bit," disclosed Jenna. "And you roll it up, and you stick it in there, and it keeps you from bleeding."
"How do guys stay hard for one to three hours?" I blurted out.
"Viagra," Jenna said. "It gets them all flushed, and their dicks won't go down for hours."
"Guys will get a reputation for having a wood problem, and girls don't want to work with them," she continued. "But they'll say, 'I want to work with Jenna because she'll actually kiss me and touch me, and it's hot.' When there's a connection, when you see a guy and a girl with their bodies against each other, that's hot. I don't find a dick going in a pussy hot. When I see a guy on top of a girl and his movement, that's what I find hot."
"But you have to show the other shots," said Louisa.
"Yeah," said Jenna, "because that's what the guys are spanking to."
So the actual fucking scenes didn't do much for these women. And Jenna didn't really like making them: "A lot of times with the boy-girl stuff -- where you don't actually see the penetration -- it's not really in, just because of the soreness."
But oral sex was another matter. Feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon once asked, "Even if she can form words, who listens to a woman with a penis in her mouth?" That night I found at least one answer: other women who like to have penises in their mouths.
Louisa kicked things off: "Was it 'The Wicked One' where you were stranded in a car and you ended up in that house?"
"No, that was 'The Kiss' -- that was a hot movie," said Jenna. "That blow job with Peter North was awesome, wasn't it? That come shot was like, 'Wassup?'"
"What makes a good blow job?" Christina and I asked simultaneously.
"When the camera captures how much I'm loving it," said Jenna. "When you can see the look in my eye, you know, and he's just got a really big dick and it looks really good."
"Totally," said Louisa, "and you're working it." For the first time that night, I had to shift in my seat and cross my legs.
"It was just really hot," continued Jenna, reminiscing about the scene. "He had me on a leash, and it was really nasty, and in the come shot it was like he dumped four buckets on me -- whoosh! It's the hands and spit and movement."
Four buckets? A leash? The spit I understood -- Jenna's signature move, which leaves lesser practitioners slurping clumsily, involves lubricating a penis by dribbling saliva on it. "It feels better when there's more spit; it makes my mouth water," Jenna laughed. "I should trademark it -- Jenna Lube! Jenna Juice!"
"It's all about the hands," said Louisa.
"And the variety," said Christina.
"And your tongue on it," said Jenna.
"Mm-hmm," they all agreed.
"And where are your eyes?" I asked. I couldn't help it; I'm a hopeless romantic.
"Right up at him," said Jenna.
"Yeah, I love that," cooed Louisa, who seemed to be doing a little seat shifting of her own.
"Like I love it, like you're really loving it," said Jenna, blithely veering into second person. I stopped trying not to stare. "And I'm moaning and telling him that I like it."
Fortunately, dinner came before I did. We settled into watching "Dreamquest," which is sort of a cross between "Legend" and "Cum One Cum All" and features Jenna traipsing through an alternate world of fairies and evil queens and trolls. (Promo blurb: "She came to save Fantasy.")
With a budget of $250,000, "Dreamquest" is one of the most expensive porn movies ever made. (Such flicks typically cost $10,000 to $20,000.) Its producer, Wicked Pictures, spent that much cash to keep itself and Jenna squarely in the vanguard of high production values -- using film instead of video, physically attractive stars, halfway intelligible story lines, non-throwaway sets -- in order to lure an audience of couples and straight women.
"In the beginning, I really didn't think about it, though I was never going to be in some gonzo movie shot with a High-8," Jenna explained. "But I had watched movies before I got into the industry that were very stylized, with beautiful women in beautiful houses, but where the sex wasn't so hot. So I thought, "Man, what if they had girls in there that enjoyed what they were doing and looked like they were really fucking, and were still beautiful. It would be huge. And that's what I wanted to do."
Unbelievably enough for anyone used to encountering porn as sweat socks and moaning on cheesy bedspreads -- like, um, me -- none of this was lost on its intended audience during our screening of "Dreamquest."
"Some of this is really pretty," Christina said. "It's not like you're just in a bedroom somewhere."
"I love all the houses you guys shoot in," said Louisa. "The costumes are great. And with women, you definitely can't just get into the sex. There's more of a story line."
"We all need foreplay in everything we do," concluded Jenna's pal Tracy.
From the deft little move where she uses both hands to flick her hair from the back to the front of her shoulders during conversation to her willingness to be fucked by multiple candelabra on camera, Jenna obviously loves attention. But even she found it hard to watch herself in hardcore scenes. Whenever "Dreamquest" was about to shift from dialogue to sex, she started humming a "ch-wocka-wocka"-goofy porn-music soundtrack. And she kept up a running, fairly desexualized commentary about technical difficulties and bloopers.
"You have to make sure your toes are pointed," she said at one point. "Do you see the position she's in? It makes it hard when you're bent into awkward positions. You always have to open out to the camera."
Which isn't to say we didn't get all the details we wanted. (Louisa: "Now, are you actually like --" Jenna: "Munching box?" Louisa: "Yeah." Jenna: "Yeah.") There was even a moment where Jenna, comparing herself with a pierced costar, lifted her top to show her right breast, where she usually wears a small barbell, thus providing me with a personal money shot.
"I don't do anal," Jenna proclaimed during one penetrating scene. "I do it at home, but not on camera. I gotta save something for my baby." She paused. "And I want to wait until someone wants to give me an extreme amount of money. Or I'll do it for my own company and make all the money myself."
"This is funny, because I always end up fisting chicks," she said at the start of another scene. "My hands are so small -- they're smaller than most penises -- so it's pretty easy to go in, and if they're saying, 'Give me more,' I'm just like, 'OK!' But they can't show that -- it's illegal. So they always yell at me, 'Thumbs out! Thumbs out!'"
It was midnight, and it was over. I walked Jenna and Tracy to their car, into which they hopped with brief goodbye handshakes. I came back upstairs and cleared the living room of sushi, cerveza and cigarettes, carefully preserving one ultrathin, barely smoked and lipstick-smeared Capri for posterity.
"Two thousand dollars for a 15-minute tape," said Christina. "Who's taking advantage of who?" She had grown somewhat restless -- however glossy the production, sitting through a close examination of a porn film's interstitial scenes without any potential at all for diddling can get to be a drag. But she was impressed. "That little girl is going to change her entire industry."
Louisa's mind was elsewhere. "I wanted a hug," she said. "Not because I wanted a hug from Jenna Jameson, but just because she was very quick to say goodbye. Things got very businesslike at the end, after I had just seen this woman violated every which way possible."
"But," Louisa added, "she probably thinks everybody wants something from her. A hug's probably too much of her, too personal."
Why do women who like porn love Jenna? Because she loves them -- from precisely the distance that keeps men wanting her.
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