The Dirtiest Girl in the World
ON AN OVERCAST Sunday in Los Angeles, Sasha Grey arrives at a set for the film The Fuck Junkie promptly at 9 a.m. This is not her real name, though it’s a subtle one for a porn star, a mash-up of Sascha Konietzko, a founder of the German industrial band KMFDM, and the Kinsey scale of sexuality, which identifies sexual orientation as shades of gray. The shoot location is unexpected as well, a brick warehouse in downtown L.A., far from the porn epicenter in the San Fernando Valley. In her dressing room, Grey unpacks a suitcase of makeup, lingerie and dozens of barrettes, then applies a thick coat of eyeliner in a mirror. “No one in porn knows how to do makeup right,” she says, flicking the brush across her eye. “The only thing they know how to do is make my face orange. I’d rather do it myself. I’d rather have it be my fault.”
Grey, who is known for exploring the outer edges of pornography, is shooting a solo scene today. It is her first bit for Grey Art, a new production company founded with director Oren Cohen, a 31-year-old third-generation porn purveyor. “This is my company, a new chapter, a positive step up for me,” she says. “I wanted to start it right.” In fact, deliberate, symbolic action is the defining characteristic of Grey, who, at 21, has managed a risque ingenue’s hat trick: She’s the adult industry’s reigning princess of porn, celebrated as the Adult Video News Female Performer of the Year in 2008; a muse to rock stars, featured in videos for the Smashing Pumpkins and the Roots; and, most impressively, a potential crossover sensation, making her film debut as the high-class-escort star of Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience this month.
“In the adult business, you’re forced to grow up and work for yourself, or somebody else will work you and you’ll be done,” she says, before stepping out of a black cotton dress. “There are maybe four people in the industry that I hang out with, because they’re interesting people and not coked up. I’m not calling anyone up to say, ‘Hey, let’s get a mani-pedi together.’ I do my own nails.”
At five feet six and 110 pounds, with straight black hair that shoots to her lumbar spine, Grey’s naked body is exquisite and natural, with taut skin free of blemishes and tattoos (she resembles Kate Beckinsale in physique, and her affect is a similar mix of languor and brutal hauteur). “As far as I’m concerned, Suicide Girl types with black hair and tattoos are the new blondes with bolt-on tits,” she drawls. “Those women look the same, and they’re idiots.” She pulls a pair of frilly underwear from her suitcase — “Is that the type of thing you put around a rack of lamb?” asks Cohen — then reconsiders the choice, slipping on a black G-string. The porno theme of the day is “neckties.” Grey holds a green tie to the daylight before settling on black.
“You feel like you can rub one out with this?” says Cohen.
“That could happen,” says Grey, nodding. “I could feel that.”
As cliche as it is to note the arid thousand-mile stare of sex workers, there is something about Grey that is hard to reach, like talking to a woman behind glass. When she perches on a wooden chair in the center of the warehouse, training her eyes on a fresnel light above her and beginning to masturbate, the glass shatters. The crew watches silently, transfixed. We stand 20 feet away, but it feels like two. She works herself mechanically, transferring her fingers to her mouth every 30 seconds or so, then chokes herself with the tie before erupting in a minutes-long close-eyed orgasm, at which everyone finally exhales and claps. In her ecstasy, she is a vision of a terrifying goddess fueled by her own bliss energy, a half-woman, half-machine Kali springing forth to wreak destruction on the safe, timid sex habits of our world. Her performances are calibrated to destabilize, and they succeed at that goal. If Grey had been masturbating someone else this way, it would have been violent, but because it is self-imposed, it seems OK.
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