James Deen on being a male pornstar.

From Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon.com:

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This isn’t the first time I’ve watched this man have sex and, if you’ve recently browsed online porn, chances are you’ve seen him before too. At 25, after just seven years in the game, he’s one of the most visible men in the industry. I think of him as a cold, brutish performer — but when he hears that I want to interview him, he comes right up with a warm smile on his face and juts out his hand to introduce himself. As I find when we go back to Kink’s headquarters to chat, he is thoughtful, self-effacing and polite. After a quick shower, he meets me in a conference room barefoot, wearing plaid pajamas and sipping from a bottle of apple juice. He looks more like a kid ready for a bedtime story than the man I watched hock a loogie on a bound, naked woman an hour ago. I notice that his eyes, which are usually upstaged by his aggressive performances, are such a delicate, piercing blue that it just might excuse his choice of pseudonym.

While periodically lifting his shirt to show me the fresh bug bite swelling on his chest, we talk about sex as art, Viagra, fake orgasms and why people should never try to have sex like a porn star.

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The guys at the shoot were coming up to you and saying, “Oh man, you have the best job in the world,” which is something I’m sure you hear a lot. Is the job really as great as they think?

Mhmm, yeah, it is. Every now and then I’ll work with a girl who is doing this just for the money and doesn’t want to kiss, doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t want to do anything other than get her paycheck. But it’s so rare. For the most part, everybody that is in porn now really genuinely wants to do porn. Nowadays, girls will come out of high school and say, “I’m gonna be the next Jenna Jameson! I’m gonna be a sexual creature of desirability for the world and it’s gonna be amazing!” I think it’s awesome that’s happening. It’s very rare that I meet girls who are like, “I just need to get drunk. I’m just doing this because I have to.”

You have so many men, and women, making assumptions based on your movies about what normal or hot sex looks like. What does it feel like to be influencing the way that people have sex?

That’s way more responsibility than I want. We do stuff for the camera, we are having sex for the people at home, so not necessarily everything that we do feels good. I once did a magazine interview where they asked me for tips on how to have sex like a porn star and one of my biggest pieces of advice was, don’t. The key to sex is that you need to communicate with your partner about what they’re into and what they’re not into. If you’re trying to have sex like a porn star, you’re not — [a guy walks by carrying a giggling, limp girl in a bathrobe up the stairs]. I think somebody made someone come until they couldn’t walk. But, yeah, if you’re going to try to have sex like a porn star you need to make sure that the person you’re having sex with wants to be fucked like a porn star. I really hope I don’t have that responsibility of teaching people how to have sex.

Read the rest of the interview here.