kagablog

At 21 years of age, Sasha Grey is living her dream of becoming all that she can be. Recently headlining director Steven Soderbergh’s (Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven) The Girlfriend Experience, a digital-age update of his ’89 indie hit Sex, Lies & Videotape, she’s buzzing across various media: The hungry focus of a Terry Richardson shoot; muse to Richard Kern’s recent, deliciously avant-garde Fashion spread in Vice magazine; appearing in music videos for The Smashing Pumpkins and The Roots; dropping guest-vox on Moby and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry tracks.. She fronts the band Atelecine, is the subject of two documentaries, and is penning her second novel. Mostly though, Ms Grey is something of a demonic force within the Porn industry. Touted as the next Jenna Jameson, she’s already notched up 140 films, but it’s not just her nubile velocity that’s brought both fame and infamy.

Appearing on a now-famous Tyra Banks Show episode, transparently entitled ‘Teenage prostitutes and porn stars’ in 2007, Sasha, a petite 18 years old, refused to submit to Tyra’s insistent labelling of her as victim, coolly asserting that she was doing exactly what she wanted to be doing, and calling the shots, which effectively threatened the message of that particular episode, and led to Banks visibly losing her cool. The enigma of Grey is a new phenomenon in the history of pornography, if only due to her audacious nature – she is the damsel consuming the dragon; if the knight wants to watch, that’s fine, if he wants to collapse into a morass of identity crisis and phallic alarm, that’s his deal. Her historical and philosophical precursor is the witch – long persecuted for enchanting and confounding the men-folk, for luring them away from their masculine obligations, and frolicking in content independence from their man-rules and man-authority. She threatens not only him, but is despised by his loyal, submissive women-folk (yes, we will be dipping into feminism later, no pun intended).

Sasha Grey’s mission statement (she has a mission statement), as outlined on her Myspace page, reads: “I am in the adult film scene for mainly one reason. On average, most of the xxx I see is boring, and does not arouse me physically, or visually. There is only a handful of adult stars that continue to push the boundaries of what women are supposed to like, or be like in bed. This entices me to be one of these young women, not to mention my lust for sexual creativity; I hunger for all modes of sexual perversity. I am determined and ready to be a commodity that fulfils everyone’s fantasies.”
Most porn actresses operate along the same quick-in, quick-out deadline as models, going at it hammer and tong for as long as their bodies make the cut, only to be unceremoniously spewed out by the eternally hungry, apathetic machine when a fresh line of fleshbots arrive. The lucky few retain enough of a cocktail of all-out sexiness and mystique (read as: they put off going all the sticky way for as long as they can, keeping their fans glued in the suspended hope of eventually seeing them go anal, or triple-entry, or whatever the latest peaks of exposure are) to stake their own space in the industry, ala Jenna Jameson, whose Jennaworld was purchased by Playboy for a cool $17 mill in 2002. Grey’s vision of her future is vast by comparison. She sees herself as an artist, with pornography as her central canvas, thereby neatly turning the tables, in an unprecedented way, on the machine. Twirling through taboos even as she explodes notions of identity and power, Sasha Grey is queen of her universe.
Thing is, Porn is essentially a male construct – the titillation is aimed at getting Joe Sofa on the couch there to knock one out; and so you have beautiful ladies (that’s the idea anyway) performing acrobatic debauchery on generic variations of Joe Sofa. The point of the exercise, outside of showing Joe mounds of gleaming, quivering she-flesh, is to get him off on the idea of unattainable women begging for it.. so drunk on desire that they would do anything if only he would bless her with that magic wand of his. All of which, at the end of the day, is kinda sad for all involved. And kinda un-sexy.

One of the reasons Sasha got into the industry was because she felt there was so much more to be explored; specifically with regards female sexuality, which is all-but-absent from your average porn flick. “I don’t need to see genitalia up close; I don’t need to see a dirty yellow couch against a white wall. I want to see something different, like, this is not exciting to me.” Grey has rather eloquently put the ball in her court, so to speak – in most of her scenes she’s pushing her male co-stars into territories they weren’t planning, or intending, on visiting, effectively reversing the traditional power-dynamic. When folks are appalled at her craving for controlled violence in sex, and her turn-on for non-reproductive bodily fluids, she points out that it’s a matter of, ahem, taste – it’s about what gets her off; to those who cry misogyny, she reminds that she is a young, independent, successful woman, and relishes in the power she wields in her shoots – Sasha Grey knows that the power of the female is essentially her mysterious force of attraction, be it explicit or obscure.

A quick peek into her list of personal heroes says it all – Jean Luc Godard, David Bowie, Catherine Breillat, Miles Davis, Jim Morisson. Individualists who broke through the boundaries to spill into the unknown. A brave girl in a jaded universe - Long may she spill!