“A lover who can hold my string so I don’t float away like a helium balloon”: Dreamgirl Chapter 2
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Content note: Self harm
London was cold and all the other parents at school were married. I began to wonder if Casey was meant to be my next big romantic interest and whether my ex had been just a delicious cookie crumb that led me to her. I’d never even been with a girl. The closest I’ve come was at 21, when the sister of a guy I was dating pushed me up against the landing wall and kissed me when I’d crept to the family bathroom in the night. They looked alike in the dark but she was softer and kinder, a better version of him. I liked the idea of looking at and caressing breasts but the vagina horrified me, in the way the Ikea instructions horrify me. I know how incredibly complex it was for me myself to operate, to do so for someone else is far beyond my abilities. When I told her this, Casey laughed:
“Hahahahahaha. I find that vagina owners are pretty innately excellent at operating vaginas.”
I remain convinced I’d never slept with a woman for the same reason I’d never built an Ikea cabinet: not for lack of desire but a learning processing issue.
Casey, on the other hand, excelled academically. At college, she took on the full course load, a student job and becoming a serious athlete, making the US national rock climbing team. Perfectionism and workaholism have been through lines in her life. Today she stars in and also writes and directs features and a dramatic series called “Primary” whose plot comes from polyamorous relationships. Her “primary” relationships in her own polyamorous agreements are mainly with men but sometimes with women. It had been such an enormous logistical effort to get divorced from one man and had caused so much pain to separate from this first boyfriend thereafter, I envied the heartache that must come with polyamory, for I assumed it must be more diffuse, by dint of sheer volume.
Casey’s S & M videos interested me as they related to my own pecadillos: in my early years of womanhood I was a cutter who would go into a trance of anxiety and shame and use a razor against my flesh to shock myself back into my body. I tell her it began at 16, after my first sexual experiences were various gradations of non-consensual. After some years as a cutter, I had a great psychiatrist, the right medication and crucially, I developed vanity: I thought it would be best to stop whilst I had less scars rather than more. I tell Casey I see her submission to whips and paddles as occupying the same territory as the tools that keep me from cutting. She agrees:
“I find that most of my friends who engage in this realm have self harmed at some point. And I personally am of the opinion that any way to experience a similar feeling in your body is okay - the feeling that you are Body Only. No brain. No thoughts”.
Her description explains, to my mind, the preponderance of Jewish porn stars: Casey, Joanna Angel, Jane Wilde, Abella Danger and Arabelle Raphael just a limited current selection. Scientists have already made the evolutionary connection between thousands of years of expulsion and flight with the Jewish anxiety Larry David and Woody Allen exemplify. I sit at night, trying to make my brain quiet and sometimes I can, but other times I wake from sleep because I smell danger (it’s toast being made an apartment one house down). It is why the erectile reversal of fortune rattled me so much. Sex with him had made my chatty mind quiet. Body only.
“I’d never even been with a girl. The closest I’ve come was at 21, when the sister of a guy I was dating pushed me up against the landing wall and kissed me when I’d crept to the family bathroom in the night.”
I tell Casey the story of how, when my Aunt Lil knew her children had been caught in the rain walking home from school, she would cry because she was so worried. Casey laughs: “I never would have been allowed to walk by myself to and from school, not at any age. There was constant fear of “stranger danger””. At eighteen, she didn’t know how to boil pasta because her Mom had not allowed her near the stove for fear of her scalding herself. Her Mother was so nervous about the rock climbing that, watching Casey from the audience, she would scream.
Making sense of it, Casey has done deep dives into the medical links between Jewish anxiety and our increased risk of dementia. Did you “catch” your Mother’s fears?
Casey answers bluntly, “I am mentally ill”. “You take medication?”
“Yeah. It's just different levels of depression and anxiety since childhood. I think my parents took me to see my first psychologist when I was, like, ten.”
When I ask if she found, through her sex work, a way to contain it, she answers unequivocally, “Yes”.
I tell her how I grew up with no boundaries, allowed to not do my home work, and to stay the night with grown men at 16. The “bad sex things” happened because I was running free. When, as an adult, I questioned my Mother on this, she said I was too powerful and they had been afraid of saying “No”. As a small child, they called me “The Ayatollah Emma” because I was so demanding. I therefore like to relinquish control in bed to a more more dominant partner, and prefer to be with men who could over power me. I want to feel small in the world in every way. Because I was told I was the most powerful one, and it was exhilarating in some ways, but it also frightened me.
I tell her a little bit about the mania I struggled with once adolescence hit, and how I want a lover who can hold my string so I don’t float away like a helium balloon. She says she’s never had mania, only depression, which I’ve not had. It’s feeling more and more, in our chats, like we are yin yang, a figure eight. And that we need to meet.
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Emma Forrest is the author of four novels including Namedropper and Royals, and of the memoirs Your Voice In My Head and Busy Being Free (which she is currently adapting as television). She is the writer/director of ‘Untogether’ (2018), starring Jemima and Lola Kirke, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Emma began her writing career age 16, as a music journalist, at the height of Britpop. She finds it laughable, with age and distance, that Oasis were ever considered in the same league as Blur.
Casey Calvert is an award-winning adult director, writer, performer, and content creator. An eleven-year veteran of the industry, she won Director of the Year and Feature Movie of the Year at the 2023 "Golden Globes" of porn. Casey is constantly working to better integrate a more modern sensibility towards issues of mental health, polyamory/alternative relationship structures, and gender identity into her cinematic work. She currently resides in Los Angeles with her hastily-assembled terrier.