Dreamgirl - A Short Story by Emma Forrest

Words: Emma Forrest

Make it stand out

A mid-life love story arrived as my reward at the end of five years of celibate single parenting. The things I’d done alone all that time - the desire whispered late night to the moon, or removing spiders on my own - became an alchemical combination that seemed to conjure him. It was the most intensely sexual relationship I’d had. When, suddenly, at the year and a half point, he could no longer get hard with me, I had flashbacks to trying to wrangle a toddler when they’d lay down on the pavement and refuse to get up. I was meant to stay calm instead of letting my distress become palpable, thus feeding the disregulation cycle. But, in both instances, I couldn’t help it. 

I kept picturing myself as Tom and Jerry - naughty but harmless! - and his penis as the unseen human that leaps, screaming onto a chair whenever it spies them in the kitchen. How this shocks the leaper and the leapt at. It’s not winnable. 

I felt very small. Not in the turned on way of losing myself in a big man’s arms. I felt, of course, that this failure to expand him had diminished me. I felt bad about myself (surprised that there were new ways, post-divorce, to feel bad).

The timeline, at least was not perplexing: I’d needed surgery for diastasis recti - torn abdominal muscles, a pregnancy injury that would have been hanging by a thread ever since I’d given birth eight years earlier. Stitched and sedated, in agony for weeks, I could not make love, nor would I have wanted to. A few months later, I’d recovered from the operation and was ready and willing. But he could never do it with me again. 

It tumbled out, late one night, that he had become desensitised to my touch after throwing himself too deeply into pornography. It was, he explained, “So I wouldn’t try to touch you when you were in pain. I just need to detox from it now” he said, “Please wait”. I’d heard about this, of course: the graph showing increased erectile dysfunction in men and the graph showing men’s online porn consumption lined up parallel. 

I had no inherent problem with porn, knew that he watched it, that most men watch it, many women too, and had gone through a period (in the hormonal rush of pregnancy’s first trimester) of watching it myself. So I waited and waited, because I loved him, because we had plans to move in together and for him to be a Father figure to my child, who adored him. But he didn’t detox. I’d walk into a room and he’d slam the laptop shut and pull me close into a hug so I couldn’t look at him. “Were you watching porn?” I’d ask, gently. And he’d just squeeze me harder and harder, and his penis got softer and softer. “I’m melting! I’m melting!”, I’d hear it cry.

I made it bleakly funny in my head, because I was so crushed. I always thought it was the English half of me synthesising with my Judaism, the impulse to say: WOW that hurts HA HA! I didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. Only that it was a great shame and I was sad for both of us. On my way out of the relationship, I asked “So who was your favourite porn star?” I had the tone of an Edwardian gentleman taking leave from a dinner party. This wasn’t a trap. I was curious. But maybe the Edwardian gentleman I was invoking was Sherlock Holmes and I just didn’t know I had mysteries to work on. “Who did you like watching the most?” He looked up at me with eyes red from crying. 

“Casey Calvert.” 

And from the honesty of this conversation sprung a complex, challenging and comforting friendship that is based on mutual respect, and which I treasure. It just wasn’t with my boyfriend. 

✪✪✪

If you are a devoted fan of Casey Calvert, you will have followed her from rope bondage, to “JOI”, to anal, to gangbang. If you’re a devoted fan, you’ll recognise these terms as if they were marked aisles of a supermarket. 

I noticed right away that, though she is more than a decade younger than me, our bodies were similar- generous hips and thighs, small waists - and so, too, were our backgrounds. My ex was the opposite of an antisemite: a philosemite, a gentile who was particularly attracted to Jews. All five of his favourite performers were Jewish. A quick internet search revealed that Casey was, like me, from a middle class background with one parent tangentially in the conventional entertainment industry and that, like me, she was a cinephile who’d studied film making. 

When, after working as a fetish model, she entered porn, she’d taken her stage name as a tribute to her film Professor. Looking at her oeuvre, I saw that she’d employ, when she could, traditional cinematic techniques, like breaking the fourth wall. A potentially distressing “rape” scene was rendered more palatable to a female viewer by the fact that she - the “victim” - kept stopping to instruct the “attackers” on better angles they could approach her at. 

The one I responded to most when I first “found” her: she gives a video diary at the end of each day of progressively more intense S&M with one of her partners, a man who is dominant to her submissive (with other partners she is sometimes the dominant). At the end, when every orifice has been used, her face is beatific, lit like a Saint. Then in the video diary afterwards from her makeshift bedroom, she is schlumpy, hair frazzled, exhausted. I understand the dichotomy, the superhero self side of female sexuality. If a man I am on a date with happened to see me on the underground escalator two minutes before or after I meet him for the date, I would not be sexy - I would be aggrieved and disappointed to see him and for him to see me. 

I was mesmerised. So, having previously contacted all manner of boyfriends ex-girlfriends as the medium changed from landline to Myspace to Instagram - I direct messaged Casey. To my surprise, she messaged right back. Our first words were about the Norwegian art film The Worst Person In The World, which, between photos of her ass in booty shorts, she’d enthusiastically endorsed on her instagram. 

I did not keep from Casey how she had come to my attention, telling her in the second conversation. I felt validated when she started following me back. Our conversations were as easy as my break up with my ex had been stilted, and she and I soon moved from DMs to texting. We left each other voice notes about film and sex and art and life. Maybe it felt like accelerated intimacy to me because of the time difference - that she was getting my messages in the dead of night in L.A where her industry is based, me at dawn in London or vice versa. It also felt intimate because she is a porn star. 

✪✪✪

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 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.

✪✪✪

The next time I took my daughter to visit her dad in Los Angeles, Casey and I finally met for the first time. We chose the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena, where Eve Babitz had posed naked in a game of chess with Marcel Duchamp. I dressed on the sexy side for someone who is 45, down to my Maryjane shoes, whereas Casey was wearing a teenage sweatshirt and baggy jeans. Her demeanour was open, and I asked if I could hug her, every boundary in her S&M videos negotiated in advance.

She said “yes” and I noticed - while, in the videos her body is held by the ropes at elegant angles - in life, her off duty posture is teenage too, like a girl unhappy at getting breasts. Her ass - which is legendary in the industry - was tucked away so efficiently as to be undetectable. She’d later describe this to me as “Code Switching”, how her whole demeanour, right down to the angle at which she holds her hands, changes when she isn’t being “Casey”.

Her face is doll shaped and porcelain, with a rosebud mouth. It’s a Victorian beauty, throwback to a time when women could only be wives or whores, an unusual face to have if you work in the modern sex industry. As we wandered the gallery, I looked at the framing and the colours they’d painted the different walls and my mind wandered occasionally to the way her body was framed in the videos I’d seen. I felt zero sexual frisson between us, though I felt romantic towards her as I do towards all my friends. 

In her Instagram pictures - which are there to lead the viewer to her fan site - Casey has the same body as mine if mine were amazing. Her skin has a more luminous tone than mine- she is of course far younger- and the lines of her curves are sharper. 

“I just go like this to make my waist smaller” she said as we picked up museum cafe coffees, zooming her fingers in on an imaginary phone screen “and like this” now her fingers zoomed out, “to make my ass bigger. It’s an app. It’s easy”. It’s all a trick, the same way “When I shoot my anal I use a wide angle, like 14 millimetre lens. It makes your face look kind of funny, but it makes the ass look GREAT!” 

Casey and I wandered the grounds of the museum, talking for a few hours, about art and friendship and love and boundaries. I told her about my ex-boyfriend and what I still kind of felt for him. Ambling the sculpture garden, I tell her about the mistakes I’ve previously made in allowing myself to become entwined with readers who contacted me with their problems after reading ‘Your Voice In My Head’ (the memoir I wrote about mental health). Casey sighs- she is smarting from having entered into a friendship with a female fan, that went south when it became clear the fan believed, though they had not met, they were in a romantic relationship. Casey had pre- negotiated how they’d be the first time they met in real life (they would go indoor rock climbing together, a trip Casey had excitedly arranged for her, but she stipulated that she did not want to hold hands). The fan/ friend was deeply wounded by this prerequisite. 

“Yeah. I mean, that feeling of knowing me is the parasocial relationship of how I make money. I'm their friend. Because I can't sell the sex alone anymore. That's out there for free - there’s ten years of my content out there. Anything they want, they can Google, but what they cannot get for free is access to, you know, me. And so that's what I sell.” 

I told her at the end of our first meeting, as she sees me off in my Uber, that I will never look up her videos again. 

Though I’d gotten into it a little via my ex, it wasn’t hard for me to give up. Watching porn, like being a class rep, does not suit me. My bete noir is asking people “Are you okay”? I trailed my husband from room to room during our marriage, constantly asking “Are you okay?” really until I got divorced and then, to be honest, many years after. I would like to stop doing that. The porn I’d watched, I’d get turned on and then I’d climax and then I’d worry terribly whether the women in it were okay. Mindgeek - who own websites Casey often worked with before OnlyFans changed the economic order of things- has testimonial before and after the video from the woman saying they are above the age of consent and have not been co-erced to do anything they weren’t comfortable with. I relied on this as kosher until it was explained to me by the journalist Jon Ronson - that though with the company ‘Kink’ the disclaimer is accurate, with ‘Mindgeek’, someone is off screen holding the performer’s check until they’ve filmed it. 

Sex workers are stigmatized, operating outside the financial system, frequently ineligible for mortgages and bank loans - though Casey is unusually savvy and one of the few among her co- workers who found a way. Some had hoped Alexandria Ocasio Cortez might take them on as a cause, and though she seems sex worker friendly, it hasn’t happened yet. That said, because of the new financial dynamic of the OnlyFans site, which cuts out the middle man and lets sex workers take payments direct from fans for their videos in exchange for 20%, Casey has been able to purchase her own east L.A property. I struggle, in the London housing market collapse, to figure out how to ever get to somewhere bigger than our two bed flat. 

I think the female fear of the sex worker is as much about them operating outside conventional economics as it is a fear of them taking your partner away.  Before I left to meet her, I’d applied for a mortgage on a flat that would give my daughter more space. When I get back, I find I have been turned down for a mortgage, because banks will no longer count child support as income. I feel - if not as stuck as many divorced women with kids, then not as free as Casey.

✪✪✪

When I am with Casey, I think of a friend’s story, how he was once on Concorde and Keith Richards was the passenger seated next to him. Not wanting to gawp, he made sure never to look in Keith’s direction, which he found stressful for a long flight. Near the end, they ended up in terrible turbulence, so bad he was frightened they might die. At this point, Keith Richards poked my friend in the ribs and and said: “I’ve done everything!” But I don’t think that’s how Casey feels. Though she is serious about her ethical polyamory, her lovers she maintains in different cities, I don’t think she remotely feels she’s done all the things she wants to do. 

I ask if she can feel an alternate reality where she pursued rock climbing instead of sex work.

“No, because the opportunity wasn't there. Making a living as a professional rock climber wasn't really a thing, especially that a woman did. Rock climbing is in the Olympics now. But not then. And so sponsorships are available and female rock climbers make money, do grand deals and become social media influencers.” 

Then she smiles as she explains that one of the things that was advantageous in rock climbing, beyond her strong core and ability to focus microscopically on tasks in front of her, was her unusually small hands which could fit into crevices - and that this makes her particularly requested for fisting scenes, where she inserts her whole hand into a woman’s vagina. 

Having, at 33, aged out of her days as “Best New Starlet”, she has directed many, many porn films at and is proud of her work. Contrary to the conventions of the industry, she cares deeply about the acting performances and the lighting. As a director, she has a particular aesthetic, such as not permitting her performers to wear fake nails or eyelash extensions. 

“I feel comfortable giving very specific grooming instructions like that, because a lot of companies will give you very specific instruction in the opposite direction: “Please come with French nails”. “Please come with your hair extensions” and like all that stuff is just very common. This is my subconscious rebellion against the industry. My favourite scenes are when the persona cracks and you get some reality of a human.” 

I know what she means: in a straw poll, the female performers who are favourites of women seem to elicit in their male counterparts a visible sense of shock that they are feeling a real feeling. 

When Casey was nominated recently for Best Director at the “Porn Oscars”, she wore a green velvet Bella Freud suit which I enjoyed, not only because it covered her whole body when other women were mainly half-naked, but because the grand daughter of Sigmund Freud dressing a sex worker for glory makes good sense. Aren’t we all working out our issues through our kinks and our clothes? Even better, Casey had a fan pay for the suit. She’d come a long way, emotionally and stylistically, since she was nominated for Best New Starlet and spent her own $2000 on a Halston gown. 

As our friendship expands, I see the ways I am influenced by Casey. A much older, extremely wealthy man who is romantically interested in me based purely on having read my memoir (my own version of nakedness) says he can’t invite me to stay with him when I visit New York because of his fiancee - but offers to wire $2000 to my account so I can get myself a nicer hotel. 

I say “Yes” unflinchingly, and would not have without knowing Casey. The cash is in my account by the end of the day. I go to a nice hotel for the weekend and enjoy it very much. 

I have been terrible at drawing any boundaries whatsoever with my daughter’s father. But I find, getting to know Casey, I begin to experiment with casual lovers, practicing boundary making. When a new lover sends me a text post-coital that I do not like the shape of - it’s not an awful text it just wasn’t the response that I’d needed the next day - I cut things off with him. It happens again, with a new man, in the same two date span. I tell him the shape of the contact I require to keep seeing him. He says “Of course!” Then doesn’t do as requested. I politely cut things off. 

What of my ex-boyfriend? Have I discarded him as young women are historically discarded in porn? Used him as a means to an end? He would certainly like a threesome with me and Casey, of this he has been extremely clear, the one clarity in our amorphous post relationship “relationship”. Erectile issues reversed like Tinkerbell coming back to life after being clapped for! 

But I think of the source injury that led me to Casey: my boyfriend had been drawn to me because he thought I was a MILF (the acronym for Mother I’d Like To Fuck)- the third most viewed category in all of porn, an outsized role in adult entertainment. But when presented with a real human rendered vulnerable from repairing actual child bearing injury, he couldn’t deal. He has been, on the one hand, extremely generous to me about my friendship with his favourite porn star. But he also feels he deserves his threesome. A woman living out a man’s fantasy - bringing a porn star through the screen and into your life! - tells a different story. It becomes a woman’s personal growth moment - both mine and hers. Whereas what a man assumes it needs, bless him, is his dick. 

✪✪✪

I have been endlessly in a threesome I don’t want to be in with married couples, psychological ones where I feel oppressed by the conventions of their marriage. It is them against me. My landlords, who are a married couple. My former closest friends of the school parent group. When, after holidaying together, the wife wrote me a letter about no longer wanting to be friends with me she made a point to say it included her husband. It was so shocking and bewildering, I wondered if I had slept with him behind my own back. 

Being triangulated in this way makes me feel unanchored and out of control - like I’m close to losing it at the school gates, or that I may draw on the walls of the rental. As a single mother I feel pressure - as a sex worker is pressured - to behave in a certain way so as not to threaten nuclear families.

A major porn sub-genre is punishment sex. For example, “after the divorce is settled the aggrieved ex-husband fucks his former wife on the desk where the judge made his decision”. Or “a female comedienne steals a male comedian’s best punchline so he punishes her - with his dick!” I think of punishing the husband and wife sexually, this school couple with him I am so upset. All sex is, it might be argued, score settling, though it’s usually a score with your own past. I’ve carried hurt and shame forever, as all of us have. It is to my benefit that I can always go into a room and write. I do not need a partner to do so. But I have moments of envying that Casey uses this pain and shame for her work in a far more literal sense than I do as an author. I can’t say whose exorcism is greater. My public reward is greater, but she has brought the world more release. 

When Casey agreed to visit me in London over the Autumn, I didn’t invite her to stay in my home, in case it’s something my ex-husband could use against me if there were ever a child custody issue. Could it be? She is a sex worker but also a human. I imagined her up in my loft bed and how well she might rest there. It isn’t lost on me that this new friend who lives outside conventional societal parameters is L.A based, drawing me back to the city I had to leave because of the breakdown of the nuclear family. That I failed utterly, said my ex-husband, at being a wife and running a home. 

My husband said the clothes I’d been wearing the night he’d met me were deceptive advertising. That, in my vintage A-line dress and angora cardigan, I looked like a 50’s housewife, but did not turn out to be domestic. That I had confused him with my appearance. 

I book Casey’s London hotel, and, to do so, she must tell me her real name, the one she was born with. It is so Jewish, I just have more questions to ask about the places our upbringings merge and diverge. I feel like neither of us acknowledge out loud what a big deal it is for this “secret” name to be spoken, almost a Torah passage itself "And then the name of the porn star was spoken and the name was...” 

Or, if not Old Testament exactly, I know that this reaching out through the screen to each other seems to hold a mystical power. This is something new. A portal has been opened between us, performer and consumer, sex worker and ex-girlfriend of a porn addict. Casey posts on instagram that day: “Many relationships that are worthy of repair are discarded because we have poor modelling of true love”. 

I tell her it hit me hard. She says she’s “still in her feels” if I want to talk. I am making dinner for my daughter so we text. She is herself, feeling deep heartache about the end of one of her primary relationships. The pain seems not at all diffuse for her just because it is one of several. I was quite wrong there. 

It sounds incredibly complex to have a relationship finish with someone who you still have to be on camera with. 

“It is complicated. The whole thing's very complex. But he wants to make it work. It’s...Yeah, I think a lot of people in the real world, like an average family who has like a husband and a wife, and they go off to their jobs and they do their 9 to 5 and then they come home and cook dinner - I don't know. That’s not my life”. 

Visiting my parents house for dinner, I admire, on their wall, a Victorian engraving I hope will get passed down to me: it is a picture of a weeping young woman being led away by a police man and it says “She’s only a lassie who ventured on life’s stormy path, ill advised. Engraved by John Held jar with a heart full of pity.” Ever since I was a little girl, before I was let out in the world way too young, I felt it was about me. I’d like to invite Casey to Shabbat when she’s here. But would I tell them what she does for a living or not? She asks this same question of herself, more than ever of late, in social settings. It is the thing that causes her the most internal struggle, the fissure between pride in her work and fear of judgment. 

I have the urge to tell my ex boyfriend’s favourite porn star that my heart hurts some nights with longing for him and I just, I just loved him. That’s all. So I tell her. And she says the right thing to soothe me. This reaching across the divide towards a woman I should have been afraid of - the porn star your partner wants so much they no longer want you! - is helping me more than any other friendship. It’s very strange. It’s very lovely, as mysterious as what particular visuals and sounds make a viewer climax.

✪✪✪

As she boards the flight to London a day before Jewish New Year, Casey asks if there’s anywhere we could do Rosh Hashana together. She’s not someone who feels remotely oppressed by her religious upbringing, but, by the same token, she hasn’t been to Temple since she moved to L.A. 

Growing up in an Orthodox home, she has fretted about her outfit, and how to make her black pants and blouse most appropriate. But in the event we are greeted, at the Synagogue, by a friendly Trans Woman and a middle aged lady with dyed green hair.

We both agree the young female Rabbi we ended up talking to was wonderful and also, as a secondary thought, extremely hot. The Rabbi has prematurely grey hair, no make up and very long scarlet nails. “There are many ways,” says Casey, as we dissect the Rabbi’s appearance, “to perform femininity”. We are fascinated by how lightly she carries the double bind of being a Rabbi and a young woman, on whom fantasy can therefore be doubly projected - religious and sensual - and are they different things anyway? 

Casey is my ex-boyfriend’s “dreamgirl”, she is many people’s dreamgirl. How does being a dream girl shape your own dreams, dreams being the place we make sense of what troubled us in our waking hours. 

“I don’t even think of myself as a woman”, she says, flatly. “I don’t see myself as having any gender, though I can perform femininity”. 

“Do you see yourself as They/Them?” 

“I’m not sure. There was one day when I was like, I need a label. Like a label for my gender and I looked at like a Wikipedia issue of like 50 different words for like different genders. And ‘Demi Girl’ is the one that I found that most suits me. It feels like me, but also that's not a real word. And so I don't like it because it's not, like...It’s not a real word. It doesn't mean anything”. 

I ask how it felt to be back in Synagogue. 

She sighs. “I wanted it to be more familiar. The parts that did feel familiar were really lovely and feel really comfortable and the parts that were..the words I grew up with but sung to a different tune? I was like, But wait, that's not I want”. 

As I look at it written down, this feels like a story about an imaginary best friend. My ex-boyfriend’s favourite porn star came to life and we went to Synagogue together. 

One night, she takes me to dinner at a fancy Indian restaurant and we each get tipsy on one elegant cocktail. She says she’d like to create a TV show in the vein of ‘Californication’, and when I am unenthusiastic about the programme, she coos, in explanation: “David Duchovny lives HERE” - her small hands make a triangle at her crotch - then adds, a few minutes later, miming the same gesture, “Gillian Anderson lives HERE”. I wonder if the X-Files actors would be happy to see each other again, co-habiting inside Casey’s vagina, or if they’d feel like the villains who are trapped together for all eternity behind a shard of sealed glass at the climax of Superman. 

The X-Files - which she’d watch with her Father - was pivotal for her nascent sexuality, in part because her Dad, a forensic scientist, was an advisor to TV shows and therefore she had tangential access. “My dad at his office, had a signed picture of them. And it was like, a very sexy picture.” 

She agrees, it’s notable that a porn star grew up with a Father who specialised in the minutia - hypnotic and disturbing - of the human body in extreme close up. 

“A lot of my dad's consulting was like DUIs or insurance claims, that sort of thing. And then, occasionally, he'd get, you know, Anna Nicole Smith, someone incredibly interesting.” 

Her Mother passed away from colon cancer. And, “Yes, it did occur to me many years ago that my Mom was sick with colon cancer while I made a living taking dicks up my ass”. 

When she gets back to L.A, she will have a colonoscopy, since it’s a cancer that can be genetic. I tell her I am sorry, that must be a stressful procedure, and she smiles and says “I will find a way to monetise it”. I think it’s like when I say “That hurts HA HA”. But maybe I’m projecting. Like Debbie Harry and Rachel Weisz, Casey has a face shape with a large, clean expanse for a person to project onto. 

After the Indian dinner, we meet up with Chloe Cherry, a former porn star who “got out”, becoming a fan favourite on the HBO drama ‘Euphoria’. When we get to her five star hotel, she is in the “see and be seen” dining room, wearing a track suit and eating lobster macaroni by herself. 

She is delighted to see Casey and to gossip about her old industry. To an outsider, it sounds like your dad talking to another dad about motorways, “Take the A4 to the M25". 

"How often did you shoot for Hussies?” Casey asks her.
Chloe lets her fork pause in front of her plump mouth as she thinks:
“Like three times a month?”
Casey is appalled: “It should have been ten times a month! You were eighteen!” 

I think of the sexually upsetting things that happened to me at that age, and to the close female friends I have. None of us talk about our past the way Casey and Chloe talk about their teen years - how they ought to have been better monetized. It is fascinating to me (who has let the memories of my teenage distress melt on my tongue for decades now, like a never ending hard candy.) 

In contravention of the traditional porn star origin story, Casey’s first time having sex was “lovely”. “He still sends me dick pics now and then”. “Sentimental dick pics!” I cry. “Exactly”. 

The next day, we are eating scones and clotted cream with a friend at The Wolseley, the cavernous art deco walls echoing our conversation. 

I ask about a particular film Casey was in and, instantaneously, her whole body slumps. “I have PTSD from that film. I can’t talk about it”. Our friend hasn’t tuned in to how deeply Casey is collapsing in on herself and he begins to talk about the back story to the film. “Not in front of me”, she pleads, but she’s so quiet he can barely hear her. 

I jump in, in my best decisive Mother voice: 

“Hey! Casey! Would you rather have a bunny rabbit or a cat?” 

Our friend looks confused, as she answers me: “A bunny. I had one when I was little.” 

“Was it small or giant?” 

“It was normal size. His name was Basil”. 

She pauses. 

“He’s my first memory. I think around two. I had to give him away when we moved from Baltimore to Gainesville.” 

“Where did Basil go?”

She’s starting to sit straighter.

“To a family friend. I got updates. I think he lived until I was around seven”. 

She takes a small bite of scone, visibly back in her body. I ask the next day if she knew I was doing a Mom Jedi mind trick on her, and that pet talk always catches the attention of a despairing child. “I knew what you were doing, “ she says, “And I appreciated it”. 

✪✪✪

Casey knows she does not want children, and got herself sterilised some time ago. 

I have tried to be a good Mother, to know what is my daughter’s and what is mine - our clothes, our interests, our fears. It’s the hardest thing to keep track of, those boundaries, when you come from the same body and then are shrunk to a single parent house hold. I remain very, very aware of her bad luck that I am the only single parent in class. 

Past midnight, a dad to whom I’ve been polite on a school trip, unexpectedly messages me to say what a hard time he’s having in his marriage and that he just needs to be held. I throw the phone down as if it’s a nest of spiders. I go to bed shaken and wake up outraged. What fantasy is he projecting on to me that makes him think I’m a woman to whom he can send such a message? 

Maybe I have an open face? Maybe I have an overflowing body, that makes men think that I’m emotionally messy? Maybe it’s to do with the openness with which I’ve written my books, the content of which is all online? I realized, very recently, that the Mother at school who turned on me so suddenly, had also, perhaps, been been projecting on to me, what she’d wanted me to be. And that I hadn’t turned out to be who she’d decided I was. As audiences do when they fantasise about a movie star. Or a porn star. 

In a London pub on a rainy morning, right before she goes back to the airport, Casey and I compare the worst pictures of ourselves available on google. She pulls one up on her phone and hands it to me. It has been taken behind the scenes on a set and is a picture of her having water inserted into her vagina via a rubber tube, so she can fake squirting. She sighs. “They didn’t even colour grade it”. 

I pull up a portrait that was on the cover of a newspaper supplement to go with an excerpt from my last book. I look fifty-five. The photographer who took it was so young and beautiful, I was ashamed to ask if there was anything he could do to make me look less old. “But I guess there wasn’t”, I say. Casey studies it. 

“You don’t look old. You look very, very sad”, she says and I am touched. That was the saddest year I’d ever had. Then she fact checks these pages and asks me to note that fisting refers to her inserting her hand into a woman’s ass, not into their vagina. She watches me make the correction, and leans forward:

“But you can keep it the way it was if that’s how your mind had conjured it”.

As Casey is driven away, I think of her climbing up the rocks, a champion concentrating on the places to put her fingers. Men - and women - watching her body as she climbs: from one perspective you are this, from another that, to one viewer you are safe, to another reckless. Everyone seeing you from different angles you couldn’t have imagined, because you were micro focused on how, in your incremental movements, you could find a way to stay safe and get higher. 

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.