“I felt romantic towards her as I do towards all my friends”: Dreamgirl Chapter 3
Words: Emma Forrest
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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.
“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.”
“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.
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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.