by Sarah D. Bunting
(6/21/00)

Along with run-of-the-mill entries like "administrative assistant" and "associate project coordinator," my resume sports a couple of serious career oddities -- bullets like "pizza delivery girl," "pool tester," and "Penthouse proofreader." Well, to tell the truth, I've had to fudge that last one a bit so that it reads "proofreader, General Media Inc.," or else prospective employers would shudder and crumple my c.v. into a ball. But I did spend two years proofreading for Penthouse magazine, and nothing brings cocktail-party conversation to a screeching halt faster than this revelation.

I took the job shortly after striking out on my own as a freelance writer and editor. The sister of a friend of mine from my old job worked as the editorial manager at Penthouse, and she hooked me up with the proofreading gig at fifteen dollars an hour. I wasn't a consumer of pornography -- it doesn't do much for me, generally speaking -- but I wasn't morally opposed to it either. Besides, for the right price I would have read just about anything. So, two or three times a week, I walked to the editorial offices in midtown, picked up an innocent-looking interoffice manila envelope, and took it home with me, to ensure that the porn within contained no typographical errors.

I had no idea what to expect when I first started. Would I have to wade through Penthouse Pets as they writhed on velvet banquettes in order to reach the front desk and collect the proofs? (No. The office couldn't look more conservative and generic if it tried.) Did Penthouse have "articles" like Playboy does? (Yes, but as a "special sections" proofreader, I edited primarily the infamous letters and other sexual content.) Should I bother making grammatical corrections? (Not after the first time, when I changed "loan" to "lend" on a proof and got in return a scathing note from the section editor telling me to stick to spotting dropped commas.) How would dealing with sexually explicit words and images affect me?

It didn't affect me much, actually. Certain content brought me up short at first; I didn't consider myself a prude by any means, but the sheer frankness of the material took getting used to. So did a few of the practices that the letter-writers described. If a woman wanted to service multiple partners while her husband caught the whole thing on camcorder, fine, but I found scenarios like that -- not to mention the veritable tidal wave of bodily fluids in every issue -- off-putting in the beginning. The shock wore off pretty quickly, though, because beneath the crude thrusting and moaning in the average Penthouse letter beats a heart of the most patent absurdity.

I can attest that the letters come from actual people, but the editors mark them up heavily, which results in accounts of sex that nobody on Earth has ever really had. After undergoing the blue pencil, the letters inevitably starred impossibly beautiful people with impossibly perfect figures; often, forty-year-old women with three kids would have hourglass figures and no wrinkles or stretch marks anywhere. Everyone had Brobdingnagian breasts and penises, endless stamina and the urge to smear various sauces and preserves all over their loved ones and lick them from head to toe. Nobody used birth control or protection against STDs. Nobody honored monogamous commitments, or minded that their spouses hadn't honored them. Nobody ever had a headache, nobody thought twice about getting horizontal and sticky on top of important paperwork and nobody blinked at the prospect of having sex in extremely public places. I had always found porn cheesy and laughable, and Penthouse wasn't any different. After awhile, though, it became just work, a job like any other.

Once in a great while, a well-written and genuinely erotic letter would sneak into the daily packet, and those sometimes aroused me. More often, a truly disgusting letter would really push the limits of my open-mindedness. Usually, though, the letters didn't provoke much of a reaction at all -- a raised eyebrow, maybe, or a slight blanch, but again, I had a job to do, and I concentrated on doing it.

The fact that I had this job, however, got interesting reactions from other people. Most men stared at me for a split second, then practically shouted, "No way! Can you get me a job there?" while most women pasted on a brittle smile and tried not to seem disapproving as they murmured, "Oh. Really." My parents didn't like it, but my tattoos had softened this type of blow for them; my boyfriend, acquired at about the same time as the proofreading job, said he did like it. I found out after I quit that, in fact, he didn't. On one level, he admired me for doing it, but it weirded him out for reasons he couldn't explain.

Two years passed, and it started to weird me out too. For one thing, the editors had begun passing sterner stuff along to me -- bestiality, bondage, that kind of thing -- and the material crossed my threshold of tolerance more and more often. For another thing, I'd started to question what it meant for a woman to work in the adult-entertainment industry, even in a tangential job like mine. When my boyfriend's super-strait-laced parents found out about my position at Penthouse (don't ask how that happened), it disturbed them deeply, and although they never said a word about it to my face, they demanded of my boyfriend, "How can Sarah work at that place and still call herself a feminist?"

My honey relayed this comment to me, and at the time, I blew it off. The way I saw it, I could do the job because of my pro-woman beliefs, not in spite of them. Unfortunately, that distinction became less and less clear as time went on, and although Penthouse didn't objectify or degrade women as flagrantly as some of its competitors, it did fetishize women in a way that I felt uncomfortable with as time went on. The weird overtones of sadomasochism in most of the photo spreads; the monomaniacal emphasis on size and performance; the implication that, while "girl-on-girl action" was a turn-on, two men sleeping together was a shameful lapse; the recurring Madonna-whore theme, with the emphasis almost always placed on "whore" -- I ignored all these things for a long time, but eventually I had to admit that they bothered me. The fact that it hadn't bothered me for so long bothered me more than anything -- that, and a truly hair-raising letter involving a golden retriever and nipple clamps. At that point, I asked for a raise, and when I didn't get one, I gave notice and quit.

I never have figured out exactly what it means for a woman to work in the adult-entertainment industry. (In my particular case, I think it "meant" that the editors, who knew the relative effects of the copy on men, only hired women as proofreaders and copy editors.) As a proofreader, I thought I could keep the issues at a reasonably safe distance, and I imagine that my reasons for taking (and keeping) the job sound somewhat similar to those of any other woman in the field -- namely, that I needed the money and therefore would tolerate a certain degree of sleaziness. In the end, though, I couldn't pretend that I didn't feel complicit in what pornography does. Pornography (the stuff aimed at straight men, in any case) encourages fantasy, and more specifically it encourages unrealistic expectations of how women look and what women do. I could laugh off the depictions of bachelor parties at which twenty men lined up to "pull a train on" the stripper, because I knew that a fourteen-year-old in Wichita had probably written the letter, but at the same time, I found it disturbing that men would fantasize about an encounter like this -- one which comes close to an assault.

I bumped right up against straight male fantasy in my Penthouse job, and it could get pretty depressing sometimes. The women in the letters so seldom had minds of their own, so seldom asserted themselves, that I frequently had to prevent myself from writing "get a backbone, girlfriend" in the margin; even the women who did take the lead were presented as somewhat sluttish anomalies who, while good for a business-trip fling, wouldn't make good wives.

I'm not against pornography, but I think it can do harm when people forget that it isn't real, and working at Penthouse, the line had started to blur for me. So while I don't regret having worked there, I don't regret giving up the job when I did either. I can't deny one thing, though -- I still can't beat it in the small-talk department.