Covering the business of sex: An interview with Susannah Breslin
Okay, I managed to connect with Susannah Breslin through Twitter. I’ve never heard of her but it took me only a quick glance through her profile to see a lot of interesting content, Tweets, and shares.
For those of you who don’t know who Susannah Breslin is — Susannah is an American journalist and writer who happens to also cover the business of sex for Forbes, which sounds very much interesting to me.
She accepted my request and answered a couple of questions I thought are going to be interesting to all of us. Enjoy!
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how covering sex for mainstream publication like Forbes looks like?
I’ve been covering the sex beat since 1997. I grew up in the Bay Area, graduated with a degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and then went to graduate school for writing in Chicago.
When I came back to the Bay Area, I was teaching English at community colleges, which was super boring, but the internet was becoming this big thing. So myself and two friends from grad school created this website we called The Postfeminist Playground, where we published all kinds of interesting writing.
I had been writing fiction that had some sex in it, and then I got interested in writing about sex as a journalist. In the summer of 1997, I went to a strip club in San Francisco with a couple friends, and I was completely fascinated. All the men were staring at the woman on the stage, and she seemed to have all this power over them.
After that I interviewed Jenna Jameson, who was becoming a big porn star, and saw her and another porn star Jill Kelly dance at the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre. Jenna’s publicist said, hey, if you’re ever in LA, come visit a porn set, and not long after that I was standing in a parking lot near downtown LA watching half a dozen porn stars having an orgy on a fire truck. I was just fascinated by this surreal world. I moved to LA.
And then I became a culture writer, generally, but I focused on sex, and my primary interest was writing about Porn Valley, which is a really interesting place, and was really exploding and growing very quickly and crossing over to be mainstream at the time, mostly because of the internet. So I’ve been writing about sex since then. These days, I cover the business of sex for Forbes.com .
My editor at Forbes is really great, and he gives me a lot of leeway in terms of what I write about, so I really appreciate that.
I’ve written about going on a Sugar Daddy website , strip clubs and NFTs , a woman who turns sex dolls into handbags , a porn star social media influencer making seven-figures a year , how strippers and sex workers navigated the pandemic, and an X-rated art installation . I believe the most popular Forbes post I’ve ever written was the hardest thing about being a male porn star .
Even though I write about racy subjects, I keep the content relatively clean. I mean, this is Forbes. I can’t be explicit or crude or offensive. I have to be on brand. Those are the rules.
So I focus on sex, strippers, and porn, to name a few, but through the lens of work, business, and money.
How/why did you decide to become a sex journalist?
I don’t know that I chose this path, per se. It kind of happened. In the late Nineties, there weren’t a lot of women writing about sex.
The most well-known ones were Candace Bushnell, who wrote the “Sex and the City” column that would become the HBO series, and Anka Radakovich, who wrote for Details.
I saw them more as columnists and myself more as a reporter. Less Carrie Bradshaw, more Gay Talese. The year after I moved to LA, I got hired by Playboy TV to be an on-camera reporter on “Sexcetera,” which featured half a dozen sex reporters, of which I was one, covering sex news stories around the world. “Sexcetera” was like “60 Minutes,” but on Viagra.
Each segment we did was about eight minutes, which I seem to recall one of the executive producers saying was how long it took for the presumably male viewer to jack off to it. I described my job as “talking to the camera while people fuck behind me.”
Needless to say, it was a wild gig. A sex club in Amsterdam where people were getting fisted on stage. A gangbang in a London hotel room. Porn stars and their fans on a XXX vacation in Mexico. I guess I just like how crazy all these worlds I get to go into are. I find most things pretty boring. You do a boring job, or you watch a boring TV show, or you talk to boring people. These sex territories aren’t like that.
They’re, like, exploding with energy, and sometimes fraught with danger, and occupy spaces of transgression. I am not on some kind of mission to educate people about sex or speak truth to power, but I would like to be the Virgil to the reader’s Dante as we venture together into the inferno of … lust, you could say.
These spaces are hidden, marginalized, shadowed. I want to bring them into the light. They reflect our own hidden deepest desires. Right?
How do you see the role of media in shaping public attitudes and conversations about sex and relationships?
Mostly I think popular media is pretty dull when it comes to sex and relationships. I mean, no one is jacking off to “Emily in Paris.” (Or are they?)
A movie came out last year called “Pleasure.” It’s a drama that follows a young woman getting into the porn business.
It uses both mainstream actors and people who actually work in the adult movie industry. I found that interesting. It was edgy.
The new HBO series “Sex Diaries” is awful.
So I think that how commercial everything has become hasn’t really done much to shape the public’s attitudes towards sex. To me, sex still feels really taboo.
Presumably, that connotes a sense that sex is something shameful. But it isn’t.
Can you share your favorite and/or impactful pieces of content that you have published?
My favorite thing I’ve written is “ They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They? “ It’s a 10,000-word exposé of the Great Recession’s impact on the adult movie industry.
I wrote it in 2009 for a big media platform, but the editor wanted to fuck up my words and screw up the piece, so I took it back and self-published it. It has some pretty raunchy stuff in it, but it also, I think, captured some of the tensions and fears in that space when it was at an economic low point.
How do you think the conversation around sex and relationships has changed in recent years, and where do you see it headed in the future?
I guess I don’t know what the conversation about sex is about.
“Conversation about sex” isn’t really of interest to me. I guess that sounds like something a millennial would be really into, like, parsing sex in some hyper-intellectual way and using words like discourse and safe space, and then my eyes roll back in my head.
The reality is that there’s conversations about sex, and then there’s what turns you on. Former: snore. Latter: yes.
You also have a newsletter called “The Reverse Cowgirl.” Could you tell us more about that and what readers can expect to find in it?
Yes, my Substack newsletter is The Reverse Cowgirl . It features all the sex news that’s fit to print. It gives readers a behind the scenes look at what I do, there’ll be more long-form investigative work being published, as well, and it has photos by me of the curious places that I visit in my sexplorations.
The Reverse Cowgirl was originally a blog that I founded in 2002 that was very popular and was one of the very first sex blogs ever.
In your opinion, what are some common misconceptions or misunderstandings about sex and relationships that you encounter in your work?
As far as misconceptions about sex, I think David Fincher cleared things up pretty well here : “I think people are perverts. That’s the foundation of my career.”
Same, Mr. Fincher, same. I think people are animals, are perverts, are freaks.
But it’s not OK to be an animal, or a pervert, or a freak. So people pretend they’re a suit, or a dress, or a job. Why? It’s so lame to pretend. Just go be a freak. You’ll be happier for it.
How do you think social media and technology have affected the way we think about and engage with sex and relationships?
Tech is a marvel that has done a lot to help spread sex information around the globe and make it accessible to everyone.
As far as using tech to have sex, i.e. teledildonics , we have a long way to go. I did this story for The Atlantic awhile back where I visited this company making virtual reality pornography, and the virtual male character’s penis came off and moved around.
That’s just not sexy. Well, maybe it is to somebody.
To wrap it up: As a journalist covering sex, what impact do you hope your work will have on your readers?
I don’t know what kind of impact my work has, if any. I like to think I present the story, and it’s up to the reader to decide how they want to feel about it. I hope they feel energized, less dead, not so alone.
If you want to see/read more of Susannah Breslin’s work, be sure to follow her on Twitter.
