Dreamgirl: Chapter 1 Explores Making Friends with Your Partner’s Favourite Porn Star
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.
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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.
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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.
