The line to meet Ron Jeremy moved briskly throughout the night, but was always at least 30 people long. It stretched past mannequins with cartoonish, milk-gallon breasts and a prominent rack of edible underwear at the far end of the enormous, brightly-lit Castle Megastore – a warehouse pornography shop teeming with thousands of images of nudes copulating in every imaginable position.
From 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Dec. 8, 2006, hundreds gathered in Springfield for hugs, handshakes and autographs from a man who many Americans like to watch have sex.
Those who attended ranged from high schoolers to senior citizens, working class to wealthy. They were mostly men, but a great deal of women showed as well; by 8 p.m. half the line was women. The porn icon posed in pictures, shook hands and signed a great many breasts.
“I love boobies,” Jeremy said to one woman.
“I remember him from the early eighties,” another woman said to me. “Who knows, maybe my first kid was conceived to a Ron Jeremy movie.”
Jeremy is compelling for many Americans, as is pornography at large, but some people call Jeremy’s work and the industry he represents exploitative of women.
Ron Jeremy
Jeremy’s nickname is “the hedgehog” for a reason: He looks like one. He’s got bristly black hair greased into a Jheri curl , a big ol’ pot gut and the lumpy face of an old drunk, although, he has said, he’s never abused drugs or alcohol.
“He’s an idol for guys who don’t exactly look great, and he gets to bone, like, the hottest chicks,” said a University student named Chris, who attended with friends and has seen several of Jeremy’s adult films. In his pornographic work, Chris said, “(Jeremy) basically looks the same as with clothes on, except he’s got a huge dong hanging down.”
An online biography reports Ron Jeremy’s “huge dong” at about 10 inches long when erect. Though flaccid, it was clearly visible through his baggy running pants at the signing, and it, in combination with his everyman appearance, drives his fame. He looks sketchy, like nobody, like the school bus driver whose route you hoped you didn’t get. He looks like this, but he’s bedded more than 3,000 women in almost 2,000 films . He could be anyone, but more important for the porn viewer, anyone could be him.
He’s ugly, hung and complicated.
He grew up Ronald Jeremy Hyatt , a nice Jewish boy from New York with a passion for acting. According to interviews and biographies, he eventually made it to the stage, and studied education as something to fall back on. In the mid-seventies he received a masters degree in special education and was a special education teacher in 1978 , when he was first discovered.
His transition from teaching developmentally disabled children to being filmed penetrating thousands of women must have seemed innocuous at the time. A girlfriend of his submitted a nude photograph to Playgirl and the magazine published it in its “Boy Next Door feature. After it was published, Jeremy started receiving and pursuing offers and then more offers, and then even more, snowballing into a career and a couple thousand films.
But nowadays he’s not just a porn star. Like I said, he’s complicated.
In a brief interview at the end of the night, he spoke swiftly but softly, like an authority who cares – like a special education teacher. He was eloquent, charming, likable.
In addition to these store appearances, he introduces bands, DJs, raves and comedy shows and debates anti-porn activists at colleges and universities nationwide. In fact, he only films a couple days out of the month. His day job, he said, is “an ambassador of goodwill,” for the multi-billion-dollar-a-year porn industry – the PR, the spokesman, the face of porn.
He explained that his appearance in Springfield, a city of little significance outside its borders, stems from a deal his production company, Metro Interactive, and Castle Megastores hashed out in which Jeremy appears in the 16 Megastores in western states to drive up sales. And it works. Throughout the evening people kept streaming in and the cash registers kept ringing.
The store’s manager, Marlena Zaragoza, said not only did he skyrocket the usual evening traffic, he brought in people from far and wide and people who normally wouldn’t go to a porn store. There was a group of guys from Portland and even a professional marriage counselor who majored in women’s studies.
Exploitation
I was standing next to an anatomically-exaggerated mannequin, watching Ron Jeremy sign a slightly-toasted, middle-aged woman’s breasts, when I turned and saw a woman standing next to me. She struck up a conversation and told me she was a marriage counselor by trade. She offered her hand to shake and when we did she held mine too long and looked in my eyes intensely enough for me to understand that she wanted more than just conversation. Normally, these gestures may not mean much, but given the environment – surrounded by lingerie, mountains of porno movies and racks of blow-up dolls with “lifelike” receptacles – her intentions seemed clear and became clearer as our conversation progressed.
As we talked, she told me she’d come to the signing randomly with a friend and had some serious problems with porn.
“On a socioeconomic level, it’s exploitation,” she said.
She is against a ban on it – make it illegal and people will produce it illegally, like drugs, she said – but in small-scale, homemade porn productions, which are many, women are taken advantage of or paid for their services in drugs. I haven’t been able to find proof of this, but it makes sense. A young woman has a drug habit, and in exchange for one night of work in front of the camera she gets enough to stay high for a while and someone else makes a killing. Lightly touching my arm, she also said that porn objectifies women.
When I interviewed Ron Jeremy, he avoided addressing that type of exploitation.
“I’ve seen more drugs on mainstream sets than porn sets – they can afford them,” he said (he’s acted in several non-pornographic films). But his porn films are higher-budget; he’s a big name. It’s the small-level productions where there’s no oversight and where it would be easiest to pay the actors in drugs, or not even pay them at all.
In terms of objectification, Jeremy said, “We (the porn industry) don’t actually liberate, but we help. Women actually demand good sex now.”
I told her he said this and she looked in my eyes and said “Well, people are pretty sexually repressed. In general.”
The marriage counselor was right that porn is exploitative, but that argument seemed more a send-up of exploitation’s intractability in the entire structure of our society. I mentioned this to her and she agreed. Ron Jeremy is the “ambassador of goodwill” for an industry that provides a service and also, sometimes, exploits women. But changing the porn industry, regulating it or even shutting it down will not end exploitation. Exploitation is an integral part of the global political and economic system and in interpersonal power relationships. The underlying ideas that drive people, and the system in which we live, have to change drastically before exploitation will end. But I don’t think anyone has figured out how to do this quite yet.
After the marriage counselor and I spoke about this, the signing ended and I told her it was time for me to leave. She offered her hand to shake again, and she held on to mine after we had said goodbye. During a silence she waited for me to ask her out for a drink. I didn’t. As I was walking away she told me to look her up on MySpace, but I haven’t. I was involved with someone else at the time and she was a source. She wanted companionship and I wanted quotes. I got mine, she didn’t. As far as I can tell, our relationship exemplified the exploitation that shapes the porn industry, our world and ourselves. We both wanted something from each other, but only one of us got it.
Contact the freelance editor at eoser@dailyemerald
.com
Porn star Ron Jeremy visits local adult store
Daily Emerald
February 6, 2007
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