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John d’Addario
The Honcho of Fleshbot.com comes clean.
Interview by Peter Landau
There is a blog empire coming to a computer near you, and its many tentacles all grow from the Gawker Media hub. But all those sites were just practice for the blog to end all blogs, the porn blog that is the go-to site for industry insiders and sex-crazed fans. Perverts on the Web unite at the great Fleshbot.com.
Updated various times a day, with everything from DVD reviews to the first press on the newest amateur stars of steamy streaming video and every fetish in-between, Fleshbot does all the work so all you have to do is whack off. But if editor John d’Addario has his way, you may end up using the sexiest organ, your brain . . . at least after you drain that harder organ a bit further south.
But Fleshbot is an ever-evolving entity, having recently branched out to distribute the rarely seen Ed Wood hardcore classic Nercomania, available on its site. Besides other X-rated Woodies, d’Addario promises original DVD content, produced by the site, which will be available soon. “Keep watching,” he teases.
Fleshbot is off the usual porn track. The one-man operation is located in the dirty south, New Orleans to be exact, and in the midst of Mardi Gras partying d’Addario managed to find time to talk on the phone about his earliest taboo porn incident, what is too sick for even Fleshbot to post, and the dilemma of having too much porn to watch in a lifetime. Poor guy . . .
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Where’d the name come from?
For that you’ll have to ask Nick Denton, the publisher. We had tossed around a couple of alternative names when he was getting ready to launch the site. After saying that, I can’t remember what they were because it was so long ago [laughs].
He wanted something that would combine something sexy and something techno, because that’s sort of what the focus of the site is all about. If you read our little about blurb it’s all the porn and sex culture that digital technology has made possible. So Fleshbot pretty much sums that all up in one pretty, nice package.
How’d you get so lucky to do this for a living?
I ask myself that all the time. My undergraduate major was in Medieval English literature. I went to grad school for art history, concentrating on nineteenth-century visual culture and photography. My first couple of jobs out of college were working at art galleries in New York, and I was actually a museum educator at the Metropolitan Museum for almost five years. I ran a photography gallery down here in New Orleans.
So basically nothing in my past had much to do with porn. That said, studying art history and being around visual culture and selling photography, I always liked art history because you were able to look at a painting or photograph or drawing and be able to sort of tell what was going on in the culture that produced it at a particular time. I think you can totally do that with porn as well. It’s primarily a visual culture, but it tells a lot about the society that makes it.
There is a linear line . . .
Sort of, I guess. As far as Nick thinking I’d be good for it. When I was in grad school in the mid-’90s, I was in Columbia and I started my own website. I was lucky enough to get Jonno.com--Jonno is just a college nickname that kind of stuck, and a lot of people call me that. I was doing some part-time work at an ISP in New York, this was, God, like, 1996 or something, so we’re talking the Dark Ages. My boss said, “You should get Jonno.com now, because someday that’s going to be really hard to get.” I remember at the time thinking, “Oh, no, who’s ever going to want domains” [laughs].
But I got it and started a journal, a typical homepage thing that then evolved as these things do into a personal blog. Nick just saw my writing on that. As with most blogs, it had no particular focus. I wrote about just things going on in my life. But I would write about sexy stuff and porn stuff sometimes if they crossed my radar. And he just thought that I would be a good person to handle something like Fleshbot, which by its nature you have to jump around a lot and cover a lot of different stuff. It’s not just about the adult industry. It’s not just about celebrity porn. It’s not just straight. It’s not just gay. It’s all over the map.
That leads to my next question: How do you decide what’s a good fit for the site and what isn’t?
There’s a lot of filtering that has to go on. My canned response to that is things either have to make me laugh, make me think, or turn me on at some level, or feel that it would turn someone on. But basically it has to be something that will inspire me to write fifty to a hundred words about it [laughs]. You come across a site with a bunch of amateur porn pictures, or something like that, yeah it’s fun to look at, but there’s really not much you can say except, “Look, boobies!” That’s two words and I still have ninety-eight to fill up.
It’s trying to make connections with other things. If I can present a site and say, “Well, this sort of relates to something else I talked about before.” Or “Look, there’re a couple of sites that explore such-and-such a thing.” It’s basically stuff that lends itself to some sort of exploration beyond just getting off [laughs]. I certainly hope people do that too, but I think if people just want to get off quick and easy they probably won’t go to a site like Fleshbot. There are other sites that present that sort of stuff just for that reason.
Is it just you?
It’s just me. I write in the first-person plural because the site’s not about me. Obviously, it’s about things that catch my eye. But I thought a more impersonal voice talking about this stuff would take the focus less off of me--not that I mind having focus on me, but when sex and porn are concerned it’s something that lends itself to a more impersonal introduction, to have people feel that they’re discovering this along with me, which they are.
Unless there’s a longer article with a byline, and there’s only been a dozen or two of those of the something like 3,500 posts that I’ve done in the last year.
As far as the research, we get tons of great tips from our readers, from my readers. That helps a lot. I have a lot of people looking out for the site as far as coming across something and being like, “That’d be perfect Fleshbot material.” Which isn’t to say I use every tip that comes into the box, but that’s where a good source of material comes from. But it is a full-time job. I have my little process of what I do to find stuff on what’s going on out there and have my little spies planted here and there to find good stuff.
Has anything surprised, shocked, and disgusted you?
Oh, yeah [laughs]. I’m from New York City originally, so it takes a lot to shock me. But there’s some stuff out on the fringes there . . . especially in the beginning when my explorations would take me a little farther than I would have thought. Finding something more extreme, BDSM stuff.
My main criterion for not including something on Fleshbot is I don’t write about anything having to do with kids, dogs, or poo [laughs].
Aw, that leaves out so much good stuff . . .
It does. The dog thing, there’re a lot of bestiality sites, which people send me that because they think it’s funny. Yeah, there’s an amusing aspect to some of it, but I think it’s a turn-off for 99.99% of the population.
The poo thing, someone just sent me this Brazilian video of women puking into each other’s mouths. It’s the sort of link you send to your buddy and go, “Dude, check this out, this is insane!” But it’s not the sort of thing that beyond the shock factor I find that interesting. That’s why I tend to not cover that.
A lot of people see some of the stuff I do cover on Fleshbot and say, “That’s some crazy shit!” or, “That’s hysterical.” But I try not to make fun of what turns people on because there are a lot of sites for these very particular niche fetishes. From this week I did a post on Peddle Pumping. Are you familiar with that? The main site is called Car Stuck Girls.
Yes, I saw that post. It’s videos of girls stuck in the mud and pushing down on the accelerator.
The Car Stuck Girls site won a Webby Award last year for Oddest Site and people were just like, “Oh, wow, that’s crazy.” But if you do a search for this there are entire communities of fetishists who get off on the sight of women pumping a gas pedal. Who am I, or anyone, to say that that particular fantasy is ridiculous?
You try to stay respectful and not snarky.
There’s time for snark. But most of the time when it comes to these very particular fetishes that there are these whole communities built around . . . if you look at some of these message boards the single message that comes up the most is, “Wow, I never thought I’d find other people who are into (insert fetish here).” They take it seriously, and the Internet is obviously the perfect venue to meet like-minded souls, so I try to stay respectful of stuff like that even if it comes off or people interpret it as being something funny.
I’m curious about the fringe benefits of the job.
Yes, stop by my house sometime and see the boxes of porn that I have here [laughs]. I had a party last week because one of the Mardi Gras parades actually goes right by the corner where I live. I had a bunch of friends over and I had a big box of free porn as party favors.
You must be very popular.
My friends are all now like, “Party at John’s house. Free porn!” Once Fleshbot started gaining momentum and getting a lot of traffic, and when I would post something and studios or producers would see all this traffic coming from this site, I got put on a lot of screener lists. I guess you would consider the free-porn thing as a big fringe benefit. Right now it’s sort of more like a liability because I have all this stuff lying around. There’s not enough time in the world to even fast-forward through all of it, forget about sitting down and actually watching it.
You got to go to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The AIE, the Adult Industry Expo, which involves the AVN Awards, yeah, I went to that for the past two years. I was in Erotica L.A. last June.
Are you treated like a superstar when you go to these things?
It was funny, when I went to the AVN Expo this time last year, in ’04, Fleshbot had only been around for less than two months. It caused a big splash in the blog community because everyone knew who Nick was and Gawker Media and everything. But people who operate within the blog community forget that it’s this really tiny little world [laughs]. It’s a total big fish in a small pond thing.
Going to the expo that year and marching up to people and saying, “Hi, I’m from Fleshbot and Gawker Media.” They’re like, “Who the fuck are you?” This year, though, again because Fleshbot grew pretty much exponentially over the course of ’04, I actually got people coming up to me on the expo floor, seeing my nametag and being like, “Oh my God, you’re from Fleshbot? I love that site!” A lot of PR people, I don’t want to say kissing my ass, but being very, very nice to me.
Is it more a business or do you get any of those fringe benefits like in the early days when the industry was a bunch of horny hippies?
They don’t call it the adult industry for nothing. The emphasis is more on the industry. It’s $10 billion a year, or whatever figure you want to insert, $10 billion seems like the most common one that gets tossed around. People hear you’re going to the porn expo, cool, but it’s a trade show. It’s like going to a farm machinery show with dildos instead of tractors.
No wild parties back at the Fleshbot room?
I’ve been to a couple of wild parties. I tend to treat the whole porn scene as like I’m filming a National Geographic special [laughs]. I live in New Orleans. I’m far removed from the thick of it from porn valley in Chatsworth. I come to these events as an outsider and I just spend a lot of time just watching and taking mental notes and figuring out who people are and stuff like that. I’ve kind of done that with everything in my life, which may be why Nick thought I’d be a good pick for this. I think that outsider status, being physically removed in New Orleans, not being a career porn person, helps the gig a lot as well.
So how’d a nice, educated boy like you first get introduced to the dark, dank world of pornography?
I’d actually written a piece on this for my Web log years ago. Maybe Nick saw that, I don’t know. My earliest porn memory dot-dot-dot the edges of the screen get all fuzzy. My stepdad had this huge stack of Hustler and Screw magazines and newspapers under his bed. I remember, God, in the very earliest stages of puberty, poking around in one’s parents’ bedroom, as kids usually do, and finding all this stuff.
That must have been a shocker. It’s not like finding Playboy.
Right, exactly. It’s funny. My first introduction to porn was Hustler circa 1980. It’s funny because one of the names I remember, the photographer Suze Randall’s stuff a lot. I was a fan of that very stylized, glossy hardcore kind of stuff. Even then I knew that there was a kind of art to it. And then it was really cool when I was in Vegas early this month I got to hang out with Suze, meet her, and we stayed in touch. She’s awesome, like Richard Avedon or somebody.
The Swedish erotica stuff from the early ’80s, all those loops, we were a Betamax household and I still have one, because I actually bought some of these when I was in high school and college I would go down to the old Times Square--I grew up in the Bronx. So I would go down to Times Square and, of course, they’ll sell a sixteen-year-old kid a dirty Betamax tape. I still have some of those around.
Another one of the Betamax tapes I had, probably in high school, was Taboo, the original one on Beta. The reason why I don’t have that is because my parents were gone for the day, or something like that, and that was probably the first X-rated movie I bought. I remember getting all excited, putting it into the Betamax and doing whatever a horny sixteen-year-old boy does with a videotape and started playing and all of a sudden the machine made one of those noises like “Ahhrerrr . . .” It stopped, and I’m like shit. I started to eject it and, of course, our Beta, the heads hadn’t been cleaned, ate the videotape, and it wouldn’t come out. It’s like a teen-movie scenario: The parents are going to come home . . . I just remember being nervous and my parents coming home and just said, “If I’m really honest with you will you not get mad at me?” [laughs]. I told them what happened and they thought it was actually kind of funny. My parents were cool.
Well, what do you expect with a library of Screw and Hustler?
Yeah, exactly, well, it’s funny. I have no idea what my mom thought. My mom is a good Italian Catholic girl from Yonkers. Those are some of my earliest porn memories. And as such I have a great fondness for all the classic ’80s stars, like Ginger Lynn. I actually just got a press release for a party that Ron Jeremy and Vanessa Del Rio are hosting for Valentine’s Day, which I thought was really cool. People don’t talk about Vanessa Del Rio anymore.
There’s Dian Hanson’s book coming out from Taschen.
That’s great. Again, going on the art-history thing, porn does have a history. There is continuity, and the kids today by and large don’t know where a lot of this comes from. I’ve been looking at porn for twenty years now, so I do have a sense of how it’s developed.
So as a guy who’s been looking at porn for two decades, do you buy into the rap that it’s populated by damaged goods?
It’s a curious thing about American culture and we can blame those Puritans for that. Anything that brings us pleasure necessarily has to be bad in some way. So with one hand we’re jerking off to porn while with the other hand we’re censoring it, or saying that it comes from a bad place and it’s exploitative. That’s at the root of the, shall we say, problematic attitude we as Americans have towards porn.
What about from the inside out, the people that are attracted to the industry?
I was talking about this in Las Vegas with a friend, as far as people being abused, look in any industry or any field and there’s always going to be a certain percentage of people that are abused. Look at the fast-food industry if you want to look at people who are exploited by their job.
I think there are things that people criticize porn for doing that’s true in just about any arena you can think of. But because it’s sex and at root our Puritan conscious can’t accept the fact that sex can be something good without there being some kind of thing to castigate about it that’s why we focus on all the bad things about porn.
I wasn’t referring to the Linda Lovelace, “I was abused by the business,” but why so many of the players in the industry come from abusive households, are substance abusers, come for an unhappy place.<
I think it is true, but maybe you could say the same thing about Hollywood. How many of these Hollywood actors and actresses have perfect childhoods? We concentrate on the prevalence of that in porn without thinking that that’s true of everywhere. Because porn stars give the illusion of having their lives more open because they’re doing something intimate on screen, you know, by looking at them and saying they have these really fucked-up childhoods that fulfills our voyeurism in a different way. We’re looking at them fuck on screen, but we can say, “Oh, she was raped by her stepfather and she ran away and blah, blah, blah.”
Yeah, there are plenty of people like that, plenty of fucked-up people in porn. But there are also a lot of smart people in porn, together people in porn, people who made a conscious decision to do this with their lives and are happy with it. That’s something that only relatively recently the mainstream media has been making known.
But there’s a danger there, too. As good as it is to see porn being more accepted, trying to normalize it too much I think is almost just as bad as making it this awful thing. When you normalize something it becomes boring, and porn should always be something that’s a little on the fringes, a little dangerous, has sort of an outlaw aspect to it.
As interesting as it may be to see Nina Hartley and her husband sitting around drinking cups of tea while their dogs scamper around, it kind of destroys the fantasy. Porn is predicated on fantasy. As much as I’d like to see people accepting porn and porn stars, it should be a little bit more mysterious.
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