Taste Test

Cory Bradshaw describes the art and agony involved in making amateur porn in an essay for LARB Quarterly no. 45: “Submission.”

By Cory BradshawJuly 13, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

• Gender & Sexuality

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 45: Submission. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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BROSEPH AND DINO jointly penetrate me from behind, my sphincter clinging to their members like a tattered Chinese finger trap. Their nuts clap against me as though belly flopping into the shallow end of my anus. Talk about wrecking balls. The pain is exquisite. I moan, unintentionally alerting Broseph to my throat’s vacancy. My hole plops like a wet cork as he withdraws. Unacceptable, it seems to say. A wall of abs, Broseph’s pendulum swinging in front of me with hypnotic authority. “Open up.”

Horse, carrot. Normally I would chomp, but in this instant I’m suddenly taken, with morbid agog, by my surroundings. As if waking up from a dream only to enter a new-build nightmare. Broseph’s walls are adorned with bad acrylic paintings, all preposterous portraits of himself performing the Kama Sutra and invasive close-ups of various scrotums. Kimdio vases with fake dracaena litter equally ersatz marble countertops, brass detailing, recessed lighting. The pièce—I should say pieces—de résistance: no fewer than 12 LEGO models of the Death Star orbiting the premises. Absorbed in my failure to recognize these aberrations earlier, I force a smile in a desperate attempt to stifle my laughter. This is not good form with your dom, less still in front of the camera, so he smacks me clean across the face.

Oh. Didn’t love that. The slap rings in my ears so loud I almost don’t hear him double down. “Cory, I said ‘open up.’” The show must go on, I guess. Certainly easier than reading him the riot act. It’s not like there’s an intimacy coordinator—this is porn. He and Dino are tag-teaming me on his sofa, their iPhones our only witnesses. I look up through stars at what I think is his face and pout emphatically. “Yes, Daddy,” I coo, slackening my jaw.

We cast some of the raw footage to Broseph’s TV. I like what I’m seeing, save for my hairline’s losing battle with said lighting. But as the relative ingénue, if porn can be said to have such a thing, I wait for the veterans’ feedback. I look from the screen to Broseph to Dino. They smirk at one another.

“You really have to advocate for yourself in this industry,” Broseph tells me, absently scratching his nutsack. “Otherwise people will really take advantage of you.”

“For sure,” I say, his handprint incandescent on my face.

We continue reviewing. There’s something surreal about watching 450 pounds of man unrelentingly pound my guts out. My ass and throat seesaw on their rods, skewering themselves. They salt my skin with their sweat, baste their loads deep inside me. Seasoned and stuffed. All that’s missing is a grill. Many a fringe psychoanalyst has equated gay sex to a kind of death, but murder? Someone call PETA because this kitty is getting beaten.

Broseph and Dino are glued to the screen. I agree it’s hot, but I do not share their rapture. Bearing witness to my own bodily destruction is always disconcerting, however inspired I may be by my resilience (or gall). Not to mention there’s something baseline hallucinogenic about watching something take place in the room in which I’m sitting. I forget where I am while becoming extremely aware, again, of my surroundings. A pastiche of millennial customaries and slopping anus spill from the simulacrum, metastasizing, consuming the room. An ouroboros of image, a faggot eating his own ass. I’m spiraling down a rabbit hole, or my own butthole, Death Stars in quick pursuit with kaleidoscopic fury.

I leap up despite my dizziness, catching myself on Broseph’s ergonomic desk. I stumble toward the screen, frantically motioning to stop the video. The pause freezes on the slap, Broseph’s hand rippling across my face in 1080p.

I turn to my spit roasters. I’ve sucked the air right out of their room; they’re holding their breath. My distorted visage illuminates me from behind, glinting like diamonds off the dried cum encasing my body, shining a halo above my head. Traditionally, the fallen angel is the sinner, not the martyr, but the former is actually busy creeping into the frame. Hovering above my gelatinous face is a Death Star, preparing to invade. The galaxy, sure, but my content? Now that’s a slap in the face.

“Can we crop this shot?” I ask. The real world, in all its sensorial horror, returns. My arteries jet-stream blood into my veins, a cold sweat coalesces on my neck. The stench of sex steams off Broseph’s and Dino’s massive bodices, suddenly suffocating. Now I’m the one holding my breath.

“You mean cut it?” Broseph asks. “Was the slap too much?”

Of course it was, but we have far graver issues at hand. “No, I meant crop,” I reply, ignoring the second question.

“You look great, babe,” Dino assures me.

“Oh, I know!” I squeak. I can feel the Empire looming behind me.

“I agree,” Broseph says, “and I’m glad you do, too, but if there’s something you don’t like about the video, you can tell us. Advocate!” He beckons me back to the couch, where he buries me in his armpit. He reeks of body odor and affection. I like it. “Do you want me to cut the slap?”

Despite the avalanche of evidence before me, I’m struck by their myopia. I find the arrival of a children’s toy into our threesome so gauche as to be neutering; I can’t imagine cumming alongside Disney memorabilia. Does advocating for myself include my design sensibilities? Either way, I can’t do so without sounding like a cunt, so I downshift.

“I was just caught off guard by the Death thing—”

“Death Star.” Broseph interjects.

“Right. It’s like it’s actually intercepting the shot.” Sometimes the best place to hide something is in plain sight. “Trippy!”

“Oh my god, right?” Broseph exclaims. “It’s, like, ready to join in. A subscriber actually messaged me once telling me it turns him on. I get a lot of Star Wars fans. Don’t you love that?”

“For sure.”

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Porn’s ability to signal authenticity is often tantamount to its success. This is not always the case—ever heard of tentacle porn? Ahegao? The Japanese have fantasy on lock—but there is a definitive appeal and market, speaking from experience. Shot on iPhones in off-the-shelf gentroboxes, my consortium of ripped but otherwise forgettable WeHo himbos feels so close my subscribers can almost taste them. Historically, amateur porn has been defined by this kind of austerity, the lack of crew engendering a sort of intimacy among those on-screen and with those off of it. OnlyFans and its subscription model have complicated this category, namely by enabling astronomical cash flows to a select, albeit relatively large, cohort of performers. The lines between professional and amateur are blurred, or at least being redrawn, and we find ourselves suddenly collaborating across webs of vastly disparate income, experience, and, as is most evident to me, taste. It can all be said to be “authentic,” I guess, though there’s the question of whose authenticity prevails.

You can probably guess. Some axes of submission are endemic to the form: viewers submit to me, via subscription; I submit to many a top; we all submit to the camera. Explicit power imbalances—top/bottom, dom/sub—alongside more latent but equally pertinent asymmetries in socioeconomic class, industry status, morphology, and my personal favorite, intelligence, come into play. Granted, most of this is not materially serious—my guess is that most viewers’ relationship to porn starts and ends at its ability to get them off, and creators are notoriously lacking any sort of shared political ethos. That slap hurt like hell and shouldn’t have happened, but I’m not convinced that I find myself on the wrong end of any intelligible power play. Besides, it did kinda turn me on. Horny jail and woke hell for me, I guess. I’m way more perturbed by that fucking Death Star.

Porn is rarely said to be au courant, but it did used to be camp: black leather and high-contrast textiles, new money maximalism, occasionally Orientalism, the “pornstache.” Its clear semiotic language was a sign of the times: financially costly to produce, reputationally costly to its participants. Some of these motifs carry through to today with varying levels of efficacy, though they no longer constitute a coherent visual vernacular. More subtle questions of techne prevail: angles and lighting known to exaggerate certain features (or actions) and elementary tricks of cinema like rubbing baby oil all over our bodies before filming. These trompe l’oeils are flimsy and hardly relegated to just porn. Alongside the proliferation of studios and wider acceptance of the form toward the turn of the century, porn became increasingly, visibly budget-friendly. By the advent of retrovirals, everyone seemed to be getting fucked on the same casting couch, confirming that porn’s culminating aesthetic vision is actually a total lack thereof.

One might have thought the iPhone, or the move into private bedrooms, would allow for a flowering of some aesthetic sensibility. In exceptional cases, it has—the crunchy granola Colorado daddy who fucks everyone off-trail, the scorchingly high-def POV of the London ginger with a baguette between his legs. From the vantage point of political economy, this makes sense: the porn studio has mostly dissolved as an intermediary; we all now carry literal computers with tripartite lens cameras in our pockets. Production has become more accessible, and OnlyFans has consecrated this decentralization of adult content creation in the subscription model, bestowing (with the help of some new, inventive strains of moral panic) a correspondingly fresh title: “content creator.” Workers seizing the means of production! The future is now, except it isn’t. The mistake of conflating decentralization with democratization, let alone authority, is an old one. As with all exercises in decentralization, power ends up concentrated. To my knowledge, porn actors were typically hired for their fat hogs, accommodating holes, and white-hot sex appeal before their artistic vision. Now, aesthetics are determined by industry priors, extant reach, and access to money and materials—not creative prowess. A race to the middle ensues. In convincing the muses they’re auteurs, we’ve forgotten that they’re historically separate for a reason: you famously can’t teach taste. What was presumed to be the logical graduation of adult content into uncharted territories of authenticity has actually been a regression to the insipid placelessness of the early aughts. The homogeneity is anesthetizing. This might be ungenerous, but I’m not sure how else to account for today’s creators’ mass case of cataracts. Maybe that’s why it took me so long to recognize Broseph’s sordid state of affairs. The ennui is making me blind.

This is horrible for me, an aspiring star in the genre, but also for viewers, who are now subject to rather guileless attempts at dick-forward creativity. Porn has always suffered from a crisis of sensibility, one that’s now compounded by the misconception that such a sensibility has been found. I recently made a video with a user whose wall was emblazoned by a bespoke neon sign of their Twitter handle, @Time4CakeXXX, their bed strewn with complementary dessert plushies. I felt like I was giving backshots to Strawberry Shortcake. I’m in no position to judge this twink on the basis of financial success—his monthly take-home is about half my day job’s annual salary—but that does little to ameliorate my psychological distress. Getting slapped on camera I can handle, but getting slapped on West Elm? The horrors are indescribable.

I lied—they are easily, viscerally describable. Enter Bonnie Blue, the girl who recently “broke the record”—verified by whom, one wonders—for getting fucked by the most men ever in 12 hours (1,057). Sign up for her OnlyFans and you immediately get a link to the video ($45) teabagging the caption “THE GANG BANG THAT MADE ME MILLIONS!!!” Beyond stadium-worthy gang bangs, Bonnie cheats with married men, fucks sons and fathers concomitantly, and takes virginities like some nymphomaniacal Rumpelstiltskin. Her whole thing is gratuity. The Twitterarti predictably recoil and debate her morality, oblivious to the onslaught of additional traffic they drive to her page. Bonnie is sacrificing a lot, presumably, to be the world’s most reviled whore, but what’s submission to the tune of, allegedly, $2 million a month? She leaned in, she can’t get up, and she doesn’t have to—she can pay a palanquin of Stapleford’s finest to carry her home to mom and dad (who are “very supportive”).

For Bonnie, submission and girlbossing are evidently one and the same, and if there’s one thing that defines girlbossing, it’s caring more about the payout than the product. Seems most porn stars feel the same. Outside of a coterie of bona fide exhibitionists, most people, myself included, are significantly motivated to make porn for the money. Immortalization has never been a goal of mine, and watching myself get fucked feels like seeing a ghost: he’s moaning and moving and all, but he’s technically dead. That version of me has come and gone, exists now only as a legacy for your viewing pleasure. I might like how I look, even go so far as to say I’m proud of my work, but it’s probably always going to feel weird. In what has become an extremely saturated market, the creator with vision succeeds not only because he sets himself apart but because in doing so he mediates porn’s uncanniness. He doesn’t just sell himself; he sells a signature. John Hancock is a name, but it’s also a stand-in: for prominence, for audacity, for some je ne sais quois beyond oneself. Bonnie’s doing the absolute most is more a cross to bear than a trademark, but at least she has one. As much as I love getting DPed, dubious consent included, experiencing as much under the aegis of franchise baubles, besieged by the violent affronts of Pier 1 Imports, is not.

To be fair, I’m part of the problem. I’m complicit. I should have turned on my heel the second I saw the gray wood laminate. If I want something done right, I’ve gotta do it myself. Sure, but how do I get there? Porn isn’t cinema, but it has a similarly deleterious cost of entry—at least to do it my way. I’ve got the camera in my pocket but I can’t afford to film in far-flung locales, and however gorgeous my bedroom, I can’t exactly host—I have four roommates. (I do anyway, to what I assume is their chagrin.) Besides, porn viewers are voracious, needy little piranhas—I film as often as I can, with only enough rest to ensure my dick and hole don’t end up overbuffed, but it never feels like enough. I am not immune to the coarse grind of capital; that gray wood floor starts looking real cute in the face of a heavy check/dick. Like everyone, I have nonnegotiables—no bodily fluids, no TikTok dances—but maybe a couple of stacks would beg to differ. That is to say: Most of us leave part of our egos at the door when we arrive at work, and we often leave more when the pay rate goes up. I just happen to show up naked and my boss makes me cum.

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I haven’t seen Star Wars, but if my understanding is correct, the Death Star is some sort of Machiavellian intergalactic war machine designed to suppress dissent and induce fear. It is a military weapon of subordination. I think people view porn as equally intimidating, a predatory industry that targets young twinks and women in increasingly unconscionable ways. It’s true that porn is a dark and scary place, that its alluring financial prospects cloud the landscape of one’s motivation for being there, but none of this is irreconcilable with the fact that the great majority of young people who make porn do so because they want to. They may be precocious, they may regret the decision, but it is one ultimately driven by agency. Submission—to others, to being seen, to what have you—is absolutely part of the game, but the rules are often illegible from the outside. For me, the principal cost of doing business is my aborted reputation as a tastemaker. With a crumb of luck and a lot of effort, this may be reconcilable, but that’s not really the point. A little humility goes a long way. When we commodify ourselves, the lived experience that precedes becomes inscrutable. Reality can’t exist outside time, and porn is fundamentally a project in challenging that fact. Contrary to popular belief, that’s what makes it obscene—not the penetration, but its dissemination across spaces and timelines it was never supposed to touch. What you see is not me but a fantasy of me billed as myself. I mean this down to the letter—Cory’s not my real name. Cory is the ghost in your spank bank, the version of me that you pay to see. Authenticity as a brand is a paradox. Cory and I share important traits—moral flippancy, a love of writing, an insatiable libido—but all aesthetics are projections; they demand a canvas. However close they may get, the projector and the canvas cannot touch; otherwise, you’ll see nothing at all.

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Featured image: Ryan Robichaux. Rough Housing, 2023. Courtesy of the artist. Image has been cropped.