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Just as there is a lack of pornography made by women, there is a lack of books about making pornography written by women. Recent nonfiction titles such as Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History and Fiona Vera-Gray’s Women on Porn have sought to address the silence and moral confusion, while Rufi Thorpe’s novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles imagined a student mum paying her way with OnlyFans.
Now Allie Rowbottom, author of a memoir, Jell-O Girls, and a novel, Aesthetica, braves the dicey terrain in her sleazy, cinematic second novel. Published into a contemporary landscape where algorithms promote increasingly extreme content, Lovers XXX takes us to the so-called golden age of the Los Angeles porn industry, through the eyes of two teenage runaways who trade troubled homes for big-city dreams.
The obvious preoccupations of any porn industry narrative are: how do you get into it? What is it like? And how do you get out? Rowbottom answers these questions and more in a hurtling trip through LA’s early 1980s underworld. It’s a neon-lit, tobacco-stained scene as dusted with cocaine and packed with toupeed men touting “modelling” work as your wildest Boogie Nights fantasies might conjure; a place where desire is shaped by men, for men, yet which runs on an endless supply of disposable women.
The first half follows 18-year-old Jude, who washes up in an LA reeling from the crimes of the Hillside Stranglers – two serial killers who murdered 10 young women between 1977 and 1978 – to look for her friend Winnie, who arrived two years earlier. Immediately, it is clear that Rowbottom will not permit boredom, as Jude is snared by handsome wrong ’un Laird, who feeds her heroin and persuades her to hold up a liquor store.
Eventually, Jude locates Winnie dancing at a strip club, viewing it as material for her literary aspirations. Winnie gets Jude bartending work and a room in her cabin, which is let by her boss, Brad, a club owner and porn baron riding high on the VHS boom. Jude is at ease with her sexuality, and, despite Winnie’s disdain, begins doing nude shoots, lured by “Video Vixen” Cherry Lynn, the jewel in the crown of Brad’s empire. Yet no sooner has success arrived than it curdles, pitting the girls against one another. As gritty realities crowd in – STIs, addiction, a police crackdown – tensions build to a crisis from which there is no turning back.
The novel uses a mirroring structure, the first half opening with Jude searching for Winnie and the second with Winnie, 30 years later, on a mission to discover what happened to Jude, who vanishes in 1984. As Winnie retraces Jude’s steps, she must confront the industry she has struggled to outrun.
This duality, and Jude and Winnie’s divergent journeys, reflects the contrasting experiences of performers in this period. Rowbottom drew inspiration from real figures such as Traci Lords. Some – like Jude, who views porn as “her destiny, her art” – felt empowered by the celebrity treatment and paycheques they received. Others felt exploited by an industry that, in Rowbottom’s depiction, erodes female actors’ boundaries, breeds competitiveness, then discards them. Her characters think they can control porn, but time and again it controls them.
The plot uncoils in addictive twists, with the only false note Jude’s excessive naivety about Laird. Meanwhile the charged relationship between Winnie and Jude lends the novel its yearning melancholy. Rowbottom’s sensory, kinetic prose moves from dreamlike, Lana Del Rey lyricism to bald sterility. Porn guys all speak provocatively, “every word weighed down by innuendo”.
Lovers XXX is a reckless joyride into youthful longing and hedonism, and their bruising flipside. In its humane, heady portrayal of lives on the margins, and its evocative sense of place, it recalls the films of Sean Baker and the novels of Emma Cline – and is presided over by the ghost of Eve Babitz.
Rowbottom gives her characters dignity without underplaying porn’s murkiness. She marshals the competing forces of power, desire, love and betrayal to probe the complexities of being a woman in a patriarchal world, and of society’s conflicting responses to porn itself. Sex-positive and cathartic, or dehumanising and destructive? Read this book and decide.
