Greg Doble
About two years ago I was sitting in my Montreal apartment wondering how I could survive as an anglophone who doesn’t speak French. I had grown sick of jackhammering rocks for $10 an hour or riding a bike in the winter as a bike courier for even less. My prospects amounted to washing dishes or doing sketchy medical tests for cash neither of which are dreams of mine.
During my daily perusal through the “etc” section on Kijiji I came across an ad simply titled “SEO-writing.” The description said it was for adult-oriented content and that one should be comfortable writing less-than-savoury pieces. I really had no idea what to expect or what I was getting myself into when I applied but I had always wanted to write and I desperately needed money so I decided to give it a shot.
Before I was given the job which I have since dubbed “porn blurb writer” I had to write a sample piece. I was given an example of what I was expected to churn out which looked something like the synopsis you would read on the back of a DVD case. Except that it was for a tag that one would search on an Internet site. It’s a sort of trashy advertisement for an even trashier industry — free Internet porn. My sample was to be written on the lingerie section of tube8.com a flowery website I had never heard of. The first line of my sample piece read “Have you ever wondered what Victoria has kept secret from us for so long?” Most of my work is in this vein — humorous anecdotes and silly puns.
I was given a few basic ground rules on how to conduct my writing. One surprised me: don’t use derogatory terms. What? Really? I didn’t expect this to be a concern given the nature of the free porn industry. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think all pornography is inherently negative but it certainly has some unfavourable aspects. It’s a contentious issue and one that I never expected to find myself in the middle of.
The most difficult part of the job is the biographies. They are more personal than the tagline writing. For example a porn star known as Sexy Cora (Carolin Wosnitza) died at the age of 23 in January 2011 suffering a heart attack during her sixth breast enlargement operation. After learning this I didn’t really want to promote the site through this poor woman or her movies but I did it anyway. I felt uneasy because I was cracking lewd remarks while the spectre of her death loomed over me.
This was my first writing gig which I was excited about having. But looking back on some of the work I’ve done it isn’t something I would show my mother.
One of the sites I write for is listed as the 40th most visited website in the entire world according to similarweb.com. With half a billion visitors and an average visiting time of just under eight minutes I sincerely doubt anyone reads the stuff I write.
I rarely think about my audience because the thought of people blankly staring at a screen while they masturbate isn’t particularly charming but it’s a bizarre feeling to think that I could potentially reach half a billion people with the things I write. Half a billion is a lot of people — that’s just slightly less than every single person in Canada the United States the United Kingdom and Mexico combined — and this is only one of the many sites I’ve written for. I’ve spent so much time energy and thought on writing these pieces and for what? Simply to be shuffled underneath some faceless man with an 11-inch penis? The insignificance of it all is not lost on me.
There’s one more point I need to make and it could be the strangest aspect of this job. Although I haven’t looked very hard I have yet to actually locate anything I’ve written on any of the websites. I am completely in the dark as to what happens to my work once it’s finished. I am getting paid for the work I’ve done but I have no real way to prove what I’m writing is actually ending up where it’s supposed to go. I can’t decide if it is getting buried in the deep corners of these sites or whether it is used for something completely different than what I had imagined. Am I just writing these for the enjoyment of one man my employer whom I’ve never actually met? I can’t tell you why I do this job only that I do it and I get paid three cents a word.
All said I’ve had a lot of fun writing some of these pieces. The anonymity of the job allows me to write what I feel like. Here are a few of the best clips I’ve written which I’ve titled for your enjoyment. The Labia: “Sometimes as a Labia I feel like I’m not always respected…. This 100% virus-free and widely accessible website is the perfect place to launch the FLA or Free Labian Army.” The Wrestler: “Have you ever wondered what forbidden magic lies behind Chyna’s jade gates? Outside of the ring these stars’ finishing moves are more akin to the ‘cock throttle’ or the ‘reverse no handed ball gripper.’” And finally The Sybian: “We can all sit back and enjoy as these unabashed babes take a ride upon the vibrating pony apparatus. It has calculated and knowing prods that have been designed by the loneliest and horniest men of science on this earth.”
