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The clerk at the check-in desk of the Virgin Hotel in Las Vegas, site of the 2026 Adult Video News Expo and Awards, has the glassy, scattered affect of a man so elated to be in the room, he can’t follow the trail of a single thought, such as, this couple needs their room key. His eyes dart from mine, to my husband, Jon’s, to the veritable parade of body parts behind us: boobs, butts, labia, barely covered by brightly colored strips of synthetic fabric. Wifey.com, reads the special AVN keycard he eventually hands us. The ultimate hot wife experience, casting real couples, behind which the AI generated legs of a phantom man and woman cross seductively toward one another, attached to headless bodies perched on the edge of a hotel bed. “Good luck at the awards!” the clerk calls after us as we make for the elevators. “He thinks we’re talent!” Jon says, not without excitement. 

We pass a short, full-bodied woman in a red spandex mini dress, clutching a teddy bear. We pass multiple motorized scooters and their passengers, both human and canine. An elderly couple in official expo badges traverses the casino floor hand in hand, the woman wearing a schoolgirl’s uniform and Pleasers, though she is clearly over 60, and unsteady on her heels. A man on a leash is pulled by a foursome of scantily clad 20-somethings. A group of women with breasts the size of beach balls stroll by, flanked by male escorts. Wonder Woman, in full uniform, towers almost seven feet tall on sky-high red platforms, but even she has a man in tow. All the women here do.

I am not, in this regard, any different from the talent; professionally, I am. For the most part, anyway (more on that later). A sometimes journalist, an author of books more often, I’ve spent the last three years researching and writing a novel set in the adult industry of the 1980s, the so-called golden age of pornography. I like to think I understand porn’s distant past–as much as anyone who didn’t experience it first-hand can. But when it comes to porn’s present and certainly porn’s future, my expertise is lacking, an ignorance I hope to soon remedy. 

Come Saturday, AVN will host the annual awards show—often referred to as the Oscars of Porn and attended primarily by industry insiders—but for now it’s still early in the week, still all about the expo, where production companies, tech startups, sex toy manufacturers, and performers display their wares to anyone with a ticket, resulting in a compelling mixture of fame, fandom, and grade-A people watching. As David Foster Wallace wrote in “Big Red Son,” his 1998 recap of the AVNs, “All the cliches are true.” Female performers are never unguarded and “the typical porn starlet really is the lady in Lycra eveningwear with tattoos all down her arms who’s both smoking and chewing gum while telling journalists how grateful she is to Wadcutter Productions Ltd. for floating her breast enlargement bill.” Now, as then, it is apparent that artificiality is the first noticeable attribute of many bodies at the AVNs. Gazing upon them is an existential endeavor, an implicit invitation to consider what reasons the individual had to change in the first place, which in turn invites consideration of mortality itself, the act of traveling to the edge of death for aesthetics, for career, for the fans, for the sake of one’s own survival. When the body is mutable, customizable, no different than a Trapper Keeper or Tesla, the soul shines through, a passenger in what is obviously, overtly, little more than a flesh suit. 

I was a PhD candidate in my early 20s, the age of a starlet, when I first encountered “Big Red Son,” penned anonymously in the late ’90s, then republished in 2005’s Consider the Lobster. I thought it brilliant, and even went so far as to assign the essay to my freshman composition students at The University of Houston, kids younger than me by only a few years, which did interesting things to the power dynamics in my classroom. It was the 2010s, a time before smartphones’ omnipresence, before the rise of Instagram and OnlyFans. My burgeoning career in academia (since abandoned) and an enduring (to this day) interest in feminism of every wave had ingrained in me a suspicion of porn only cemented by repeated discoveries on my then-boyfriend, now-husband’s web browser. Porn threatened me then. Not the reality of it, but the idea. Maybe it also titillated me. 

“I wanted to enter what contemporary porn aficionados term the goonstate, an altered reality that bears little difference from the ecstasy of religious trance.”

I was, at the time, compelled by idealistic spiritual sexual undertakings, such as the (recently problematized) Onetaste Orgasmic Meditation Movement (aka OMing), and Tantra, in part because I struggled to have sex without performing to the point of dissociation. I knew the brief instants of pleasure my body was capable of and wanted to prolong them, to harness what DFW described as, “Those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness, when the starlets dropped their ‘fuck me I’m a nasty girl’ sneer and became, suddenly, real people.” Quite possibly, I wanted to enter what contemporary porn aficionados term the goonstate, an altered reality that bears little difference from the ecstasy of religious trance and calls to mind, for a feminist scholar such as myself, the myth of a time before patriarchy, when men worshipped goddesses. Though, it bears noting, I wanted to get there without having to masturbate for hours on end to a ceaseless stream of PMVs and quick clip porn.

Now, many years post-doc, I’m the age of a MILF, with the chronic neck pain of a writer and phone addict. The goonstate continues to elude me and the DFW essay, which I returned to in the car en route to Las Vegas, reads as judgy to the point of pomposity. Were I teaching it today, to students in that same age group, I would probably be arrested, age verification laws in Texas and a general culture of book banning and trigger warnings being what they are. DFW also wrote that snuff was the industry’s final frontier, the inevitable conclusion porn was hurtling toward, a thesis the internet has at least forestalled. Foster Wallace didn’t, or couldn’t, foresee internet porn, as nudie magazines couldn’t foresee film and film couldn’t foresee VHS, which couldn’t foresee DVDS, and so forth. Technology is, and perhaps always will be, the final frontier…right? 

“The next big thing will come out of left field,” talent agent Mark Spiegler tells me. It’s the following morning and we’re sitting on the edge of his bed. For now I’ll decline to elaborate on how this came to pass. “I’m old enough to remember when the internet started. Back then they had an internet rate and a DVD rate for the talent and the internet rate was less because they go, ‘Oh, nobody’s gonna see this, it’s not going to go anywhere.’ And people fell for that for a little while, but the internet has prevailed.” 

“So now what?” I ask. 

“Probably AI,” he says. “I remember even like five years ago people approached us about Angela White. And even then she was like, ‘I wouldn’t give up my likeness for less than a quarter of a million dollars.’ Now I don’t think she’d do it for even a million.” Like the internet, in other words, AI has swiftly gone from a novelty to both an opportunity and a threat.

Spiegler got his start in the early 1980s as a production assistant. “Pornography wasn’t even legal then,” he tells me, referring to the obscenity, pimping, and pandering laws that made hiring adult actors akin to solicitation and criminalized the adult industry. Now he’s one of the most famous talent agents in the history of porn. 

“A hot girl is hot, but a smart girl is hotter,” he says when I ask about the MILF category, consistently among the top three Pornhub searches, a fact that surprised me when I Googled it just yesterday. I had wrongly assumed “barely legal” still reigned supreme and my ignorance shamed me. 

“By the time girls are in their 30s or 40s, they know what they’re doing,” Spiegler says. He looks at my nametag. “That your real name?” he asks, referring, I suspect, to Rowbottom, which I was teased for as a child. “It’s Welsh,” I say. “Maybe we’ll name a girl after you,” he offers on my way out the door. 

I head to Dunkin Donuts, situated in a prime lobby location, adjacent to the casino. Dunkin, I quickly learn, is the hub of this year’s AVN. Here, insiders and mooks gather, elbow to elbow, awaiting Caramel Craze lattes and flavor swirled cold brews. And it is where, not one hour ago, I approached Mark Spiegler, offering my clammy hand and begging for an interview with the strong whiff of willingness and desperation I’m sure he’s accustomed to. Now it’s my husband I’m searching for. I find him, face in phone, scrolling with the deadened expression of a man already emotionally exhausted by the obtuse reality of his surroundings—a reality wherein the women in attendance (some surely recognizable from past Pornhub forays, though he proudly professes otherwise) show little interest in the multitude of men surrounding them. Up in the penthouses and suites where, I’ve heard tell, orgies and outrageous parties rage, things might be different. But down at the casino and within the Dunkin Donuts, it is imminently clear that zero spontaneous sex will be had and that the talent who surround us, these architects of pleasure and performance, are, in fact, all about business. 

Inside the expo this becomes all the more apparent. It’s a frenzy of color and noise, sex toys, signing lines and selfies; the green and white MyFreeCams.com booth, where women stand before ringlights and the screens of their devices, interacting with customers on the other side; the Brazzers booth, home away from home for one of the most popular porn production and distribution companies around, decorated in flame-emoji red. Brazzers girls hang out camming, or joining fans for selfies, the latter undertaking an obvious drain. All the cliches are true and many of the Brazzers girls’ faces are masked in blank expressions of dull resignation. Nearby, dueling festish booths feature free floggings for consenting fans. At the motorbunny.com booth, a saleswoman dressed in a pink leotard and bunny ears shows me the “Motor Bunny Jack,” a fuck machine strapped to her body. It’s the size of an AK-47. “I’m basically attacking men all day,” she says. “And doing the whole, you know, woman in a man’s field thing.” ​She gestures with the machine, poking it into the air between us, as if punctuating her point. I glance around the room: hoards of mooks; performers on pedestals, be they literal or figurative, guarded by more men. An alien touching down here might confuse the AVN expo with a worship ceremony, and the talent with gods. But I have to wonder what would happen if the women went unguarded. The only true god here is pornography itself. Or capitalism. Or both.

“The only true god here is pornography itself. Or capitalism. Or both.”

Which brings us to what appears to be the most popular saleable item of all: bionic humanoid robots, synthetic effigies which, for a price, one can own, and use…however one chooses. At the Hesen booth, three lifesize “generated sex toys” are suspended in elevated cylinders that resemble the cryogenic chambers of a science fiction B-movie. “She’s fully articulated,” the sales rep tells me, gesturing at one of the dolls, a tall, thin, caucasian model with blonde hair and an expression of bemusement on her heart-shaped face. As the saleswoman speaks, the doll blinks her eyes and moves her head from side to side. A tag on her cryochamber shows a price of $7,980, marked down from $12,000. Beside her are Asian and Black models. “You can take them home today,” the saleswoman says and I must make a face because she quickly pivots. “We also have our scanner over there.” She gestures at an empty cylinder. “You can scan yourself and create your very own version of a doll.” Doing so has multiple benefits. One can not only possess a life-size robot in their own image, nor come as close as humanly possible to having sex with oneself, but also preserve one’s current physical state, not just in the form of a robot, but as long-term “digital data.” Which could come in handy in the era of AI. Everything around here, it’s starting to seem, returns us to AI, and the fear that robots will not only supplant human performers, but do so by co-opting their likeness, which current laws do little to protect. 

The media lounge is a small, two story space hidden well off the main drag. Here journalists mainline free coffee and cookies and tech bros talk loudly about CDNs and SEOs. Somehow, despite this, it’s a place of respite, of quietude. At least compared to the expo. And it is where I’ve scheduled a series of back-to-back interviews with performers. Not one fails to mention the incoming technological wave. “With the rise of OnlyFans, there’s been a huge shift from studio work to creator work and studios needing influencer/creators to build their brands back,” says Little Puck, a performer, producer, writer and cosplayer, dressed today in red and black latex with a long braid snaking down her back. “But now, with the rise of AI, we’re looking at consumers becoming the creators of their own micro-niche fantasies. I’m not sure what that’s going to mean for us. Porn is always on the cutting edge of new technology and politics and there’s no laws around AI that are taking care of workers or taking care of women in general. I think there’s going to be a lot more deep fakes.”

Violet Voss, a former dominatrix who self-describes on her Instagram profile as “goth barbie” and is nominated for best new starlet, doesn’t believe AI will take over. “I think it’ll help people realize they prefer human connection,” she says. 

“It’s unclear to me, as I’m sure it is to many, if AI will be able to convincingly replicate terror. Or pleasure, for that matter.”

“People are more interested in that grit, the realism of it all,” echoes Vanniall, a performer and content creator who got into the adult business circuitously, through her One Direction stan account on Tumblr. “Even though the girl-next-door vibe isn’t real, they want it more than the most perfect girl you can ever imagine.” She tells me the origins of her name are the origins of her career; many years ago, she mixed the word vanilla with the name Niall (after One Direction member Niall Horan) and began posting One Direction content to an audience of practically no one. When that didn’t take off, she moved on. “I tried to get regular jobs, be a regular person working retail, and I fucking hated it. Then I found that old Tumblr blog and I was like, Wait, I could just keep it. And since it had zero followers at the time, I could put what I find to be sexy there. And maybe I’d start seeing myself as sexy. For a while it was just that, me affirming to myself that the body I have, which is a Trans body, is sexy.” Then, the followers followed, the likes picked up. Now, she has 333,000 followers on X and almost a million likes on OnlyFans. Next, she wants to make horror films, which is a recurrent goal I hear from performers. Perhaps because horror, like porn, is structured around the performance of extreme human experience, emphasis on human. It’s unclear to me, as I’m sure it is to many, if AI will be able to convincingly replicate terror. Or pleasure, for that matter. 

After my interview with Vaniall, I’m shuttled by a public relations attendant to an empty conference room where I await my interview with Jennifer White, a nominee for 2026’s Performer of the Year Award (which, it spoils nothing to tell you, she wins). There’s a lull. The overhead lights hum. The AC pumps. When the door opens, I startle. It’s not Jennifer, but rather a solo man, clad in a rumpled silver suit. “Looking for a hard surface to write on,” he says, and settles at a nearby table. Soon, however, he moves to the seat across from me, close enough for me to read his nametag, The Prophet. “What are you doing here,” The Prophet asks and when I answer, he assures me that an article consulting with talent about the future of the adult industry won’t be interesting to readers of Playboy. What is interesting, he says, is the business side of things. 

As it so happens, The Prophet himself is involved in a business endeavor (one of many, as evidenced by the four phones he carries) scheduled to be unveiled at tonight’s White Party. “You going?” he asks and I nod in the affirmative. OK, good. Between us, this endeavor will, for a flat rate of only $1,000 and a quick body scan, deliver to performers—or anyone, for that matter—license over their own physical likeness, thereby granting an individual the power to sue anyone who reproduces said likeness on the internet without consent. Basically the promise of the build-your-own Hesen robot, without the robot, and for a fraction of the cost. The expression on The Prophet’s face as he suggests I consider this procedure, is grim, sober. Within five years, my likeness will be out there, he warns me, whether I like(ness) it or not. “Scan now,” he says, “Scan while you’re still young.” 

He’s interrupted by Jennifer. Her handler escorts her to a chair beside me and I embark on my questions, which feel stupid, in light of what The Prophet just told me, or rather how he said it: with certainty.

Jennifer White got her start in porn in a storied fashion: through Craigslist. “I was on there for some unrelated reason and I came across an agency looking for girls. It was supposed to be a temporary thing, like a get-out-of-debt-quick situation. But once I started doing it I was like, I’m kind of good at this. I think I’ll make a career and stick around.” That was in 2009. Now she’s one of the biggest performers working today, represented by Mark Spiegler, of course. For White, as for many performers, the advent of OnlyFans has been “amazing.” But, she adds, “At the same time I think—I’m kind of just assuming—the companies have taken a hit, because we’re able to be so independent now.” And what of AI? “There’s no hiding, there’s no avoiding it. We have to adapt in order to survive. I don’t think it’ll ever replace a real person. But it does a pretty damn good job so far.”

Afterward, Jon and I ride the elevator to our room alongside a sexy nurse and her escort, clad in a moisture-wicking baby blue polo shirt and bunchy chinos, the attire of a seriously lost (and lucky) golfer. This is one of several outfits commonly assumed by non-talent males (which are most males) at the AVNs. The others being 2015-era paleo diet aficionado and amateur ax thrower, complete with well-trimmed beard and flannel, or 2015-era motorcyclist, or Marvel fan, in cape and sometimes mask, as is the case with an individual Jon and I affectionately term Batman and run into several times over the course of the expo. Each day he dresses in costume, or uniform, wearing bat shaped goggles and a trenchcoat, which accentuates his diminutive height and flows behind him as he moves, with urgency, from booth to booth, acquiring selfies and signatures. 

Our “Chamber Room” on the third floor is consumed by a king bed, the frame of which is beige and cushioned, a sort of seashell-shaped seat at the base where a bedpost might go. This is “the bed of the future,” Siri tells me, designed by Virgin hotel mogul Richard Branson, and the subject of a 2023 viral TikTok, liked over 2.4 million times, in which user @danielle_carolan was “baffled,” by what the “quirky” features of the bed could possibly be used for. Which feels, in this moment, like an indictment of either Gen Z or American culture writ large, saturated by digital sex, yet unable to identify it IRL. The bed is obviously built for fucking. 

Almost as soon as gooning—the devoted pursuit of the goonstate, widely defined as a euphoric mindset arrived at through prolonged masturbation—became common parlance in the mainstream, it was pathologized as an act of pure nihilism, a porn-informed death drive, the unfortunate result of unlimited exposure to the internet, multiple economic downturns, political unrest and Covid. “Sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers,” writes Daniel Kolitz in his viral 2025 Harper’s piece, “The Goon Squad.” “Small business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care.” Now, these would-be squares have traded capitalism for pleasure and porn; or, they have so fully bought into capitalism that they have become enslaved to their screens, those conduits of dopamine and consumption, on which gooners porn viewing sanctuaries which, “were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world,” according to Kolitz. 

Porn historian and adult script writer Noelle Perdue isn’t so sure. “Gooning is an act of reverence,” she counters. “These men build literal shrines.” By now it’s Saturday, the last day of the AVN expo, and we’re sitting outside, speaking over the noise of airplanes fleeing Las Vegas. Perdue has been an industry insider for over a decade. I sense, as we chat, that it can be annoying to have her area of expertise poached and dissected by outsiders like Kolitz and myself, and for good reason. When I ask about the popularity of the MILF category she blows my mind by pinning it to, “The dream of having someone to take care of you, to walk you through things…there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world and within masculinity and the idea of having a partner who can be patient with you and show you the ropes but is also really hot and has big boobs. That’s nothing but the hits.’’ 

Before the expo closes there are a few final stops on my list. Jon and I wander one last time past the Brazzers booth, past MyFreeCams.com, past the booth for Golden Age Icons Ginger Lynn and Christy Canyon, who yesterday I had the honor of meeting (and fangirling over). We arrive at the booth for Hentaied—“the only real life Hentai porn site,” according to the company website—where resident animator Momo, who is also in charge of concepts and story boards, is scheduled to sketch us as anime. Alongside MILF, hentai is consistently one of the top global porn searches and is most commonly identified by the presence of tentacles. Typically, it’s also animated. But Hentaied has devoted its brand identity to shooting, producing and distributing tentacle porn featuring human actors. “The cameras we’re using are the same cameras they use for Stranger Things,” says Hentaied CGI artist Rospux, who has traveled from Italy to attend the AVN expo. “Everything we shoot is super cinematic. We take two, three, four days to get everything, so it’s a big production.” Behind him, a screen plays clips from Hentaied productions. Girls are penetrated by tentacles, whisked away by tentacles, choked by tentacles. There’s a lot of cum, the amount of cum an alien mega squid might ejaculate. “The tentacles are almost always moved by other girls,” Rospux says. “We don’t touch the girls. We try to always take care of them. This is real acting. It’s not easier than classic porn.” Does the popularity of Hentaied productions and their foregrounding of real life actors say something about reality hunger, the human desire for truth? Rospux can’t tell me that. It does seem like demand is growing, he says. While we speak, a young woman clad in bondage gear and traveling, shockingly, without a male escort, approaches his colleague. I listen out one ear as she gushes about what Hentaied films have meant to her, how they’ve reflected her inner most fantasies, and made her feel less alone. Some light and heartwarming flirting ensues. The man gives her a free T-shirt. Momo finishes her sketch. In it, Jon and I smile. Two tentacles entwine sweetly above our heads, a sucker studded arbor, the likes of which might frame a hentai fanatic’s wedding portrait. 

We hurry off. Tonight is the awards, the red carpet press blitz, the latter of which we’re slated to cover. The former, the actual ceremony, is for ticket holders and industry insiders only. No press passes allowed. But even the insiders don’t seem too stoked to attend. Yesterday, Ginger Lynn told me she was skipping this year. Noelle Perdue, when we met for an interview, was en route to the airport. 

Upstairs, I sprawl on the bed of the future and text Spiegler, angling for an invite to something exclusive. Last night we attended (for 10 minutes) the 11th Annual White Party, looking for The Prophet. But the party resembled not the insider-only networking opportunity I’d hoped for, nor the ideal place for anyone to launch their next business venture, as The Prophet had planned, but the world’s worst second-city meat market mega club on a Saturday night, packed boobs to butts with civilians. If The Prophet was there, I couldn’t see him through the throngs. So I’m not eager to try my luck at the official AVN Awards After Party, open to the ticket-buying public. Rather, it feels essential to this story that I witness for myself the orgies I’ve heard take place behind closed doors. At once text bubbles appear, signaling that Spiegler is typing. Breath held, I wait for his response. There’s a party for Brazzers, he says. But it’s very exclusive. Even he can’t get me in. Sorry.

Downstairs, the red carpet cuts through the entire casino, leading to the theater where the awards will be held. It’s a parade of sequins, Spanx, spandex, latex, faux fur, legs and cleavage, but somehow, it all feels quite tame, wholesome even. Upon arrival at the step and repeat, performers are corralled by an AVN representative, then whisked before the flashing bulbs of the press core, an assemblage of mostly male photographers. The one non-talent woman in the area is dressed all in black, like a stagehand, and sits on a stool, striking a portable pot gong every few seconds, to keep performers moving, keep the flow of traffic flowing. By and large, and in keeping with the week thus far, performers are women, and travel in groups of three and four, flanked by a male escort who may or may not also be talent. It bears noting, however, that the GayVNs, held Thursday night, were the inverse. There, the talent was overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly fashion forward, and overwhelmingly young, indicative of the enduring popularity of the “twink” category. Where were the lesbians at the GayVNs? Not present, but rather lumped into the “Girl/Girl” category at the main show on Saturday night. 

The last woman to approach the step and repeat has broken her shoe. Her friends have left her behind. I watch her struggle in vain with the strap, give up, and limp toward the theater without pausing for photos. The gong striker hits her instrument one last time, a half-hearted chime that quickly wanes. Then, just like that, the carpet is empty. The doors to the theater close with a resounding thud, reminding us: We’re outsiders. 

Jon and I retreat to the bar, defeated. Large TVs suspended from every wall play the UFC fight, taking place live just down the street at the T-Mobile Arena. Sweaty men grapple and embrace, an honesty to their endeavor, humanity boiled down to its primal essence. Not unlike porn, quite frankly. Though perhaps porn is less like the UFC than the WWE, which melds athleticism with makebelieve and is beloved by billions, who watch for the stories, yes, for the battles of good and evil, yes, but also for those moments when the veil drops, when real pain or pleasure shines through. 

I make for the restroom, empty save for myself and four girls crowded into the handicap stall beside mine. I’m at the sink when they emerge, a blur of chemically enhanced energy and posi vibes. One wears head-to-toe pink neon, down to the StarFace pimple patches dotting her cheeks. Another, Char Gates, wears a silver gown with a swooping neckline, low enough to accentuate the spider web tattoo just beneath her breasts. She tells me it’s her third AVN and she flew all the way from Oklahoma to attend. For Vanna Rose, the most gregarious of the group, this isAVN number one; she hopes to shoot for both Brazzers and Playboy someday. And be nominated for an award, of course. “It’s all about stepping up each year and evolving,” she says, and mentions that her mother is also in the industry, and paved the way, so to speak. When I show her my Instagram, followed by a measly 10.2K, she tells me to just keep going, girl, post like you have a million followers, and one day, you’ll make it. I take this advice to heart. “What are you doing after the awards?” I ask, hoping for an afterparty invite after all. She begins to answer, then stops herself. “I’m supposed to shoot a collab at 11,” she mutters and I wonder if she’s lying. If so, I don’t blame her. I’m an outsider.   

“Imagine a world where the robots have taken over every industry but porn, where the last vestiges of humanity persist in the form of smut.”

Back at the bar, Jon and I contemplate what to do. More drinks? Linger until the awards let out and glom onto performers? Imbed? Follow them into the night? “I’m pooped,” I say, “I don’t want to force it.” Forcing it has become nearly second nature since we got here. As often happens in Vegas. Maybe also in porn. But now our time at AVN is coming to an end. So we relent, return to our room, put on Lana Del Rey and get in bed in our evening wear. Beyond the window, the theater where the awards are taking place throbs with the same nostalgic nightlife hits that have been playing all week, early aughts bangers like ‘In Da Club’ and ‘Milkshake’ on repeat. Amidst so much technological change, it’s easy to forget the human propensity for nostalgia. It’s easy to forget the human propensity for pleasure, that deep drive at the core of pornography and capitalism itself. In the end, as simple as it may sound, the future of pornography depends almost exclusively on what humans will derive the most pleasure from. Robots? Anime? Or each other, if only through a screen. Imagine a world where the robots have taken over, a world of AI everything, where human sex and human porn, once hallmarks of eroticism, have become obsolete. Now imagine a world where the robots have taken over every industry but porn, where the last vestiges of humanity persist in the form of smut. Perhaps I’m naive, but after three days at AVN and despite the overwhelming preoccupation with Artificial Intelligence, the latter seems the more likely scenario.  

We’ve left our curtains open and red lights strobe from distant rooftops, casting a womblike glow on the interior of our room, the contours of our bed of the future, obviously built for fucking. Which is what we use it for, out of desire and exhaustion and obligation, yes, but also out of desperation: for each other, for flesh and blood and spit and the buoy of something akin to a soulmate, the literal mating of our souls, shining through the vessel of our flesh suits. For three days we’ve immersed ourselves in pornography, the expo itself a sort of IRL gooncave, the traversing of which might have been, I realize now, akin to edging for my husband and I. Because as we entwine, time turns to a trance, to the endless pleasure of ongoing orgasm, where past and present converge; I am still the girl I was in that Texas classroom, still the MILF I became, and the future—silky as the fabric of my dress, slick as the screen of the iPhone, filming us—is but a mirror, in which all versions of ourselves are reflected. “I was there,” Jon says after. “The goonstate. I get it now.” “I was with you,” I say. Then, unsure if, technically, I could be, I stop the camera and google: can you enter the goonstate during sex with another person. AI tells me yes, which I should have known. Many gooners are having sex with others. It just looks different. 

In the morning we wake, bogged down by exhaustion and the events of last night, a sexual encounter made transcendent by the sheer unadulterated saturation in the world of AVN we’d surrendered ourselves to for the sake of this story. Our room is a mess and we hurry to pack. “Let’s get out of here,” Jon says. “One more minute,” I say, eyeing my phone, face up on the bed of the future. The browser is open to the casting form of the Wifey.com website, where the blue bar of a finishing upload shows 92 percent, and our outsider art, our insider version of the ultimate hot wife experience, inches toward completion.