PLEASURE (2021): L.A. Teen Porn Star Rises

In Pleasure (2021), Bella Cherry, a 19-year-old Swede, comes to L.A. to become a teen porn star. Initially, she doesn't condone the rough nature of porn, but Cherry comes to embrace the industry. 

And that about sums it up. Essentially, the movie is about Cherry's path to becoming a teen porn star; however, we would like to elaborate on the film's nympholepsy motif. For example, before Cherry's first scene, the director informs her that she's playing the role of an 18-year-old virgin who will be having sex with Brian - a middle-age man:

"So, Brian over here, this semi-creepy middle-aged man is gonna be fucking your sweet [...] 18-year-old brand new vigina."

However, Cherry forgets that she's playing an 18-year-old, and shares with the camera that she's 19, which is still "cool" to her middle-aged co-star:

"So what are you gonna do today?"

"I'm gonna do my first porn."

"First one huh? How old are your Bella Cherry?"

"I'm 19."

"19! Cool. Let's see the rest of you."

The fact that Cherry is shooting a scene with a middle-age man raises an interesting point. 

For instance, it's (ironically) common for members Gen Z and millennials to (openly) condone sex workers (i.e., teen porn stars, teen OnlyFans content creators, teen escorts, etc); however, members of Gen Z and millennials are typically and openly anti-age-gap relationships. 

Thus, like Cherry, teen porn stars can confortably film sex scenes multiple middle-aged men. (Note: The average heterosexual male porn star is in his mid-thirties with Manuel Jeannin, arguably the #1 heterosexual male porn star, sitting at a whopping 45-years-old.)

It's commonly (openly) acceptable for 18-year-old teens to provide explicit OnlyFans content for middle-age men. 

And one is commonly considered to be "pro sex worker" if she supports a teen whom has sex for money with middle-age men (i.e., escort). 

But it's commonly unacceptable to Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, and boomers for an 18-year-old to be in a romantic relationship with a middle-aged man. And, to the dismay of orthodox Muslims and (ultra) orthodox Jews, don't even think about condoning an age-gap marriage!

Back to Pleasure where in a subsequent scene, as Cherry is filmed with an iPhone while practicing fellatio on a banana, she's encouraged: "Maybe some old man will really like this." Maybe. 

Lastly and unsurprisingly, Pleasure was selected for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, and the film was nominated at the 2021 British Independent Film Awards.

Julia Fox: NYC High School (Teen) Sex Worker\Dominatrix

Inarguably, Julia Fox is more famous for her relationship with Kanye "Ye" West than her breakout role in Uncut Gems (2019). Consequently, her fame has resulted in more curiosity about her history. 

Per Chris Gardner's Hollywood Reporter piece, Fox was born in Milan, but she moved to the UES of NYC when she was in elementary school, and by high school at City-As-School in the West Village section of Manhattan, she was working as a teen dominatrix. Fox shared with Gardner, “[...] I got into the sex industry pretty young, doing S&M stuff.”

Unsurprisingly, Fox related that she wasn't the only NYC high school sex worker, “I had heard about another girl who was doing it [...] I did it, and it was great.” (It's safe to assume that Fox's clients were ephebophiles.)

Julia Fox

Fox elaborated on her life, pre and post teen sex worker, with Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast. Fox shared that she started clubbing with she was ≈ 14-years-old - "slutty" but in braces, and she started using drugs, regularly, when she was 16:

Cooper: "How old were you when you first went clubbing?"

Fox: "Like proper clubbing? Maybe like 14 [...] They were so clearly fake [IDs] [...] but you see, like, slutty [girls] [...] You’re gonna let them in. The hot underage [girls] [...]"

Cooper: "Nobody gives a fuck."

Fox: "I had braces, and they were letting me in, girl."

Cooper: "When did you first experiment with drugs?"

Fox: "Probably in, like, middle school. Like 6th or 7th grade?"

Fox told Gardner that she heard about being a teen sex worker from another City-As High student, but Fox told Cooper that she found the job in Craigslist's adult section, that she was offered the job, which she was "naturally very good at it", after she wrote "a sadistic BDSM fantasy off the top". And Fox roped in her BFFs to join her in teen sex work:

"I can’t work in the pastry shop forever. I’m gonna need more money; so, I just went on Craigslist, and I went on the adult’s section and everything was like, sex [...] be my slutty secretary [...]"

"He loved it. He hired me on the spot. And obviously I roped in some of my [teen] BFFs to come with me [...] and I was just naturally very good at it."

Fox said that she didn't have (teen) sex with her slaves, whom it's safe to assume were not high school boys, but her slaves were allowed to do "hot" things like kiss her feet, she would sit on their faces - in her "panties", and her slaves were allowed to buy her expensive dungeon wear:

“Like they could kiss my feet. I could smother them. Maybe sit on their face, like, with my panties [...]”

“[...] there would be times in a session where I’d be like, “Oh damn, this is actually, like, horny as fuck! This is hot!” 

“We would, like, finess the $400 latex. The good shit.”

Interestingly, Cooper did not mention that Fox was in high school when she initiated her and her BFFs careers as sex workers. 

Fox told Popsugar's Corinne Sullivan that her job as a teen dominatrix prepared her for acting:

"My after school job was a dominatrix, so you know, it was fantasy role play [...] so I'm good under pressure and I can read someone and know what it is that they want. I pick up subtle cues very well and pay attention to detail."

Interestingly, prior to filming Uncut Gems, Fox made, Fantasy Girls, a short film that she shot after meeting a group of 13 to 15-year-old nymphets in Reno. The "artful" film is about Reno's underground nymphet prostitution ring and teen sex trafficking. Fox explained to Elle's Julie Kosin:

So I went to Reno with my childhood best friend with [the idea of] making a movie. We enter the city and meet this group of kids on the side of the road, and we just both knew, we're going to uncover this story in this little mix. After speaking with some of their guardians, we were informed [that] the whole town is an underground [teen] prostitution ring. So many children are being trafficked and girls go missing all the time, and they were at risk. I was like, I want to tell this story in an artful way, not like a documentary.

Julia Fox's PTSD

In the end, one could safely assume that if Kanye had shared that he hired a high school sex worker, he would be justifiably (completely) canceled but customarily, like most teen sex workers, Fox has been proverbially acquitted.   

Megan Boyle's "selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee": (Pre) Teen Masturbation & Age-Gap Fantasy

Amazon describes Megan Boyle's selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee as a book of poetry, but muumuu house, the book's alt lit publisher, describes Boyle's writing as prose. Let's just go with Elle's Kelley Hoffman whom describes Boyle's writing as "confessional writing":

"With her mixture of immediate honesty and everyman wit, Boyle has emerged as a cult voice of Millennials whom have come of age sharing confessional writing online."

Interestingly, selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee reminded me of Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies where, for example, Marina shared that she began to be aware of men at the age of 9 or 10 and thought about them while she masturbated. 

In the chapter "embarrassing moments", Boyle shared that when she was 6-years-old, she had to be scolded for (pre) teen masturbating in public, and when she was 8-years-old she was scolded by her babysitter for masturbating under a "thin blanket":

had to be talked to for masturbating in public several times, parent-teacher conference once. seriously didn't think anyone knew what i was doing (age 6)

masturbated under a thin blanket while watching 'the beverly hillbillies' movie with my babysitter. she said 'if you don't stop doing that i'm going to tell your parents' (age 8)

And continuing on the same subject of self-love, Boyle related in the chapter "lies i have told" that when she was confronted by her parents about her prolific masturbating, she told them that  she was simply itching her belly button:

'i'm itching my belly button'

i masturbated a lot as a kid. this was what i would tell my parents i was doing when they would try to talk with me about it. i remember seeing them look at each other with concerned, yet amused faces

Nicolas Cage Con Air (1997)

Just like Theda who shared in My Secret Garden that her first sexual fantasy started she was about 7 or 8 after she gazed upon her teacher's "rotund posterior", and she had "an infantile urge” to slide her hand “[…] down his bum cheeks and round to 'the front' [...]", 12-year-old Boyle had a similar age-gap fantasy with Nicolas Cage whom she would "kiss" on the television screen:

made out with TV while watching 'con air' (crush on [33-year-old] nicolas cage, brief period, weird), forgot to windex. mom found it, made me clean it (age 12)

Shockingly, a guy from Boyle's poetry class stated that "[...] everyone he knew had sex in middle school". And unshockingly, Boyle continued to express her sexuality into her late nymphet years. For example, when she was 18, she unsuccessfully pleaded for sex and the opportunity to give blow jobs:

when i was 18-19 and lived in a dorm in chicago i sometimes got drunk and yelled in the stairway, i'm horny, i want to have sex, someone come here, i give blowjobs, are you attractive, i am attractive, come here.' 

Lastly, I read the 5th edition (2020 ) of unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee, and Jennifer Shaffer of The Stanford Daily opined:

"[A] remarkable debut [...] both painstaking and unpolished, earnest and unassuming, plain, poetic, moving, self-conscious and, above all, real."

Famous Age Gap Couple: Jimmy Page (69) & Scarlett (24) | Jimmy Page (24) & Lori Maddox (14)

Kristy Johnson posted on the Daily Mail "Jimmy Page, 77, and girlfriend Scarlett [Sabet], 32, at the Venice Film Festival". In the post, Johnson related that the couple met in 2014, which would make Page, of Led Zeppelin fame, approximately 69-years-old and Sabet a whopping 24-years-old at time:

They began dating in 2014 after he stopped to listen to her poetry reading at a London bookshop.   

Of Page, Sabet shared:

'I'm in an amazing relationship. I think a lot of people make assumptions but Jimmy's an exceptional man, and beautiful. There are a lot of women of all ages who are excited to meet him.'  

Sabet wasn't lying when she said "women of all ages who are excited to meet him", because Nikki McWatters shared in the Huffington Post article “Predatory Teenage Girls”:

“Lori Maddox, a famous teenage groupie from LA, is alleged to have lost her virginity to David Bowie at the age of 13. [And] [s]he was [24-year-old] Jimmy Page's steady girlfriend while still underage [i.e., 14-years-old]."

Jimmy Page & Lori Maddox

I related in The Allure of Nymphets that Simon Hardeman wrote about Led Zeppelin for The Independent in an article titled “Led Zeppelin: There was a whole lotta love on tour”. 

Hardeman wrote about how Led Zeppelin's American tours involved “sexual degradation of fans [...] accusations of attempted rape [and] child abuse.” 

Jimmy Page & Lori Maddox

And Hardeman wrote about how Page, the group's guitarist, had a relationship with 14-year-old Maddox - after she was allegedly kidnapped by Richard Cole, Led Zeppelin's tour manager, and taken to the Riot House (i.e., Continental Hyatt House hotel.)

Hardeman related that Maddox “fell in love with Page almost immediately.” And “[...] how she had to be locked up, albeit willingly, most of the time so that word of this illegal relationship - statutory rape could not get out.” 

Maddox said, “It was magnificent. Can you believe it? It was just like right out of a story! Kidnapped, man, at fourteen!”

I can believe it...

Famous Age Gap Couple: Princess Elizabeth (13) & Prince Philip (18) | [Teen] (Age Gap) Love at First Sight

Like Lena Dunham, Air Mail has been a reliable source for examples of nympholepsy in pop culture. For example, Air Mail's piece "Sissy Sheridan Knows [Teen] Sex Rules On TikTok," Nancy Goldstone's post where she dubbed King Louis XV the possible Jeffrey Epstein of the 18th century, and on episode 58 of the Air Mail's "Morning Meeting" podcast (Oct 22, 2021), we learned that François Mitterrand, the former President of France, had [at least] two mistresses. And [at least] one of his mistresses, Claire, was 50 years younger than Mitterrand and that Claire was 18 when she seduced the elderly former statesman.  

13-Year-Old Elizabeth | Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage

And we learned from an Air Mail podcast that 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth fell in love with 18-year-old Prince Philip - at first sight.

Gyles Brandreth's Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage relates how the teen age-gap relationship began:

Their first port of call - part duty, part pleasure - was along the Devon coast, at the mouth of the estuary of the River Dart, at Dartmouth, at the Royal Naval College, where the King - a cadet at the College in the years before the Great War - was to carry out an inspection, and Princess Elizabeth, age thirteen, was to meet Prince Philip of Greece, age eighteen. Lilibet [Princess Elizabeth's nickname.] later claimed it was love at first sight.

During the visit: "Prince Philip would be detailed to entertain them. Lilibet and Margaret Rose [Princess Elizabeth's younger sister.]"

The nymphet was playing with a: "[...] children's train set when Philip appeared. He said, "How do you do," to Lilibet, and for a while they knelt side by side playing with the trains. [Unsurprisingly] [h]e soon got bored with that."

Philip - The Year Before. | Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage

After "ginger crackers and lemonade", Philip suggested, "Let's go to the tennis courts and have some real fun jumping the nets.”

Consequently, “She [i.e., Princess Elizabeth a.k.a. Lilibet ] never took her eyes off him the whole time [...] And today, the Queen does not deny the essence of it either: that was the weekend she fell for Philip. And why not. He was enviably good-looking. He was fit. He was fun. He was funny.”

Why not? Well, it appears that official and unofficial royalty are immune to being cancelled for being involved in age-gap affairs. For instance, like we previously mentioned, the Air Mail podcast hosts spoke flatteringly about elderly François Mitterrand's affair with his 18-year-old mistress. And who has attempted to cancel a Kennedy for an age-gap affair? (e.g., JFK and Mimi Alford. And Michael Kennedy & Marissa Verrochi.) But 22-year-old Jerry Lee was (literally) cancelled in Britain after it was revealed that he was married to Myra Gale - his a 15-year-old cousin. 

Wait, did we mention that Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth were cousins? Brandreth related that the age-gap couple met prior to 1939, because they were cousins:

It is frequently asserted that Saturday 22 July 1939 was the day on which Philip and Elizabeth first set eyes on one another. Not so. They had met before. They were cousins, after all.

Philip (18) and Elizabeth (13) Playing Croquet | Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage

Brandreth described the above photo and somehow determined that 13-year-old Elizabeth was gazing intently at Philip and that the royal nymphet looked happy:

There are, however, in existence two photographs taken that weekend, each featuring Philip and Elizabeth, and each telling its own story. The first is a snapshot of the two of them alone playing croquet in the garden of the Captain's House. 

The eighteen-year-old boy appears to be concentrating on his next stroke. The thirteen-year-old girl, standing by a hoop, in her neat double-breasted summer coat, small hands clasped together in front of her, is gazing at him intently. She does look happy.

Allegedly, Elizabeth's love was unrequited, but not because Philip wasn't sexually active. Reportedly, prior to enrolling at Dartmouth, Philip had a "holiday dalliance [i.e., teen sex] in Venice" but no word on if the girl was a blond, brunette or redhead charmer:

What distinguishes their meeting in July 1939, of course, is not Philip's attitude to Elizabeth - he was interested in girls, girls of his own age, not thirteen year olds - but hers to him.

In the run-up to taking the Dartmouth entrance exam, he stayed [...] with a Mr and Mrs Mercer in Cheltenham. By day, Mr Mercer prepared young men for their naval examinations. By night [...] Alexandra of Yugoslavia, Mr Mercer's teenage daughter entertained the student prince [...] Alexandra also recalled Philip enjoying a holiday dalliance in Venice at about the same time. 'He was very amusing, gay, full of life and energy and he was a tease,' she said. 'Blondes, brunettes and redhead charmers, Philip gallantly and I think quite impartially squired them all.

Although, Philip and Elizabeth didn't marry until the princess was no longer a nymphet, they did keep in touch - reportedly only "here and there" and "now and again. And if you believe that, I have a plot of sand at Coney Island I'm willing to sell you - for a (large) fee:

Through the war years, Prince Philip kept in touch with his cousin, Princess Elizabeth. He wrote to her, 'from here and there'. He saw her, 'now and again'. Sixty years on, he says he really doesn't remember much about it.

Lastly, despite the surprising (open) support for 13-year-old Elizabeth's love for 18-year-old Prince Philip, ironically, their relationship wouldn't even be cleared by the "Romeo and Juliet laws" where, per Wikipedia: "a person can legally have consensual sex with a minor provided that he or she is not more than a given number of years older, generally four years or less." #royalty

Marie Calloway's WHAT PURPOSE DID I SERVE IN YOUR LIFE: Age-Gap Virgin Sex & Young Prostitution

Lena Dunham has been a reliable source for examples of nympholepsy in pop culture; thus, my nympholepsy radar went off when I read Dunham's tweet about Marie Calloway: "Her prose is crisp/subject matter titillating! 4 stars."  

Let's take a look at Calloway's titillating subject matter in what purpose did i serve you in your life - Calloway's biographical fiction\autofiction "novel'. 

In the first chapter, "portald, oregon 2008", Calloway described losing "her" 18-year-old virginity. Even though she "[...] had been watching pornography regularly since elementary school [...] ", she thought her first time having sex would be different:

“It hurt a lot. He was fucking me really hard and fast (later he would admit he was incredibly excited to be having sex with an 18 year old), but somehow I loved the feeling and thought things like, “It hurts, but it hurts so good…” 

Subsequently, the "gorgeous blond" man asked her to leave, because he didn't want his friends to know that he was having sex with an 18-year-old:

“He said his friend was on his way over and I had to get going right away, because to be honest he didn’t want his friends to start gossiping about how he was sleeping with an 18 year old.”

Wait, did I mention that the man was a stranger: 

“I didn’t know if I wanted to see him again. It didn’t go with the idea I had in my head of losing my virginity to a stranger and then never seeing him again.”

However, within 48 hours, she emailed him for sex: 

“I emailed him two days later: “Let’s sleep together again.”
“Monday night? 10pm? CoffeeTime?”
“Okay.”

The next chapter is titled "sex work experience one". In the chapter, she made 200 pounds for having sex with a stuffy, bald and "two pump chump" middle-aged banker. 

The rest of the book is littered with graphic age-gap sex and peppered with her reasons for becoming a[n] (age-gap) prostitute, which are revealing  - yet not surprising:

I just want lots and lots of money and expensive things so I don’t ever have to be afraid of what’s going to happen to me again, no matter what I have to do to get it. 

I thought his cock tasted and smelled sweaty, but I thought of all the sushi and margaritas I would be able to buy after this and kept going.

I need money for BareMinerals foundation and MAC lipstick and soy lattes and pizza. If I earn money I will no longer be a financial burden on my parents; I will be productive and accomplish something. I will be a commodity, and I will be in demand and valuable. I am so beautiful and young that men will pay three hundred dollars to have sex with me; sex work will reify my youth and beauty.

Thus, unlike some young prostitutes who are forced into sex work (e.g., actress Demi Moore),, Calloway's character is like some of the Roman and Japanese teen prostitutes whom do it for luxury goods.  

And lastly, as for some age-gap relationship quotes:

His response felt awkward, and I wondered if he felt weird about me being so much younger than him, rather than excited like I had expected and hoped for.

The bartender asked to see our IDs. I wondered if we looked weird to him, or if it was typical for girls to go to bars with men twice their age in New York.

I felt like a lot of people were giving us dirty looks. I couldn’t tell if it was for smoking or for him being twice my age.

[…] I was actually trying to explore my reverse Lolita complex with him [...] 

RED ROCKET (2021): The Making of a Texas Teen Porn Star

Richard Brody summarized Red Rocket well in his New Yorker review:

[...] [Simon] Rex’s character, Mikey Davies (whose porn name is Mikey Saber), travels by bus from Los Angeles to Texas City, where he drops in on his estranged wife and former onscreen partner, Lexi (Bree Elrod) [...] Mikey looks for work locally, but he has a seventeen-year gap on his résumé [...] Instead, Mikey reconnects with the head of the local marijuana trade [...] At a nearby doughnut shop, he meets a counter clerk and high-school student named Raylee (Suzanna Son), who calls herself Strawberry. She is seventeen—or, as Mikey crows, “legal as an eagle”—and he insistently pursues her. At first it’s just sex that he’s after, but then he decides to try to lure Strawberry to Los Angeles to act in porn, with him as her manager-slash-pimp [...]

In the film, shortly after Strawberry informed Mikey, "I'll be 18 in three weeks," and Mikey confirmed, "Legal as an eagle," Strawberry grabbed Mikey's penis behind Donut Hole's counter. 

Subsequently, Mikey had Strawberry cease having teen sex with Nash whom became "clingy ass fuck" after Strawberry "[...] blew him at junior prom." Consequently, Strawberry informed Nash, "I'm with him (i.e., Mikey) now," before she blew Mikey in her pickup truck. #swallow Later, Strawberry and Mikey had age-gap sex in the pickup truck's bed. (Pun intended.)

To the chagrin of (most) middle-aged women and teen boys, like a number of nymphets we've written about on this blog, Strawberry shared that she's a teleiophile and for attention, she and her teen friends posted nudes on Reddit, and she sold a nude for $60 via Venmo. 

Strawberry related to Mikey: 

"Let's just say, I like men - not boys." 

"I posted a nude online [...] This old guy in Ohio propositioned us to sell him a nude pic, and I did. And he Venmoed me 60 bucks [...] We were just trying to see how much attention we would get."

Strawberry invited Mikey to stay at her home for the weekend while her mother was away. "We've got the place to our own to fuck [...]," which they did. Initially, outside along the lakefront and then in Strawberry's bedroom where it was strategically filmed." In reference to the age-gap sex tape, Strawberry opined, "That's so hot."

I won't spoil the ending, but Strawberry informed her boss at the Donut Hole, "I'm going to L.A. with Mikey [to become a teen porn star]."

In her Nylon piece, ‘RED ROCKET’ STAR SUZANNA SON IS THE NEXT BIG THING (Dec 8, 2021), Sophia June asked Suzanna Son (Strawberry):

Q: Your character is so naive, but so confident and really bold and smart. Do you think she’s aware that Mikey is using her and is she using him?

A: She’s super aware of it. She waited on that roller coaster to tell him that because she’s screwing him as much as he’s screwing her. And truly, he’s the naive one. She’s two steps ahead. She might like to play that she is a little bit coy and shy and young, but that’s her weapon. She weaponizes her cuteness.

Mare of Mare of Easttown

As hard as it is for (most) middle-aged women and teens boys to (openly) admit, nymphets can seduce men. And Son's assessment of Strawberry reminds me of novelist Robertson Davies' assessment of Lolita as: “[...] not [about] the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but [about] the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child”. And Son reminded me of Mare of Mare of Easttown who said, "Trust me. Teenage girls are fucking sneaky."

Interestingly, of Mikey Saber, Brianna Zigler shared in her Gawker piece, "In ‘Red Rocket’, Mikey Saber Is a Very Bad Man: How refreshing" (Dec 10, 2021), that she found Mikey, refreshing, exhilarating and a hoot to root for:

It was both refreshing and exhilarating to watch an anti-hero go that low [...] it’s fun to root for a fictional character who is an endearing piece of shit, and boring to watch people become perfect moral agents.

Lastly, before it's release, Red Rocket was shown at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or. And the Los Angeles Film Critics Association awarded 47-year-old Simon Rex Best Actor for his Mikey Saber portrayal.