Read by Kevin Shen
Some called it the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Others the Third Wave of Automation. Terminology aside, we all knew what they meant. Truck drivers, radiologists, abstract painters – all had been bettered by algorithms.
And now it was our turn. “Amateur” adult actors.
Many a journalist has interviewed those in our profession and come back with horror stories about our upbringing. Parents enslaved by opioids. Partners with a taste for extreme violence.
Trust me. Those clichés aren’t true of us.
As for me, I come from a family of idealistic artists. Dad spent the 90s making speeches in dimly lit São Paulo bars, claiming he’d soon bring down Hollywood and make cinema a true form of art. Mum thought of herself as a Japanese-Brazilian Nina Simone. A jazzy-J-Pop visionary. In her heyday, she was banned from ninety-four out of Sao Paulo’s ninety-eight karaoke bars for disorderly behaviour. She’d ask the senescent DJ for an Asian classic, a tune that made her contemporaries think of their parents and the Old Island, just to sing it as insultingly as possible. Mum lived to shock the Japanese-Brazilian community.
It was while studying graphic design that Manu and I met. It was while learning about the psychology of everyday objects, as our hero the cognitive engineer Don Norman had phrased it, that Manuela Schwarzschild and I fell in love.
Professor Norman had showed us that door handles, water taps, and push buttons all nudged our unconscious towards a certain kind of action. Design them wrong and an airplane pilot will make a fatal decision. Great design saves lives.
Uninterested in the greater good, we designed impossible objects. A tea kettle with the handle and nozzle on the same side. Two bicycles sharing a front wheel, their handle bars facing each other.
After graduating in 2017, Manu and I quickly learned the Brazilian market wasn’t ready for our vision. To complicate matters, our prospective employers now had the option of going online, and commissioning creatives from even cheaper parts of the world.
Manu thought about moving abroad. Her paternal grandparents had fled Germany for mysterious reasons, just as World War II had ended, and she was entitled to German citizenship.
Brazil aside, I could only reside legally in Japan. I could apply for a working visa and slave away in a farm or a factory, like several of my cousins and uncles – a highly unappealing prospect.
Did Manu and I want to be rich? Did we want to be revolutionaries? I had just turned twenty-two, my only credential was a Bachelor’s Degree in a high risk/low reward industry. What I really wanted was to rewind time and go back to being a child. Like Holden Caulfield, I wanted to stop everyone from growing up.
But Manuela was the opposite of J.D. Salinger. In the script she wrote for our lives, we couldn’t help but move forward.
And move forward we did.
In one of our many idle, uncertain afternoons, Manuela showed me a nude self-portrait she had sold to SuicideChicks. She was lying in a red hammock on her parents’ balcony, Sao Paulo’s grey communist-looking apartment blocks in the background. She was wearing nothing but her nose piercing and her Afro-Brazilian spiritist skull tattoos. She had her tongue all over a green coconut.
SuicideChicks was a website and fashion brand dedicated to non-conformist beauty. Alternative models made a living selling them erotic content.
What if we went one step further? Manu pretended to ask me. As I said, she was the one scripting our existence, and her question was in fact the clearest of orders.
Setting up a channel on CamScura, an online marketplace for erotic experiences, was easier than we thought. We made up an email address, uploaded fake ID cards, and registered my PayPal to receive our wages – since Manu still shared a bank account with her parents.
In the CamScura world, Obscura Tokens were the currency. These allowed users to access our webcam, and to lobby us to act out their fantasies.
For six tokens, Manuela would twerk naked while I stood by eating a Vienna sausage. For seven tokens, I’d lick her armpit as she pinched my ear singing Hotel California.
It surprised us at first how little interest there was in traditional lovemaking. Penetration was passé. The Absurd was now the norm.
Unlike all of our previous ideas, this was an instant, unambiguous success. Within two months we had the funds to rent a small apartment in the West Zone of Sao Paulo. Our office, our studio, our stage, moved from Manu’s bedroom in her parents’ home, to a place we could call our own.
Focused on growth, Manuela “asked” me for my thoughts on using social media to monetise our popularity. She wanted to create TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter pages. She wanted maximum power over how we were perceived.
Manu and I knew we were running out of time. Soon, very soon, an acquaintance would find our oeuvre online. When that happened, our parents would learn their kids had swapped graphic design for adult entertainment, wasting years of private schooling, extracurricular courses, educational family holidays.
An alternative, Manu argued, would be to embrace our new identities. We could sit with the old-timers and explain our reasoning. Without shame. Without regret. We could frame the narrative to our advantage.
Manu was right and wrong. She was right about the benefits of making the first move, of not being caught by surprise. She was wrong that love, sincerity and openness were enough to convince Mum and Dad it was normal to expose ourselves on the internet.
My parents and Manu’s father cut us off. Only her sobbing mother accepted her daughter’s choice. Mrs. Schwarzschild's tolerance, however, was restricted to Manuela. Later, the old lady would go on record blaming me for corrupting her innocent little girl.
We attracted the attention of the mainstream media. Liberal and conservative newspapers queued up to interview us. Two college-educated millennials, from law-abiding middle-class families, choosing a career in porno.
Our Instagram page quickly reached three hundred thousand followers. My email inbox was full of requests for collaborations. Suddenly, all lingerie brands wanted to clothe Manu. All condom brands wanted to sheathe me.
We were offered roles in productions with the greats, like Ron “Hedgehog” Jeremy and Stormy “FLOTUS” Daniels. Despite the allure of international fame, we passed on invitations to perform with others. Sharing our sex life with strangers took something important away from our relationship. To make up for this absence we agreed to only act together, no matter how tempting the offer.
Sure, this deal was much harder on Manu than on me. She was the one gringo producers were after. They wanted her as Mary Magdalene in the arms of twelve horny apostles, while the Messiah slept oblivious in the next room. They wanted her as Helen of Troy, turning that most epic of wars into the most epic of orgies.
To wit, I wasn’t just an extra in Manu’s productions, even if sometimes I felt like an extra in her life. The Japanese in Brazil are a so-called model minority. Well-educated, well-behaved, well-off. Watching a member of this harmless group rebel excited Brazilians in deep and unpredictable ways.
Video footage of my mother’s karaoke performances resurfaced. A couple of highly experimental short movies my father had made twenty years earlier were uploaded on YouTube.
In the 2018 Presidential election, the Pro-Torture candidate used us – and me in particular – to illustrate how globalisation had corrupted Christian values.
Death threats ensued. A chunk of our budget was now spent on security measures. We thought again about moving abroad, since all we needed for work was a laptop and an internet connection.
Manu woke me up one morning and said We’re going to Portugal. Landing in Europe, we bought a camcorder and tried to cast Brazilian expats in our erotic productions.
We became co-directors. This was Manu’s idea, of course. She knew we couldn’t count on our bodies looking young forever, and pivoting to amateur porno production seemed to be the most reasonable next step.
Three months and three hundred videos later, just before our visa expired, we flew back home ready to start our media empire. Manu and I worked hard to promote those movies. We focused all of our resources into making those actors porno stars.
And yet, audiences cared only about our acting. We lost more than half of our savings trying to become filmmakers. I couldn’t help but wonder – was this how Dad felt when reality forced him to give up on trying to make cinema a true form of art?
For the first time in our relationship I saw my girlfriend doubt her instincts. Her insecurity and lack of energy became visible in our performances. Even our most loyal fans complained something was missing.
The final blow came when we were emailed footage of Manu as Marie Antoinette in bed with the Royal Cake Maker. Of me as Chairman Mao spreading STDs in Communist China. Of her as Margaret Thatcher in a ménage-à-trois with Gorbachev and Ronnie Reagan. Of me as musician Psy doing it Gangnam Style in downtown Seoul.
Those were us. Those were our faces. Our bodies. Our genitals.
Our oeuvre had been fed to A.I. algorithms, and now anyone could create videos of Manu and me doing anything – without paying us a centavo.
For a while, competition boosted our energy. In the last two years adult entertainment had become central to our identities, it had given meaning to our lives.
We fought back. We bought masks and costumes. In bed I was President Trump, she was President Bolsonaro. I was Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, she was a Minke whale.
Politicised porno made us again the centre of attention. A German liberal newspaper offered Manu a column. Minor Brazilian parties asked for our endorsements.
But soon after our A.I. doppelgängers were all over the internet making love to past and current political figures.
We were disheartened. Traffic on our CamScura channel was so low we couldn’t pay our bills. Our rent was several months overdue. We both knew we couldn’t move back with our parents.
Depressed, demoralised, we overate and overslept. In a rare moment of anger I threw our camera equipment out of the window, smashing and killing a couple of hapless pigeons making love on the pavement.
Manu woke me up one morning holding a pair of berets, and said it was about time we started the Revolution. A brand new political party. A Revolutionary Movement.
Transitioning from the adult industry to politics wasn’t unheard of in Brazil. With a populist tyrant in power, with the leader of the opposition in jail for corruption, there was a vacuum in national politics – and who better than us to fill it?
Manuela Schwarzschild saw herself as President of the New Republic in 2022, and me standing there by her side. To prove how far she had come. To witness how far she’d go.
(c) Enzo Kohara Franca, 2020
Born in Brazil to Japanese and Italian parents, Enzo Kohara Franca (left) studied Photojournalism at the University of Arts London and documented conflicts in Eastern Ukraine and Macedonia. His work has been published by the Tishman Review, the Fortnightly Review, and short-listed for the 2019 Tillie Olsen Award and the 2019 Hammond House Award.
Kevin Shen’s selected credits include: Theatre: Yellow Face (National Theatre, Park Theatre), Chimerica (West End), Snow in Midsummer (RSC), Paper Dolls (Mosaic Theatre, Washington, DC). Film: A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby, Close, Unlocked, The Rezort. Television: Tyrant, Criminal Minds, Pure Genius, EastEnders. Radio: Fear of Flying (BBC Radio 4)
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