Mike Adriano

Photo of Adriana Chechik courtesy of Mike Adriano

I re-watched Mike Adriano’s superb Anal Starlets 2 a few days ago and it is stuck in my head’the way songs get stuck in your head.

It was the second scene that did it, with Adriana Chechik just before she rocketed to superstardom. More than any other art form, the stars of porn deserve to be stars. Very few obvious phonies or charlatans make it to the top, and very few deserving participants get overlooked or shoved aside. What those who cannot appreciate porn do not understand is that what it takes to make it big in porn is ‘presence.’ It is not being hot, or being able to deep throat, or having grotesquely oversized erogenous zones. While those are all of course important, everybody in porn already has them.

Presence is what it is all about, and Miss Chechik has got it. Unfortunately, it is not easy to define. ‘Presence’ is the part of porn that most reminds one of the old quip, ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ The sex acts can be described, the lines quoted, the apparel and location documented’but not the presence of the performers.

In porn, presence is how appropriate it is that you (the performer) are there. When you are seen, does it make sense that you are in porno? Does it just make sense? When you are first heard, do the lines you deliver feel like something you would say at a party or in bed? When someone looks you dead in the eye, is it safe to say they’d assume you are up for anything? Is your hair parted in such a way as to suggest you’re all too happy to gag on a cock well after your eyes have started to water? Do the motions of your hands while you speak imply you love the pagan glory of being a porn star?

Once you have all that, you have to pair it with an energy, an eagerness. Like a sports star, every piece of your anatomy must command the conclusion that you couldn’t live with yourself if you were doing anything else. It is not just that you have the unique biology to deliver, it is that you would still be doing this even if you didn’t have that unique biology. That is ‘presence,’ the natural fit matched with the drive.

Sasha Grey, Asa Akira, and Tori Black all had presence in spades. Adriana Chechik has it too, and that is why Anal Starlets 2 is stuck in my head. When Mike Adriano speaks with her in the beginning of the scene, she gives answers with a perfect unassuming sexiness. It is not showy, not try hard. Her tone of voice is that of honest, reserved femininity: she wants her answers to be pleasing, but is uninterested in acting. She says she didn’t have that much sex before entering porn; that she is liking anal more and more; that she does watch porn, but not too much; that she has gaped a bit in the past, but has learning to do. As the camera wanders over her beautiful body, she is happy to show it off, but she does not boorishly gyrate like a sorority girl at a party, nor does she affect a condescending and knowing air the way prostitutes do. She is simply pleased to be so examined with reverence, and happily obliges the lens.

When Mike says that he’d like to eat her asshole, she acquiesces. Again, she is happy to do so. It is a ‘neutral positivity.’ He wants to eat her ass, and she wants him to too, a happy meeting of the minds. He starts chewing and she coos in turn. She does not insult the intelligence of the viewer by pretending that a tongue up her asshole is bringing her to orgasm. It feels good, it’s a good place to start, rimming, but there’s no need for theatrics. Asked if she goes ass to mouth, she says, ‘of course’ and immediately ladles the finger that just came out of her sphincter. She makes eye contact with the camera as she does it, and her bright blues eyes’with a bit of crazy to them’light up like the doomed girl in the opening scene of Sin City. There’s the presence again. She said ‘of course’ and it made sense that she did, now she is doing it while looking at you and it’s undoubtable that she meant it. The attention, the perversion, the pleasure—all are standing at attention.

Porn does not ask for the “willing suspension of disbelief” from its audiences the way most art does. What is happening in porn is real, they really are fucking. It’s everything else we must believe: that they want it, that they love it, that they want more of it, etc. It is the “unseen” in the most explicit art form there is that must convince its audience to believe in it, lest the whole thing fall apart.

He keeps eating and eating to his cock’s delight, and she coos and urges him on here and there: “How’s it taste?”, “You like eating my tight little asshole?”, “Oh that’s really deep”. Of course, all those lines could be delivered flatly, falsely, and (or) forced, but they aren’t. You may simply have to watch it to know what I mean. From there the scene moves on as you’d expect: a sloppy blowjob, anal, gapes, money shot. It is good through and through, but those opening bits are what stick out. She is so beautiful, so happy to be there, and so blessedly devoid of self-consciousness It sticks in my head.

My mind keeps going back to it. Her cute butthole and its little winks, her honesty, the way she looks so perfect as she licks that finger. Is it all a lie? Does Adriana Chechik really hate her job and her life? Maybe. No way to know for sure. But that’s fine, porn is performance art. A ballerina might be looking for a permanent exit from her job, but that does not mean she won’t dance beautifully on a given night. And that performance is not somehow made hollow by its performer wanting another job. However, if the performance is great, you might feel safe in assuming the performer does, in fact, like their job. Anyway, the superb Anal Starlets 2 series from Mike Adriano’s site just keeps bouncing from one corner of my brain to another all day.