What If Your Wife Were A Porn Star? - PART 2

Ryan Brown is standing in the doorway of a room at a Motel 6 in Van Nuys, California. The 23-year-old car detailer, in training to be a firefighter, and his just-legal fiancée, Kelly Skyline, are down from Sacramento while she shoots a movie. Inside, arranged around the TV, are a container of body butter, a bag of Runts, and a DVD of Be My Bitch 6 (Skyline's considering a role in 7). Skyline wears low-slung jeans that expose a suntan tattoo of two hearts just above her hip line. Brown (not his real last name), an easygoing, nerdy-looking kid, appears mellow and doting. They're discussing a recent on-the-job injury that Skyline suffered—one that Brown, usually at peace with his fiancée's occupation, found troubling. "I got a text message from her that said 'I've been ripped,'" he recalls. Skyline had been shooting a scene with Billy Glide, a porn star who's nicknamed the Human Wine Bottle, and his oversize penis tore the inside of her vagina.

Brown knew the drill. "Get that text and you know it's no sex for a few days," he says, rolling his eyes. "I constantly made Epsom-salt baths and forced her to get in. It burns the cut but also helps it to heal faster."

Brown and Skyline met a few years ago. She was a student at the high school where Brown was the pole-vaulting coach for the track team. They began dating after she graduated, and he told her that he wanted an open relationship. Skyline agreed. A few months later, trained by Brown's sister-in-law, the porn actress Trina Michaels, Skyline entered an amateur-night contest at a strip club and won. Soon after, she decided to try her hand at the X-rated-movie business. "My feeling was, if she does it, cool," Brown says. "It wasn't a big deal either way. But once you start, you can't undo it." Brown sees it as beneficial to their open relationship. He and Skyline recently had a threesome with a boyhood friend of his (he ranks as a hero among his pals), and she occasionally brings home costars. "Girlfriends of mine call and say that they want to come by for a swim," Skyline says. "I say, 'Yeah, it's okay. You can fuck him.'"

Rusty, 34, says that when his wife, Mikayla Mendez, started working as a porn star, their sex life improved.

Rusty, a 34-year-old bouncer in L.A. married to a porn star named Mikayla Mendez, leads a slightly less charmed domestic existence. It's not so much dealing with his wife's occupational hazards or with the guys at work—"They always ask if it bothers me," Rusty says. "It doesn't"—it's a future of contending with soccer moms. Rusty and Mendez, 28, have a 3-year-old son. This month he'll be starting preschool, and there will inevitably be questions about what his parents do for a living. "I'll play it off," Mendez says vaguely. Rusty, crooking his shaved head, says he'll run interference: "I'll play Mr. Mom. I'll go to school and interact with the parents."

The couple met through friends in 2002. Mendez, a former patients' advocate in the health-care industry, stumbled into porn five years ago after answering a newspaper ad for figure models. She now drives a Mercedes Kompressor and, between acting, stripping, and personal appearances, earns a six-figure income. But she hasn't knitted her porn career into her personal life: She avoids discussing scenes with Rusty.

That policy is more for her own emotional well-being than for Rusty's—he insists that he'd happily talk shop. "Porn has improved our love life—we do it every day and it turns me on that she's with other people," he says, though he admits he has concerns about STDs and expresses relief that Mendez now has a contract with a company that does condom-only movies. "She's an animal, and I am very unusual. What can I say?"

What If Your Wife Were A Porn Star? - PART 1

It's a Wednesday night in late May, and Ryder Sky and her husband, Bill, are celebrating their third anniversary. They keep it simple and order in pizza. The next morning, Sky heads to work at a boxy, modern house in the San Fernando Valley, in Los Angeles. Before long, backdropped by a floor-to-ceiling window, she lowers her mouth onto the erect penis of a sideburned actor who calls himself James Deen.

"That's beautiful," says a scruffy-faced director. "Now give me a jawbreaker."

Sky adjusts Deen's penis so that its head causes her left cheek to bubble. "Do you ever do anal?" the director asks her.

Nine hours later, Sky, a 24-year-old porn actress, pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way, returns to the cozy house near Studio City that she shares with Bill, who works as a driver for a talent agency. Inside their neatly organized home, mainstream DVDs are racked near a flat-screen TV and remnants of supper cool in a pot on the stove. Husband and wife are sprawled across the sofa. Bill, in his mid-thirties, muscular and handsome, wears jeans and a pullover; Sky's in plaid pajama pants and a tank top. If it weren't for the handblown glass dildo artfully displayed on their coffee table (Sky's name is etched on the bottom), this would be a standard picture of American domesticity.

Sky and Bill met in 2002 while working together at an independent film-production company. ...

They have a seemingly solid marriage. It's only when Bill thinks too hard about what his wife's been doing in the year since she quit her job as an executive assistant to become a full-time porn star that things get difficult. Occasionally, he can't keep from mulling over the fact that he's home alone while she's getting it on with another man. "Sometimes I think about it when she works late and I'm going to bed," he says. "It's not negative, though. It's more like, eh . . . " He trails off with a what-can-you-do groan.

This is what it's like to be married to a porn star. While you toil away at a conventional job during the week, your wife spends eight hours a day getting plowed by guys with nicknames like Thug of Porn. There are the indelible mental images. There is the awkwardness of explaining to friends and colleagues—let alone to your parents—what she does. And then there's the fact that you don't even get to have sex with her all that often—intercourse is off-limits before a shoot, and afterward she's too tired and sore.

Bill describes his sex life with Sky as vanilla; "We schedule sex," he says. But that bothers him less than his wife's habitually telling colleagues she's "in a relationship" rather than married. "She hardly ever wears her wedding ring, even off-set," Bill says. "Why be ashamed of being married?" Sky insists that it's not a matter of shame. "I don't want to get typecast as a MILF," she says.

Otherwise sanguine as Bill seems about their arrangement, he shows some discomfort when he explains that his family doesn't know what his wife does for a living and admits that he doesn't go out of his way to tell coworkers about her occupation. At his previous job, a colleague saw a picture of Sky on Bill's desk and recognized her. "He said, 'Hey, that's Ryder Sky,'" Bill says. "I said, 'Yeah, she's my wife.' He said, 'You're a lucky guy.'" This hangs in the air for a beat before he continues. Being a porn star is what Sky wants. She makes good money, she doesn't get bossed around by a suit, and she has time to attend college (majoring in women's studies). He isn't going to stand in her way. "I want her to be happy. And it's a turn-on, in a way. On the downside, though, there are guys having sex with your wife."

But rather than avoid seeing her work, Bill watches Sky's movies religiously and stealthily posts positive sentiments on porn sites, occasionally attacking critics. "I don't look at it as sex," he says. "I look at it as a guy with his dick in my wife, but they're working and it's not emotional. She never orgasms in porn. That's for us. If it happened on the set, it would be a little weird."

Bin ich zu dick?

Nichts Böses ahnend haben Sie es sich mit Ihrer Liebsten auf der Couch gemütlich gemacht. Sie stupst zärtlich ihr Näschen gegen Ihren Hals und flüstert: „Schaaaaatz? Wo soll das mit uns beiden eigentlich hinführen?“
Mist! Vorbei die Ruhe, vorbei der Frieden! Plötzlich befinden Sie sich auf einem Tretminenfeld, das jeden Moment explodieren kann. Wie kommen Sie aus dem Schlamassel bloß raus?