The appeal of Ron Jeremy at work

June 5, 2016 7:58 AM

Why I Love Watching Ron Jeremy Fuck (Vice) (NSFW pictures)

To witness Ron Jeremy have intercourse is to witness a grizzly bear eat a flamingo, or an orphan try to break into a vending machine. He is a manifestation of the grotesque male id, jamming fingers and genitals into every orifice at every opportunity, doing all of these things simultaneously, not making sense, not following some plan, just a man bludgeoning the human body with his sexual impulses. It is like watching a chimpanzee try to open the package of an Xbox controller.

posted by slutze (57 comments total)

This is fucking (ahem) beautiful. Probably needs a major NSFW warning, though.

I also loved this, from his piece To Girl, From Boy, With Love:

You stare down at the tracks, at the Burger King cups and Skittles wrappers and discarded MetroCards. You think about how these are remnants of other people's lives, things that were at a moment essential to their existence. That someone had to make a train to meet a girl and dug in a pocket for a dollar to cram into a slot on a robot machine. Then that someone watched the crumpled corners disappear and prayed that the dollar wasn't rejected, and in this instant his brain played a montage of every other dollar he had ever inserted into a robot machine, soda machines and cigarette machines and arcades, and whether those were more crumpled but were accepted anyway, what his chances were now, because he loved this girl and maybe she loved him, and he was trying to find out.

I don't know this writer but I want to read all his words.
posted by rorgy at 8:02 AM on June 5, 2016 [8 favorites]

I think this involves a degree of projection of what the author would like Ron Jeremy to be. I have actually never seen him in porn, but I remember the overwhelming impression he gives in interviews of being more melancholy dissatisfaction than bewildered exuberance.
posted by howfar at 8:07 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hipster, inasmuch as it exists today, is the ability to endorse not just Bernie Sanders but, for audacity's sake, Donald Trump, too. People who can align themselves with both lofty idealism and unrepentant narcissism. Ruin America, make America great again, make America a socialist utopia—it doesn't matter, because there is no wager, really. Hipster is just a man rich enough to dare you to object to him, in all his infinite costumes, because of how inherently unobjectionable a rich white man feels he is at his core. It's all an amusement.

What made hipster culture so persistent was not the knit hats or the glasses or the micro brews, but how it functioned as a sort of permission, a license to veer into mindless recreation and Important Movements in equal measure. Hipster was just what we called the games white people play with their various entitlements.

One man's #occupywallstreet is another man's #champagneshowers.

Goddamn. I like this guy a lot.
posted by rorgy at 8:08 AM on June 5, 2016 [25 favorites]

Yeah I'd love for this to have an nsfw note in the link - meant to add one but forgot. I've flagged the post and maybe someone more powerful than me can change it (or let me know if that's an inappropriate use of a flag)
posted by slutze at 8:12 AM on June 5, 2016

Mod note: NSFW done and dusted
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 8:13 AM on June 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Once while I was pretending to enjoy blackjack at noon with some coworkers in a crowded off-the -strip Vegas casino, Ron Jeremy walked into the room. He was completely quiet, dressed like a shlub, just trying to check in at the counter. Didn't ask for or expect any attention.

The room absolutely exploded with people smiling, waving, and yelling, "Ron!"
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:22 AM on June 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

The writing is great.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:28 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Seriously, after this year's election cycle, he'd get my vote in 2020.
posted by mikelieman at 8:31 AM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm a fan of Ron Jeremy's to the point that I once dressed as him (the older, more rotund version) for Halloween. I was surprised at how many people got it. His autobiography is pretty entertaining, especially the section on how to have sex like a porn star, where he describes having to ignore all the lights, cameras, and other people on the set, and having to be aware of where your head/hair and arms and legs are at all times so you don't block the camera. Although he is known as "the hedgehog", he seems to prefer "the human ouroboros". I leave it to the reader to determine why.
posted by TedW at 8:36 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Man, what's so bad about shopping at Kohl's? Like, where do you shop, dude? I can't imagine that writing thinkpieces about Ron Jeremy is buying you a lot of designer clothes. Well, shit, maybe it is, I dunno. How does one break into this I guess lucrative market?

I thought this was fine, but I've read a lot of stuff in this tone and style, to be honest. I'm way less curious about the author's take on watching Ron Jeremy get laid than I am in how a guy I presume is under 30 came upon (you know what I mean) a bunch of '80s VHS porn. Did he pick up a box at a garage sale? I want to hear that story.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:39 AM on June 5, 2016 [10 favorites]

80s VHS porn is easy to stumble upon regardless of age or the current decade so that story is prolly boring
Hope this helps
posted by todayandtomorrow at 8:45 AM on June 5, 2016 [7 favorites]

My appreciation for Jeremy has considerably diminished since reading Ginger Lynn Allen's charges that he raped her.
posted by maxsparber at 8:46 AM on June 5, 2016 [15 favorites]

Perhaps I am a lone voice of dissent on this one, but I don't really like that style of writing. It just comes across as overwrought.

Ron de Jeremy, though, that is fairly clever.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 8:51 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Apropos of nothing, I read this in Robert Evans' voice. Riveting article.
posted by NordyneDefenceDynamics at 8:53 AM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh, male gaze, you so funny.

He’s a shriveled man covered in back hair, glistening, hunched over, with a stomach so massive, so swollen and perfectly spherical it looks like his bellybutton is going to pop out and send him flying around the room like a deflating helium balloon....

He is very obviously bald, but maintains the long, brittle, greasy black strands that hang down the back of his head like an animal pelt drying in a West Virginia cellar. He exists perpetually in a state of recently-divorced dad—shirt untucked, sometimes no shirt at all, always looking as if the room he is in is one he wandered into accidentally, but he'll hang out for a bit because he is out of canned beans and Wheel of Fortune doesn't start for 16 minutes anyway. He looks permanently covered in warm mayonnaise and old steel wool.

Disgusting male porn star admired simply for being disgusting. Meanwhile, women are critiqued for any breast too small, any stomach too round, any thigh too thick, any wrinkle too visible -- any single "flaw" that makes them human.

Feh.
posted by mudpuppie at 9:10 AM on June 5, 2016 [94 favorites]

I'm way less curious about the author's take on watching Ron Jeremy get laid than I am in how a guy I presume is under 30 came upon (you know what I mean) a bunch of '80s VHS porn. Did he pick up a box at a garage sale? I want to hear that story.

Probably found it in the woods.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 9:13 AM on June 5, 2016 [27 favorites]

Or in the back of daddy's closet.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:15 AM on June 5, 2016

Apropos of nothing, I read this in Robert Evans' voice. Riveting article.

Which in turn made me read it in Patton Oswalt's Robert Evans voice (also NSFW).
posted by Strange Interlude at 9:35 AM on June 5, 2016

This guy needs to see more real life people having sex. He seems stunned that Jeremy has the audacity to be mediocre looking!!! On camera. At least don't devote half the article to how repulsive the guy is, we've heard it all before.
posted by benzenedream at 9:56 AM on June 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

I reject the content of the article but I do admire the author's indulgence of stylistic excess. I mean that unironically, the writing is ridiculous but it is also awesome. Perhaps like how the author sees Jeremy himself.

Jeremy makes a face like he has witnessed the moon landing while on opiates, like he has come home to find Cleopatra playing Wii Fit in his living room.

posted by Nelson at 10:15 AM on June 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm wondering if Don DeLillo ghostwrote for John Saward in this article about Joel Osteen:

In 1996, five British academics said, "If you want my future, forget my past." They were the Spice Girls.

posted by Stoatfarm at 10:22 AM on June 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

His autobiography is pretty entertaining,

In it, he mentions a tree on his high school campus where he got his first blowjob. My old bartender Phil went to the same high school (Cardozo, out in Bayside), abd told me that's where everybody in that neighborhood got their first blowjob.
posted by jonmc at 10:26 AM on June 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

...how a guy I presume is under 30 came upon (you know what I mean) a bunch of '80s VHS porn.
You can fairly easily find it all in various locations of the interwebs.
Or...um...so I've heard.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:37 AM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

"He describes having to ignore all the lights, cameras, and other people on the set". Yes, he ignores all the other people, including the woman or women he's screwing. He uses them like they are inanimate objects.

Why are we glorifying such a vile person?
posted by mysterious_stranger at 10:43 AM on June 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

I really want this author to write erotic novels.
posted by Foam Pants at 11:14 AM on June 5, 2016

Stoatfarm that sentence makes absolutely no sense. What is Delillo-ish about it?

I don't know anything about porn but Osteen is two zipcodes over from me and worth studying and his article on Osteen reveals zero insight. Zero.
posted by bukvich at 11:14 AM on June 5, 2016

bukvich: "Stoatfarm that sentence makes absolutely no sense. What is Delillo-ish about it?"

It po-facedly elevates a pop commonplace.

And it's funny.
posted by chavenet at 11:18 AM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

Thank you chavenet.

Jokes are not funny when they have to be explained!
posted by bukvich at 11:22 AM on June 5, 2016

You can fairly easily find it all in various locations of the interwebs.

No, the truth is, it finds you. Sort of like the abyss gazing back.
posted by blucevalo at 11:27 AM on June 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

We're burying the bigger issue here, which is that jonmc knows where there's a tree that gives blowjobs.
posted by delfin at 11:57 AM on June 5, 2016 [54 favorites]

The elves need to switch it up every now and then. Baking cookies 24/7 gets old.
posted by CKmtl at 12:20 PM on June 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

I guess it's all fun for hipsters because they can just check out any time and get a job in tech startups or organic beer brewing or bullshit journalism, but for a lot of the people in Ron Jeremy's orbit of employment, it's just a pile of shit you're never going to come out of well.
posted by Coda Tronca at 12:35 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

We're burying the bigger issue here, which is that jonmc knows where there's a tree that gives blowjobs.

That sounds like a story Shel Silverstein may ended up revising into a famous children's book.
posted by detachd at 12:59 PM on June 5, 2016 [11 favorites]

Hipster is just a man rich enough to dare you to object to him, in all his infinite costumes, because of how inherently unobjectionable a rich white man feels he is at his core. It's all an amusement.

*eye-roll*

This is the almost perfect internet think piece, tho: arguments over "hipsters" meet arguments over class meet arguments over porn. It's lacking only an excursus on tatoos.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:14 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

That sounds like a story Shel Silverstein may ended up revising into a famous children's book.

The Giving O Tree?
posted by Sublimity at 2:09 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I desperately wish that the idea that one can see this:

jamming fingers and genitals into every orifice at every opportunity, [...] just a man bludgeoning the human body with his sexual impulses

and also appear genuinely to think this:

not misogynistic

was surprising to me in the slightest, but no. So nauseatingly predictable.
posted by jesourie at 2:11 PM on June 5, 2016 [14 favorites]

Mudpuppie, you said a mouthful with Disgusting male porn star admired simply for being disgusting. Meanwhile, women are critiqued for any breast too small, any stomach too round, any thigh too thick, any wrinkle too visible -- any single "flaw" that makes them human.


Did y'all see #100daysofpleasantries on Instagram? The stripper who makes illustrations out of interactions from her workday? I'm having trouble making a direct link, but the comment I quote above reminds me of the picture that is shown first in the blurb about this project in Forbes... A hugely fat old guy remarks that a different stripper's body "wasn't up to his standards".
posted by Sublimity at 2:14 PM on June 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

The line "just a man bludgeoning the human body with his sexual impulses" has the interesting characteristic of seeming to separate "man" into a different category from "human." You see this constantly with women ("I get along with people okay, but I can't talk to women"), and very rarely with men.
posted by Nothing at 2:47 PM on June 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

The line "just a man bludgeoning the human body with his sexual impulses" has the interesting characteristic of seeming to separate "man" into a different category from "human."

It's got man, vending machines, orphans, and flamingos but the presence of no woman. Is it too uncomfortable to imagine the vending machine being jammed and slammed is an actual woman person?

Very interesting writing.
posted by amanda at 4:17 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Between the author, Jeremy himself, and Vice in general, I'm not sure who hates women the most.
posted by beerperson at 4:33 PM on June 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

Viceland Employee Calls out Vice’s 'Sexist' Reputation on Live TV While Co-hosts Put a Condom on a Microphone
posted by Atom Eyes at 5:01 PM on June 5, 2016

amanda, I agree the analogies are objectifying in and of themselves. But...you can't really put a woman in an analogy once the man changes into a monkey, orphan, bear, or what have you. Kind of breaks the whole point of analogies, and perhaps people just can't be put into analogies, but I don't know if I'd go that far. Tough subject, I'm a dude and I always kind of felt sorry for the women who perform with Ron Jeremy, especially "new starlets" who are basically auditioning by being with creepy weird dudes.

At some point this criticism feels sanctimonious to me but I will be examining why that is...certainly porn is a complicated subject and I don't see it all that far removed from joining the military: it tends to leave people of "poor station" adrift, tends to suck in people who have little opportunity, and if there was more education and opportunity available I suspect more people would refrain from participating in either, both of which involve putting your life and health on the line with a ton of trust to people who have it in their interests to exploit you.
posted by aydeejones at 5:11 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Of course, "creepy weird dude" is its own complicated subject and a sore spot for many aggrieved guys, who feel like women are more welcoming to the advances of conventionally attractive men and immediately deem anyone who is sufficiently flawed "creepy." Is consent stretched into a bad place when a woman has to "perform" with Ron Jeremy?

I'm surprised this hasn't exploded into a 200+ comment discursive MetaFilterBeanPlate post, possible because it's Sunday ATM, in the US.
posted by aydeejones at 5:13 PM on June 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

John Saward, I'm WATCHING you (when not busy watching Ron). What Ron did for porn, you do for writing. Absolutely BRIL! Bravo.

"His breathing sounds like an 18-wheeler accelerating form a dead start." Priceless. I'm sure you meant a '65 Mack B1 Thermodyne, but whatever.

Although I absolutely love your words, I find you a little hard and too judgmental on St. Ron: "He is a strange loser, a figure we can relate to as he grunts and celebrates that he is having sex all."

I suspect many of his 'partners' in his videotic history would disagree. He brought so much more to the scene than the body and looks. Personality, heart, Jeremy-ness.
posted by lometogo at 5:44 PM on June 5, 2016

.......like an animal pelt drying in a West Virginia cellar.

OMG you kids today. You don't dry pelts in your damp cellar! Morons, the lot of ya! Get off mah lawn.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 6:16 PM on June 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

kittens for breakfast: curious about ... how a guy I presume is under 30 came upon ... a bunch of '80s VHS porn.

sevenyearlurk: Probably found it in the woods.

ayup, first prawno was an unlabeled Ron Jeremy VHS found in the woods. I honestly assume this is the same for most men, and psychically unites generations X, Y, and Z.
posted by dgaicun at 9:05 PM on June 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

As soon as I read the title I knew a dude wrote this and I knew exactly what the content would be.

Ron Jeremy is a perfect representation of the misogyny inherent in the porn industry: look guys, even THIS schlub can have unlimited amounts of sex with human Barbies who beg for his dick! What, you think women might want to watch porn featuring a man who doesn't remind them of a cross between their creepy uncle and a bus flasher? Who cares about that, bitches just be holes to be filled.
posted by Anonymous at 1:02 AM on June 6, 2016

Ron Jeremy is a schlub, and is not a threat to men watching porn the way that hardbody gymrats with good hair and 8 inches of glory are. I've had men tell me they watch lesbian porn exclusively because it's less "gay" (IKNORITE) than watching some strange man's cock.

He's an uggboot any many can slip themselves into.
posted by Jilder at 1:14 AM on June 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

He's an uggboot any many can slip themselves into.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
posted by beerperson at 7:27 AM on June 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Somewhere out there is a documentary about Ron Jeremy made in maybe 2001 or 2002. Ever since I saw it, I have had nothing but fondness for the guy. Also he has a formidable dick and a startling ability to get and stay hard more or less on command.
posted by janey47 at 7:58 AM on June 6, 2016

amanda, I agree the analogies are objectifying in and of themselves. But...you can't really put a woman in an analogy once the man changes into a monkey, orphan, bear, or what have you.

Well, but she is there. I see her. She is the flamingo being eaten by the grizzly bear; she is the vending machine being broken into by an orphan. Yeah, I get that there's a base impulse to the sex drive and I totally buy that Ron Jeremy is possibly the near perfect manifestation of that base drive but when you get to the part about "jamming fingers and genitals into every orifice at every opportunity" and then say it is "a man" singular, bludgeoning "the human body" implying a universal "body." Women are not a universal body. Women are present. Women feel pain.

You could spend an entire semester on this article and the tone and the analogies and it would be pretty fascinating. But, I mean, I just read this about a man jamming fingers and genitals into every orifice and, it doesn't seem so great to me...that regular guy just doing...regular things...?

I get our social fascination with the filthy aspects of humanity. I laugh at (mostly) the same base stuff and wrong humor. But only the privileged get to enjoy that without balancing it with the pain.
posted by amanda at 9:41 AM on June 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

you think women might want to watch porn featuring a man who doesn't remind them of a cross between their creepy uncle and a bus flasher

Oh, you mean James Deen! He was all the rage. At least until the multiple rape accusations.

The porn industry is really shitty.
posted by Nelson at 9:52 AM on June 6, 2016

Personally, I think anyone who jerks off to anything but wrinkled snapshots from the Civilian Conservation Corps, mid-seventies Sears catalogues, and The Hite Report On Male Sexuality is dreadfully uncouth, but if one must to stoop to the level of the lurid realm of imagination-aborting moving pictures, Jeremy at least looks like a genuinely human being instead of the glossy horrors otherwise projected before us as some sort of lusty exemplars of manipulated biology.

Of course, the misogynist angle reminds me of when my mother, being an attentive and informed parent in the late seventies, explained to me how pornography harmed and exploited women, which was baffling to me, as a kid who thoughtfully cut out all the women in the process of harvesting pornographic images for my neat scrapbook of stuff that turned me on, and I pasted pictures of early Ron Jeremy together with other pictures of Ron Jeremy together in titillating masturbatory homages to Onan and Brion Gysin in which women were blissfully relieved of all responsibility or involvement.
posted by sonascope at 12:00 PM on June 6, 2016 [4 favorites]

"creepy weird dude" is its own complicated subject and a sore spot for many aggrieved guys, who feel like women are more welcoming to the advances of conventionally attractive men and immediately deem anyone who is sufficiently flawed "creepy."

Unsurprisingly, those aggrieved guys have a fundamental misunderstanding of creepy. Creepy has nothing at all to do with conventional standards of physical attractiveness.

No matter what you look like, creepy is when your first thought about a woman is a judgement about whether or not you'd hit that.

No matter what you look like, creepy is interacting with every attractive woman you meet as though she were a potential sexual partner.

No matter what you look like, creepy is refusing to take no for an answer.

No matter what you look like, creepy is assuming there's something wrong with her if she isn't attracted to you.

And no matter what you look like, creepy is anyone who approaches sex like their partner is a goddamned vending machine.
posted by jesourie at 1:36 PM on June 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

I pasted pictures of early Ron Jeremy together with other pictures of Ron Jeremy together in titillating masturbatory homages to Onan and Brion Gysin

Now that's a party.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:46 PM on June 6, 2016

Majestic prose. Cheers slutze!
posted by The Salaryman at 2:03 PM on June 6, 2016

Somewhere out there is a documentary about Ron Jeremy made in maybe 2001 or 2002. Ever since I saw it, I have had nothing but fondness for the guy. Also he has a formidable dick and a startling ability to get and stay hard more or less on command.

I saw that documentary on Netflix at some point. It was actually pretty melancholy in parts and I didn't end up envious of his life at all. There was one particularly sad scene on the set of a porn shoot where it didn't look like Mr Jeremy or his partner wanted to have sex with each other in the slightest, but they were professionals and went ahead.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:35 PM on June 6, 2016