To be fair, Brad Guigar and I spoke about many things over dinner and island whisk[e]y last night (he stayed on Islay, I started in Japan and ended in Orkney), ranging from who is doing great comics and the potential for a Patreon bubble collapse to his discovery of how challenging drawing the naughty comics has been for him these past few months. Short version: the money is very nice, but there are societal hurdles. Shorter version: he’s never been so glad that his mom doesn’t ever read his comic. On the plus side, he gets to deduct porn as legitimate business expenses. It was a wonderfully wry conversation that looked at both sides of that tension.

But today, there’s a far better conversation, far briefer, and we all get to share in it. You’ll have to supply your own booze.

I call Erika Moen Hurricane Erika (although I may stop, as that name was actually used this season and was rather deadly) because she’s a force of nature. She’s spent a significant amount of her comics career getting shit on by people that have decided to assign motives to her or make her the villain in their own personal psychodramas. Basically, people forgot that DAR-era Erika was not a cartoon character, but an actual person with a life that doesn’t perfectly parallel with those of her critics; once they forgot, they never remembered.

Today’s a little different. Today, she’s anticipating getting shit for being who she is and what she actually does. I imagine it’s marginally better to get grief for your actual own self instead of somebody’s invented version, but not a whole lot better.

Let me back up a moment.

Today’s Oh Joy, Sex Toy is about something Moen hasn’t test-driven or done, but something she’s thinking about doing and how she’s conflicted about the likely blowback. Specifically, porn star James Deen has invited Moen and husband Matt Nolan to make porn with him¹ and do a comic about the experience. They’re into the idea, they want to do it, and they haven’t yet — or at least, haven’t told us if they have or not — because of the likely side effects. Moen’s comic career work will no longer be what you find on Google:

If I do this, when you search for my name the first thing you’re gunna see is my vadge getting pounded. A video of me fucking will eclipse everything else I’ve accomplished and created. [emphasis original]

And that’s before the internet commentariat that despised Moen for who they thought she was will start to despise Moen for something she’s actually done; fortunately, internet people never make their displeasure with complete strangers known². And even worse than asshole internet randos, Moen anticipates getting treated differently by actual people in her life:

They’re cool with you reviewing sex toys and going to sex parties and featuring sex work in your comics, but if they knew a video of you fucking existed they’d be appalled?

That’s Leia Weatherington, the other half of the conversation featured in today’s comic; she has zero fucks to give for anybody that pulls that shit, and good for her. It’s entirely possible that she and Moen will get an uptick in their average internet asshole contact rates just for being shown to have this conversation, which makes them both brave as hell in my book.

So there’s the dilemma — something that Moen wants to do, with her husband’s enthusiastic cooperation, completely in line with the sort of experiential consumer reporting/education comics journalism that she’s known for could carry significant negatives. I’d love to reach out to her and advise her to tell her haters (present and future) to fuck off, but I’m not the one that would have to bear the brunt of that bravado from my safe remove.

The comic ends on a To be continued, and whatever Moen decides, I hope she can find the balance between brave and emotional safety, long-held want and personal relationships. Maybe Erika and Matt and James Deen make porn despite the negatives. Maybe Dan Savage’s HUMP Festival³ offers a middle path. Maybe the discussion is the most important thing. But in any event, Moen (and Weatherington, and Nolan, and hell, James Deen too and let’s throw Guigar on the pile while we’re at it⁴) are all to be applauded for challenging a culture that wants everything to be sexy all the time but also wants to punish those that are/create material that is.

My most sincere thanks to Moen for once again generously, courageously sharing who she is. It’s not easy to tell the world that you exist and what you’re like, but she always makes it look graceful and messy in equal measure.

Spam of the day:

(1) New Message from Jessgirl86 (9 miles away)

Oh great, now I’ve got a Rick Springfield earworm going on. THANKS, spammers.

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¹ Something that apparently anybody can apply to do on Deen’s website [NSFW, obviously)

² I am not meaning to minimize Nolan’s involvement in all of this; he and Moen are partners in OJST as well as life, and would be partners in this porn adventure. But let’s face it, a dude is not going to get even one percent of the vitriol that a woman would.

³ Where amateur filmmakers create five minute porn shorts — of any degree of explicitness, any topic, any genre or medium — and they get shown in an actual theater to an audience, then the movie file is publicly destroyed. You get to be in porn but not have it follow you around for the rest of your life.

⁴ Ladies and gentlemen, start your fanfics.