I Was 19, a Virgin and Penthouse’s First Summer Intern
👅💦🍒Das Video ist über diesen Link verfügbar.👅💦🍒
Initially, I was horrified by her suggestion that I intern at a porn magazine, but soon the feeling turned to titillating curiosity
By Suzan Sherman • 06/10/02 12:00am
The first issue of Penthouse.
My mother told me to do it. Initially, I was horrified by her suggestion that I intern at a porn magazine, but soon the feeling turned to titillating curiosity. Her best friend’s daughter worked at Penthouse—sadly, my family’s only connection to the New York publishing world. My mother described the job as “a foot in the door.” I giddily contemplated the possibilities offered by this “experience”—editorially speaking and, presumably, beyond.
Now, as the quaint world of print pornography quietly shuffles through what many are calling its twilight, I look back fondly to the summer of 1988, the summer that I became Penthouse‘s first (and, at the time, only) intern.
Every morning, my father and I would commute together from suburban Long Island. He’d drop me off at the Penthouse offices on Broadway and then head crosstown to his upstanding job at the United Nations.
My first day, I wore a pressed skirt and blouse, though when I emerged from the elevator into a corridor hung with framed posters of naked Pets on Bob Guccione’s knee, I wondered whether the dress code was nothing at all. The editor in chief looked me over as if I were Snow White fluttering into his den of perversity. I was certain he could discern, with his pornographer’s X-ray vision, that I was still a virgin.
Peter was middle-aged, with dark, thinning hair, though his strongest feature was his teeth, which were incredibly crooked, giving him a kinky menace when he smiled at me. He led me around the narrow banks of cubicles and introduced me to everyone on staff, most of whom were women. (To rationalize their work, they quoted the First Amendment constantly, with the righteous flourish of Bible-thumpers.) Some appeared indifferent to my presence, while others looked me over with concern, as if they were witnessing the conclusion of my wholesome girlhood.
Much of my time was spent reading the slush pile, which was composed of bizarre, poorly written short stories, usually sci-fi, where women’s measurements were more amply described than character or plot line. Then there were the infamous Penthouse Forum letters—the sexual escapades, real or imagined, of “ordinary” men. Hunched over my desk, I found myself more than slightly aroused by my first-time foray into libidinous wordplay. My favorite was the well-endowed lawn boy who, with a few deep thrusts, defrosted the haughty housewife. I also liked the mailman and the lusty ladies on his route who licked his postage stamps (and more). The Forum editor was a smart-talking, gum-chewing, big-haired gal who wore spandex pants nearly every day. She crossed out sentences with red pencil between chortles and burst Bubblicious bubbles. At the other end of the spectrum was the prudish, tight-lipped copy editor who let me proofread every article except the Forum, as if this would preserve my fast-fleeting purity.
Sexual slurs, I soon discovered, occurred offhandedly between coworkers