2020: WTF Was THAT?

When you think about it, 2020 started off normally enough. By this I mean 2020 started off stupidly, cruelly and ridiculously, with me predictably suffering a liquor, amphetamine and psilocybin-derived hangover so severe that I openly yearned for death. Even so, January 1 gave us no real indication of just how abnormal the rest of 2020 would become.

On the other hand, maybe we should have seen the rest of the year’s bizarre misery coming when much of Australia’s perimeter suddenly burst into flames. On the bright side, those fires gave adult industry philanthropists some good fundraising practice, which would come in handy a matter of weeks later.

As January handed off the baton to February, it momentarily looked like the big challenge the adult industry would face in 2020 would at least be a familiar one – the prosecution of a “War on Porn” coming from social conservatives on the political right.

Looking back, fighting that sort of war almost sounds pleasant compared to slathering ourselves in hand sanitizer, filling our garages with rolls of toilet paper bought at Costco in a breathless panic and watching televised sports with fake crowd noise.

California’s AB5 was another source of adult industry angst in February, because despite whatever good intentions its sponsors might have had, it would (among other things) force YNOT to treat me as an “employee,” instead of treating me as what I am: An asshole who occasionally hacks YNOT’s backend to publish dumb, unhelpful and terribly misleading posts without their permission.

Not to be outdone by California, Utah cooked up a bill which requires warning labels to be affixed to porn videos, because in the mind of Utah’s legislators, porn is just like cigarettes, except without the beneficial teeth-yellowing, cancer-causing properties.

California responded to Utah’s “who can write the dumbest legislation” challenge by proposing AB2389, a bill which, if I understand it correctly, would require adult performers to be fingerprinted and sit for a polygraph examination, then earn a PhD in social work and a law degree before becoming eligible to perform on camera.

Still, by that point in 2020, it looked like it would be a conventionally stupid and awful year, not a historically unprecedented, will-this-shitty-year-ever-fucking-end? kind of terrible year. That all started to change in March, when some bright bulb in the New Hampshire legislator introduced the Stop Guilt by Association Act.

Ha! Just kidding – obviously, that was just more of the normal, annually-stupid stuff. The truly soul-crushing things began when every adult trade show, webmaster gathering, open mic night and Casino Night fundraiser was abruptly cancelled, postponed, delayed, or jettisoned into space like a DC supervillain. That sad trend began in March and continues through the time of my writing this post. Along the way, the COVID-19 pandemic even forced the cancellation of the adult industry’s single most-celebrated, annually anticipated event: The Pinedale Forum.

Before you knew it, this COVID-19 thing was fucking up everything. Sure, people kept watching porn, along with binging every show Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, HBO, HBO Go, HBO Max and HBO GoMaxPrimePremium+ had to offer. But first, the NBA suspended its season, then Major League Baseball decided to have part of a season but forgot to tell anyone, so nobody noticed it.

Later, the college football season was off, back on, back off, on again but only for in-conference games, then back off, then back on but only for state schools with animal mascots, then back off, then finally back on again, but held entirely on the International Space Station in a zero-gravity environment, which was great for offensive linemen but kind of a drag in terms of passing accuracy stats for the quarterbacks.

Luckily for us in the American adult industry, our government quickly took bold, decisive action to provide life-saving emergency loans to small businesses. Somewhat less fortunately, our government also took the position that businesses and individual entrepreneurs in the adult industry couldn’t have any of that money.

That policy led to the U.S. Small Business Administration getting sued by a bunch of strip clubs, across several different states. These lawsuits resulted in one of the only truly satisfying events of 2020: The U.S. government being told by the court, in effect: “Yes, you DO have to make these loans available to adult businesses.”

Then, as if 2020 wasn’t weird enough already, in June, a bowl of tortilla chips covered in cheese sauce and jalapenos was arrested and charged with manslaughter. Or maybe it was a male porn performer? Either way, what really caught my eye was the murder weapon, which was – and I swear to God I didn’t imagine this while high on opium – a fucking toad.

Look, we’re only as far as June and I’m nearly 800 words into this post, so I’m going to more succinctly summarize a few things, or we’re never going to make it to December 31 – which, oddly enough, will be yesterday by the time you read this, because in addition to being a freelance blog hacker, I’m a time traveler.

Anyway, after a snack that’s popular at sporting events killed someone using a toad, or whatever the fuck happened there, there were massive protests around the globe against racism and police brutality, everyone attended approximately 5784 Zoom meetings each, Jeffrey Toobin jerked off on camera in at least a few of those Zoom meetings, elected officials introduced several hundred initiatives targeting Section 230, Ennio Morricone died, Obama started following Sara Jay on Twitter, “WAP” came out, Ben Shapiro clutched at his pearls about “WAP” coming out, Erik Everhard put out a book that appears to be about people with “sexual superpowers” (Netflix will soon release a series based on it, I’m sure), something happened with 2257 but it’s not entirely clear what it was and elected officials introduced several hundred more initiatives targeting Section 230.

Pretty soon it was October – and, not really thinking about the fact there wouldn’t be as much trick or treating going on in 2020 what with COVID-19 hanging around and all, millions of Americans stocked up on candy to hand out on Halloween anyway, only to find themselves spending the next six weeks eating bite-size Snickers bars by the dozen while they sat on the couch watching the entire Breaking Bad series for the third time.

Then November arrived and we had the 2020 Presidential election, which yielded a clear winner: American election law experts. Then, despite the ongoing pandemic, the nation’s families gathered for Thanksgiving, celebrated with loved ones, passed COVID-19 on to those loved ones and watched as they died in large numbers. Then we invited anyone who survived Thanksgiving to join us in a month for Christmas.

By the time late December rolled around, we pretty much found ourselves back where we started: “The War on Porn” – only this time, the war was declared by VISA and Mastercard, not the government, and they added a “hub” to the end of the phrase.

So here we are, January 2021. What will the year ahead of us bring? Will the world return to something resembling “normal”? Will the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines enable us to resume having trade shows and other events? Could 2021 possibly be even worse than 2020, or would achieving that require the earth crashing into the sun? I suppose we’ll find out over the next 12 months.

Happy New Year!

Chaos photo by Brett Jordan from Pexels