From www.blogs.browardpalmbeach.com- About the time the economy began to completely unravel last fall, I wrote a story about the life of a few local prostitutes. The story was prophetically titled “The Real Girlfriend Experience.” I say prophetic because director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brokovich, the Ocean’s 11 series) has a new movie out about the life of a New York prostitute during the financial collapse called “The Girlfriend Experience.”

The film stars porn star Sasha Grey, whom Rolling Stone calls “the dirtiest girl in the world” in its profile of her in the current issue. Grey is also the reigning AVN Female Performer of the Year (at 21, she’s the youngest woman to win the honor). She was in town this week to pimp the movie during Exxxotica Miami Beach. I watched the film (see the trailer here) and caught up with her on Friday at the Catalina Hotel.

I asked her about the research she did for the Soderbergh movie, the Rolling Stone story, her relationship, and how she feels porn fits into the women’s lib movement.

We meet in the lobby of the hotel. She is with her 33-year-old boyfriend, Ian, asking the front desk if she is already on the mezzanine level. I am trying not to sweat valuable parts of my body off. The publicist introduces me as “the writer who did that GFE story.”

Sasha Grey is part porn star, part businesswoman, part philosophy student. She uses expressions like “clinically speaking” and drops words like “enigmatic” as casually as words like “fucking.” She is at once charismatic and distant, pleasant but still cold.

Grey wants people to be more open and comfortable with their own sexual preferences. “All sorts of people like all different things, and we just need to accept that as a society,” she tells me. She prefers being choked, slapped (but not on the breasts), and sometimes getting doubly penetrated. And she says so. Sometimes on Tyra, sometimes on Oprah, sometimes in Rolling Stone or the Juice, and often in her many, many adult movies. In her first-ever porn scene, she famously told her partner to punch her in the stomach before his climax.

“In our society, we use sex to sell everything. Everything! Right now there’s a commercial on TV that’s selling kids toys — some SpongeBob Burger King meal — is using sex to sell.” The commercial in question stars Sir Mix-a-Lot, the architect behind hits like “Baby Got Back.” “So we can do that, but we can’t openly talk about who we are as sexual beings without feeling ashamed. I think that’s ridiculous.”

She says one of the reasons she got into this business was to encourage people to feel more comfortable with themselves. “Listen, it’s OK to be yourself,” she says. “You might have different fantasies or a different sexual interest than your sister or your best friend has, but that’s OK. We’re all human beings. Everybody’s different.”

In conversation, Grey references everything from hipster musicians to relatively obscure philosophers to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the biology professor turned sex researcher from the middle of the 20th Century.

“Dr. Kinsey did a test on people’s sexuality, whether they’re straight, gay, or somewhere in between. For me, I see the same thing when it comes to sexual tastes and sexual interests.”

The second part of her porn name, she says, comes from the term Kinsey used when describing human sexuality: shades of grey. She believes when it comes to sex, there is no right or wrong, good or bad. There is just different. Who could argue with that?

What creates this variety of sexual interests, she isn’t sure.

“Is it genetic? I’m not a scientist. I don’t want to answer that yes or no. But I do think it’s an individual thing. I have best friends who’ve never had an orgasm. I have best friends that love anal sex, and I have best friends that hate anal sex.

“There’s so many different aspects to our sexuality, and we can’t talk about them without being vilified. It’s 2009; it’s time for a change.”

I ask her why she thinks the country is so repressive.

“To keep women down!” she jokes. “Nah, I’m being paranoid now.” She continues seriously. “It’s the last taboo. Maybe it’s the little secret everybody keeps tucked away in their pocket. I think it’s a very moralistic, Christian way of thinking. I hate to put it that way, but it is. We live in a very Puritanical country. For as far along as we are in technology and the media and as a whole, we’re not far along with sex.”

She says she feels like women in this country are controlled by shame. At some point, she says, Grey would like to go on a speaking tour, with the message: It’s OK to be who you are.

“Shame is bad because it inhibits you,” she says. “It’s fear. I’m not gonna sit here and say I’m not afraid of certain things in our society sometimes, but we live in such a fear-based society, people are really afraid to be who they are. Whether it’s because of what somebody else thinks or the culture around them. Shame stops your personal growth.”

She said she hasn’t read the Rolling Stone story. “I haven’t had time,” she says. But when I read her a headline about empowering women “one gangbang at a time,” she says, “That’s obviously the writer saying that, not me.”

She says she wouldn’t call herself “a crusader,” and she thinks the term “feminist” is useless. “Every woman is a feminist in her own right,” she says. “Whether you’re anti-porn or pro-porn or somewhere in between, feminism has become such a generalized, watered-down viewpoint. Someone can say, ‘I’m a feminist because I believe in sexually empowering women.’ That’s my view on feminism. Someone else’s opinion might be, ‘Having sex is just wrong no matter what.’ And both sides might call themselves feminists.”

Tomorrow I’ll have more from my talk with Sasha, including a discussion of prostitution, her research for the new movie, and how she deals with the emotional strains of the sex industry.

Part 2: Yesterday I posted the first part of my interview with porn star Sasha Grey. Grey, the 2008 AVN Female Performer of the Year, plays an upscale New York prostitute in Steven Soderbergh’s new movie The Girlfriend Experience. The film is set amid the Wall Street meltdown just before the election last fall. About the same time, I wrote a story about local prostitutes, prophetically titled “The Real Girlfriend Experience.”

Grey was in town over the weekend to promote the movie at Exxxotica Miami Beach. I watched the movie last week (it is tentatively scheduled for release in South Florida on June 5), and I met with Grey at Hotel Catalina, near the beach. Though I wouldn’t ever say I’m any kind of expert on the subject of prostitution (Hi, Mom!), after my story was published, I was asked to consult on proposed legislation regarding the sex trade. And I was curious how much Grey knew about the same topic.

She says she and Soderbergh met with two escorts: one in L.A. and one in New York. She also read from a blog written by anonymous prostitutes — mostly GFEs like the one she plays in the movie — from around the world. A GFE, vice parlance for girlfriend experience, is a prostitute who offers her clients not just her body but her attention and companionship. Think Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

Grey says she started researching very early in the process because she was so excited to make the movie. Not just because the movie will be one of the largest mainstream crossovers in the history of American porn but because of the chance to work with Soderbergh, the director who brought us Sex, Lies and Videotape, Traffic, Erin Brokovich, the Ocean’s Eleven series, and most recently, Che.

“I’m a huge fan of Steven’s,” Grey says. “It was less about the subject matter and more so about the fact that I actually got to work with him. Had it been a director that doesn’t have his résumé and I wasn’t a fan of, I probably would’ve said no.”

“Really?” I ask. “You really would have turned down a role in a movie like this?”

“I know he’s not gonna vilify this,” she says. “He’s not gonna overglorify it. It’s so easy to say, ‘Hey, here’s a porn star, we’re gonna make her a hooker.’ Knowing Steven, I knew he wouldn’t do the clichéd things that most people that would approach me or another adult star would do.”

I tell her it’s ironic. “It sounds like you were worried about being exploited.”

“No!!!” she says quickly. After all, Grey wants to empower women with her work.

The film doesn’t have a plot, per se. With a runtime of 77 minutes (when’s the last time you saw a 77-minute movie you liked?), it’s a series of events in the life of Chelsea (Grey), a $2,000-a-night call girl. We see her with her wealthy-but-emotionally-stunted clients, her personal trainer/boyfriend, a prostitute connoisseur who claims he can help her business, and a fellow working girl.

The dialogue is “natural” (read: mundane about half the time), like a Slacker-era Richard Linklater, and the characters are distant and abstract. But the visuals are fantastic. Most of the scenes take place in the stylish New York lofts of the people who benefited most from the toxic, inflated economy of the past decade. In that way, Soderbergh is Kubrikian.

As most sex workers eventually become, Chelsea is cold and emotionally shut-off throughout the movie. Though Grey is thoughtful, polite, and interesting, she definitely seems guarded when being interviewed. Anyone who sells themselves long enough builds an emotional shield from the world and a cautiousness verging on paranoia — skills of the trade that don’t translate well outside of a few occupations.

But Grey says she isn’t very similar to her character in the movie. “I’m a pretty open person,” she says. “I’m really goofy. Once you really get to know me, I’m a dork. I think the thing we had most in common is our distrust for journalists, no offense.” I laugh awkwardly. “Earlier in my career, I dealt with some bad situations,” she says.

In one scene, Chelsea is interviewed at a restaurant by a rather large, rather prurient journalist who wants to write about her life. He asks questions she calls “invasive,” and at one point, as the reporter is probing for something emotional for the readers to chew on, Grey’s character simply waves her hand and, in the same disconnected way she says everything else, tells him “Next question.”

As Grey said that, I realize I’m dripping sweat into my notebook (the air conditioning hadn’t been turned on upstairs yet, we were later told), asking her possibly pointless questions about how she connected with this prostitute. I felt the need to apologize for some reason.

She politely eschews my apology and tells me more about her research. In addition to the blogs and hooker meetings, Grey says she wrote a character bio — a back story. “Each and every day, I would try to take of what I knew of this person and throw it into each scene. So some of it was method, but not full course. It was such an experimental film that you can’t throw yourself into it that deep. The very nature of how Steven shot the film, it was impossible. He wanted this natural quality to each scene.”

Soderbergh shot three or four takes for each scene. “He wanted to take some of my natural confidence and personality into this character,” she says. “I had to find a way to do this every day.”

Ultimately, as interesting as Grey is in person in an interview, her acting evokes no empathy whatsoever. It feels as if even Grey doesn’t care much for this woman as she recites her lines like, well, a porn star. There is essentially no single moment in the rather short film where I felt I was looking at anything other than porn star Sasha Grey on screen.

This isn’t to say it doesn’t work either. It’s hard to say. And as much as casting Grey may have been a mistake based on a fascination with the smart, bohemian porn star, it may also have been genius. Chelsea is an incredibly cold person (except when she’s making out with clients, perhaps) and the way Grey says her lines — devoid of feeling — is utterly appropriate. While watching, though, it is at times hard to believe Grey knows how coldly she comes across. Either way, it makes an accurate sex worker.

Grey says that, for any similarities, there is one large difference between Chelsea and her. Grey has said that her goals are beyond that of the almighty dollar. She’d like to encourage people to feel comfortable liking what they like, as long as nobody gets (too) hurt.

“[Chelsea’s] end objective is always money,” she says. Not Grey, though. She wants bigger, better, with more creativity and more beauty in the world, she says.

The Girlfriend Experience is something like that.

Tomorrow I’ll post the last of the interview, in which Grey talks about what it’s like to have a relationship while working in porn.