From www.sfbg.com – Hot on the heels of Ivy League Stripper, Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure, and Confessions of an Ivy League Bookie comes Confessions of an Ivy League Pornographer, another book about an Ivy League graduate who eschewed a predictable post-graduate path to a stable and respectable job in favor of a career that, well, doesn’t generally require an Ivy League degree.

Confessions of an Ivy League Pornographer is an interesting look into the life of a young man who channeled his creative drive out of the hallowed halls of Brown and into the Los Angeles porn industry. However, Sam Benjamin is hardly the first Ivy Leaguer to go the route of porn. Bill Asher, an ’84 graduate of Dartmouth College – this blogger’s own alma mater – is the President and co-owner of Vivid Entertainment, the world’s largest pornography distributer. H Bomb, a porn magazine published by Harvard students, proudly features “nude co-eds and critical theory”. In addition to racy photos of students sans clothing, H Bomb features student-submitted poetry and essays about politics.

Benjamin’s memoir is well-written and interesting, but I wonder at the publisher’s decision to rehash the tired “Confessions of an Ivy League” trope. Being a porn director is an unlikely career for anyone to find themselves in, Ivy League gradate or not. One is lead to wonder if Benjamin’s book would have gotten the same recognition if he had gone to Arizona State or Western Kentucky University rather than Brown. Do readers care more about reading about Ivy Leaguers who go into careers commonly perceived as socially questionable like stripping, or sex work, or porn — as opposed to those, for instance, who never went to college? Are Ivy League strippers looking to pay off their student loans inherently more interesting than strippers out of, say, San Francisco State? Would Callgirl be as interesting of a book had Jeannette Angell gone somewhere other than Yale? Are these books just another sign of Ivy League favoritism and entitlement – which is prevalent in not just the corporate workforce and the social sphere – but also in publishing as well?

Regardless of the marketing forces at work behind the scenes of Benjamin’s book, it’s an interesting read, and one worth checking out (though the book is available as an e-book only) if you’re interested in personal memoirs about porn.

Like Heidi Mattson, the Ivy League Stripper, Sam Benjamin went to Brown, a school with a pass/fail option whose students are rumored to enjoy drug binges and drunken orgies. (Note: I wish I had gone to Brown). Benjamin graduated in 1999 and, rather than following the majority of his peers in the exodus to Boston or New York, Benjamin moved to Santa Cruz in an idealistic search for bohemia and art. Upon discovering neither in Santa Cruz, he predictably became a stoner. It was while working on an organic farm in Santa Cruz, frustrated at the lack of art in his life, that Benjamin’s idea to produce “feel good” pornography was hatched. Not receiving the reception or cultural capital he desired in Santa Cruz, Benjamin moved to Los Angeles, where he worked demeaning jobs to support himself while angling for an introduction to the porn industry. He paid his dues, finally began working as a director for a major porn production company, and then ‘stuff of memoirs’ begins.

Gaining riches and accruing sins, he spent a summer living inside a porn mansion in Malibu; grew his hair out; found porn love, after all; broke his heart; aged; found rough sex; scared himself; burnt out; quit the biz; escaped to Southeast Asia; fasted; got boils all over his body; cleared his head; atoned for his sins; returned home; applied to graduate school.

As Benjamin recounts in his memoir, “Things would have been simpler, had I been more practical. I would have gone into investment banking, or applied to law school, and that would have been it. But instead, I chose to entertain the fantasy shared by every upper-middle-class, semi-hipster, slightly awkward Jew who’s ever done time in a college classroom: to get paid for being creative. And to not work too hard doing it.” I’m not a slightly awkward Jew, but I feel you Sam.