Last week, after two years as a proofreader, I quit my job at Penthouse Magazine. Yes, “that Penthouse Magazine.” I have had some exceedingly random jobs in my life – from stable hand to church secretary to pool tester to assistant producer to book search coordinator to CD-ROM editor to pet sitter to Little League umpire – but nothing touched working for Penthouse, at least in terms of getting people I had just met to snarf their drinks.

Now, the fact that I worked for Penthouse inevitably prompts a host of questions, so I would like to present the Penthouse Proofreader’s FAQ (in the hope that I won’t have to answer these questions ever again – a vain hope, probably, but worth a try).

Q: How on earth did you get that job?

A: When I quit my job at an electronic publishing company, the office manager knew I wanted proofreading work, so she told me to call her sister over at Penthouse if I wanted to work for them on a freelance basis. In other words, connections, baby.

Q: Can you get me a job there?

A: Men always ask me this, half kidding but also half hoping that I’ll say, “Sure, no problem. In fact, I have some proofreading right here in my bag – give it a go!” Alas, no. To my knowledge, Penthouse does not hire men as proofreaders, probably because they actually want the copy back at some point (and without the pages sticking together). They also have a very limited budget for freelancers, and in fact I didn’t get any work from them for several months due to budget constraints. Unless you know someone on the masthead, I can’t help you. And take it from me – you might think you want the job, but you don’t. Trust me.

Q: Why haven’t I seen you on the masthead?

A: First of all, get a life. Second of all, I work as an uncontracted freelancer. I don’t appear on the masthead (thank God).

Q: Are the letters real?

A: More or less. Real people do send in their sexual adventures, sometimes neatly laser-printed, other times scrawled on cocktail napkins or scribbled on lined notebook paper; in other words, no, the editors do not sit around in the conference room and make up the letters for each issue. But the majority of the letters do require a thorough revamping for continuity – making sure “the action” doesn’t jump from the bedroom to the kitchen without any lead-up, for instance
– and of course for grammar and spelling. I personally suspect that many of the letters come from 14-year-old boys or overweight chat-room-frequenting shut-ins who don’t fully understand the basic mechanics of real sex. When I first started out, I frequently had to draw myself a diagram in order to figure out what position they had contorted themselves into, but after a while I learned not to worry about it. The letters in Penthouse do not represent sex that anyone has ever actually had, anyway.

Q: How did you learn how to edit the letters?

A: I didn’t really edit them – I proofread them. By the time I saw a piece, it had already gone through the editor and the copy editor and over to the art department, so I only read them to check for misspellings and double punctuation and that kind of thing. For a while, I made “line edits” – correcting split infinitives or noting a misused verb form in the margin – but the editors asked me to stop doing that, either because it made them feel inferior or because they didn’t feel like reformatting the piece afterwards. Basically, I already knew how to proofread. I got a style sheet telling me how to hyphenate certain words and so on, but I didn’t have to take a class or anything.

Q: Did you meet Bob Guccione?

A: No.

Q: Did you meet any of the Penthouse Pets?

A: No. The Pets pose in the studio of whichever photographer has gotten the layout assignment, not in the editorial offices (in midtown Manhattan, by the way, two floors down from a well-respected investment house and right in the middle of Park Avenue). People tend to envision the Penthouse offices as some sort of velvet-draped sybaritic paradise, with naked women lolling on cushions in the lobby and orgies taking place in the art department. I think I expected a similarly sleazy environment when I first started, but they have a business to run, and in reality it looks like . . . a business. They have a front desk and industrial carpeting, and everyone dresses normally.

Q: Did the letters turn you on at all?

A: Again, the letters describe sexual encounters so unrealistic that they border on laughable, so I couldn’t take most of them seriously, and thus they didn’t turn me on. Once in a great while, I would happen upon a well-written and low-key letter that stirred me somewhat, but that happened maybe four or five times in two years. Plus, some of the proclivities addressed by certain sections of the magazine – voyeurism, for example, or “swinging,” or getting spanked – do nothing for me. And twisted though it might sound, I viewed it as work. I picked up the assignment, I read it through twice, I marked it up using official proofreaders’ marks, I turned it back in the next day, and I sent them an invoice twice a month. End of story.

Q: Did the job affect your sex life?

A: No. People often wondered if I got any ideas from the letters, which I didn’t, or if I got bored with sex after reading about it so much, which I also didn’t. Let me repeat: the letters have little or no basis in sexual reality as most of us know it. Once I realized that, I had no trouble separating it from my sex life.

Q: Did your boyfriend have a problem with you doing that job?

A: Sort of. I think he respected me for doing something so liberated and not having hang-ups about it, but on the other hand I think he also found it a little creepy. I can’t say that I blame him.

Q: What about your parents? Did they know about it?

A: Yes, they did. I don’t think they minded too much as long as it didn’t bother me, and I made decent money at it. Besides, they’ve gotten used to me following my own weird star over the years.

Q: Do you list the job on your résumé?
A: Yes – “Proofreader, General Media International.” If an interviewer wants to know more, I don’t lie, but the word “Penthouse” itself doesn’t appear.

Q: If you consider yourself a feminist, how can you read that smut?

A: Good question. I do not agree with Catharine MacKinnon’s assertion that all pornography constitutes rape, but a lot of porn harms and demeans and insults not just the women involved in its production but all women by extension. I find this kind of pornography damaging and disgusting. (For example, cinematic canonization of Larry Flynt notwithstanding, I think Hustler demeans women and I wouldn’t proofread for that magazine.) Penthouse, on the other hand, confines itself to encounters between consenting adults; occasionally they run letters involving bondage or S&M, but again, these encounters take place between consenting adults who derive pleasure from them. I have no problem with this kind of pornography – I mean, it doesn’t do anything for me, and I find a lot of it cheesy and immature and kind of grody, but it doesn’t offend me morally. I read a few letters during my tenure that crossed the line with me, but for the most part, Penthouse expresses sexuality freely without degrading anyone in the process, so I don’t take issue with the majority of what they print.

Q: What made you decide to quit, then?

A: A number of factors. First of all, they couldn’t – or wouldn’t – pay me any more, and I felt I needed to make more money in order to continue. Second, I had to walk a mile and a half round trip to pick up the materials and drop them off again – through midtown at rush hour – and I just got sick of the inconvenience. Finally, and most significantly, I got burned out. I just got tired of it. I didn’t mind it for a long time, but after two years, the subtle sexism and racism really started to get to me; I could only blow off the stereotypes as “trashy” and “silly” for so long before I began to get annoyed.

I don’t regret working at Penthouse. It paid the bills and I got a lot of mileage out of it when people at parties asked me what I did. (Strangely enough, I ran into a college acquaintance a few months ago, and when I told her I proofread for Penthouse, she yelled, “NO WAY!” It turns out that her father works there as the production manager and sent her to college on Bob Guccione’s dime. Go figure.) But I don’t regret quitting, either. Now I can finally stop answering all of these questions and get some “real” work done.

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