Sometime in the early 2010s, the porn actor James Deen made a film with a fan whom he called Girl X. He would do this now and then; fans would write to him, wanting to have sex with him, or he would put out a call to “Do a Scene with James Deen”, and the results would go up on his website.

In an interview in May 2017, only a few months before the media would be overwhelmed with discussions of assault and harassment by Harvey Weinstein and others – and only two years after Deen himself was accused of (but not charged with) multiple assaults (which he denied) – he said: “I have a ‘Do a scene with James Deen’ contest, where women can submit an application, and then, after a very long talk and months of me saying, you know, ‘Everyone’s going to find out, it’s going to affect your future’, and trying to talk them out of it kind of, then we shoot a scene.”

Little of the Girl X video actually involves sex. It is mostly a long, flirtatious, fraught conversation, which circles repeatedly back to whether or not they are in fact going to do this: have sex, film it and put it online. Girl X hesitates; she moves between playfulness and retreat; she is game, then agonised; she lurches ahead, then stalls. She is torn, reflective and self-questioning. She thinks her dilemmas out loud, and Deen tries to follow along.

She presumably wants to “do a scene with James Deen”, but when he opens the door to her, she appears to lose some nerve. She walks into the apartment, dressed in PVC leggings, a buttoned-up silk cream blouse with black detail – our gaze is behind the camera, with Deen, filming her – and paces around in agitation, laughing a high-pitched, nervous laugh, saying Oh my God, oh my God. He occasionally brings the camera up to her face; she turns away. He teases her – You’re a college girl, you’re smart and shit – as they move back and forth in the kitchen, with its gleaming central island, in the corridor with its bright white dado rails and deep red walls.

She’s skittish, nervous – I can’t even look at you – moving away, moving in. She sits down at a shiny chrome table, on a white bench. They discuss a contract; the footage fades out – we are not privy to the details. It fades back in, and she takes a selfie. She’s about to sign, but then she stops and says, What am I doing with my life? What the fuck am I doing with my life? She can back out at any stage, he says; they can rip the contract up. More fading in and out; we see her sign. We can figure out a stage name later, he says, unless you just want to be Girl X? I don’t know, she says in a reluctant drawl, I have no idea, I’ve never done this.