Real Couples in Porn: Josie & Karmann Interviewed.

Introduce yourselves! Who are you, what do you do for a living?

Josie (J): We’re Josie and Karmann and we’re a full time porn couple. We create adult content, mostly our own. We have also shot a few studio productions.
Karmann (K): We also collaborate with a few people. We’ve done this for a year and half now and so far so good!

Who had the idea to start making porn together and why?

K: I think we both got to the idea of making porn at a different time,
J: even before we met each other.
K: I was already planning to do it myself with other people shortly before I met you and you briefly had an OnlyFans. 
J: Yes, I had discovered FetLife and I was posting a lot of nudes, and a couple of friends were like, “You should make money off this!” and I tried, but I found the solo stuff really boring.
K: Also for me,I love doing this but I like someone to do it with, it makes it so much easier. So, two years ago we were both planning to change careers.
J: We were both in jobs that we just hated. (Laughs)
K: So we were like, let's try. We weighed the pros and cons for a while. 
J: I actually backed out once.
K: Yeah, that happened in October when you backed out the first time. And we had basically a month and a half to just think about it. And then in January…
J: In January, I gave him the book “Coming Out as a Porn Star.” It's a collection of essays by porn stars about coming out. I read it and then gifted Karmann a copy for New Years with a note inside saying "let's do the porn thing!" That was at the start of 2023. 

What did you hate about your previous jobs?

J: The thing that I love most about now, working for myself, is also my biggest downfall. Cause I hate it so much working for someone else and having to be somewhere at a certain time, but that is also my downfall now because I can take the day off, do it later. I worked a lot in customer service, which I think anyone who's worked in it knows how awful it can be. It's very exhausting. 
K: I had good jobs in my life. Well, I had one good job in my life and a few miserable ones. I just ended up in a circle where every time I was changing jobs the new one would be worse than the previous job, and I just got to a point where it was not sustainable. I was like no, I hate this, and either they're gonna kill me or I'm gonna kill myself. 

You didn’t consider the option “I'm gonna kill them”?

K: “I'm gonna kill them” actually got pretty close as well but that's a story for another time. (Laughs)

Photo: Ocular Spice

Now you're balancing work and personal life in a very intimate business. How do you juggle these two areas, personal and work life? 

K: Trial and error. 
J: Yeah, we're still trying. 
K: We got better because, of course, during this year and a half, we went through phases where we were trying to figure out how to juggle it. And the fact is that every time we try to improve something, it seems that you're still doing something wrong. But if you look at the big picture and you look at how we started, we did much more wrong.
J: I know that when we started, we wanted to have much clearer rules. Like “these days are work days, these are personal days and personal days we don't discuss work”. But it just isn't really possible, especially when it's something creative. Ideas will come into your mind. Sometimes we'll obviously talk about them in our free time. But we do try to have at least one day off per week.

It sounds like you're working a lot!

J: It's not like we're working constantly. I actually prefer to do the same thing every day, because it makes it easier to do it every day. I don't work the whole day though. I just do like the emails in the morning to stick to my routine, but I might not work the rest of the day. And I try to go out and do something rather than just veg on the couch. 

You're not only partners now, you're also business partners. How did having the business together and doing porn together change the relationship?

K: It definitely made us tighter, I suppose.
J: I would say that was one of my biggest hesitations about starting it, because we had actually only been together a year and a half, or even less. And I was worried about what working together and starting a business could do. Be it porn or any business. But we've actually worked together really well as a team. I only recently really appreciated this: We had a really good month and it was really nice to have someone having the exact same experience. Of course, you celebrate your partner's successes, but the fact that we were experiencing the exact same thing together was really nice. And also for when it's not so great that they know what's going on.
K: We definitely managed to support each other through bad times and good times. When someone is down, usually the other one is there.
J: I am aware that in these interviews we always say “it’s great, it works!”. But I will say I realised something recently. We haven’t actually had a single holiday together that wasn’t work related. We've been together for like three years now. We travel a lot. But we've never been on just like an “us” holiday. So we're gonna do that. 
K: But I suppose there are worse things to complain about. Like, oh my God, I travel half of the year and l didn't have a chance to do nothing for like three days. It's okay, you know, I wished for this life for a while, so fuck it if I have to postpone a proper holiday. 

What is the biggest professional learning you've had during your time working together?

K: For me, the fact that I can do this. I'm someone that always doubts himself, but now I know that stuff is doable. You don't need to be a magician, you don't need to have a crazy big dick, or being a mad wizard of editing, you just learn. Our content is definitely better than when we started. Our intimacy is definitely better than when we started.
J: The most persistent lesson is to have more grace with myself because I'm very much like an all or nothing person. I can be really hard on myself if I haven't stuck to the plan or I haven't achieved what I planned to because something happens or whatever. But we recently sat down and went back through the last year and a half. And I was like, fuck, we managed to make this work. 
And also, sometimes I'll feel quite negative because I don’t manage to stick to a routine. But I heard someone recently say that they experience seasons. So what works for them at some point doesn't work for them at every point in their life. So just be a bit more flexible…
K: Be more gentle…
J: Yeah, not so critical when something has to change or doesn't go as planned. 
K: Yeah, I was about to mention that. You always watch forward compared to the present, but you never put into perspective where you come from. So it's always something more to do, something to do better. And it could have been much easier at some point to just go back to any kind of job. But no, we stuck to it. We did what we did with very low energy, with everything else going on. And we still did it. 
J: I think I'm also unlearning that work has to suck. Because I honestly sometimes feel like it's luck that got us here. Because I'm like, why do I feel like I've worked that much? That's because I enjoy a lot of what we do. And I don't mean just the filming. Honestly, sometimes that's actually exhausting. But just all this stuff, it doesn't feel like work. And then I feel like I haven't actually worked that much. Although...I have because I don't hate it. If that makes sense. 

If there was one aspect of your work that you could just take away, it wouldn't be necessary for your work routine anymore. What would that be?

K: Considering we work from home, it would be nice to have someone taking care of the house. Maybe having a cook as well would be amazing. But for the foreseeable future, I would love to have someone that takes away the editing, for instance. Because it just takes a long time.

J: I take care of social media, mostly Reddit. And for me, it’s the scheduling. If someone could just do this for me.I schedule a lot and there's a lot of captions. And I just feel like a robot at this point, cause I've been doing it a year and a half and I feel like there's a limited amount of words. So I just feel like a porno robot. I'm like, “this felt so good when he put this there”. Ugh.

Photo: Josie & Karmann

What was the first clip you shot and what do you think about it today?

K: The first clip was for Lustery. It was amazing because the feedback was what actually pushed us to go even further.
J: We're so critical because we were like “was the lighting shit? The camera work’s shit, they're going to reject it”. 
K: But also there is a little Easter egg about the first video, because we decided to shoot in a hotel. And we booked just for one night, just for that video. And the first night, making the video didn't work because we weren’t in the mood or something. So we were like, okay, no problem. We're gonna shoot it tomorrow morning. And we shot it and it was amazing, fantastic. It was perfect. We were super happy. And Lustery also wants those five minutes of cuddling after the sex to be filmed. So we finished the video and we were just there cuddling, with the camera rolling, when the cleaner of the hotel came into the room. So there is just me running away and shutting the door at the end of the clip.
J: It's weird because I get this nostalgic feeling looking at it, even though it was just a year and a half ago. But it just looks like Baby Josie and Karmann. I know that's so silly… But I just think, we had no idea what was coming.

What advice would you give other couples who are thinking about starting a career in porn together?

K: Spend a reasonable amount of time thinking about pros and cons and trying to weigh everything. Most of the people don't do it at all or if they do it they just do it superficially, like “what if my family finds out”, and that's a good one to start with but you also have to think, “what if in a couple of years I'm sick of it and I want to go back to another job” or “what if I struggle to find a house because the landlord found me online”?
J: Generally I would not think of it as a light decision. I thought about it for so long. I still wouldn't say that I was a hundred percent certain because I don't think you can ever be a hundred percent certain about anything. 
Think about the ways it could affect you as a couple. If it's a guy/woman relationship, the woman's definitely gonna get a lot of attention, think about whether you're okay with that. We don't shoot a lot of phone footage. So this doesn't affect us so much, but I know that a lot of people do a lot in the moment, like grab the phone when they're actually having sex, just the two of them, which is obviously great content, but I feel like it's very easy then that all your moments together become work.
K: And possible jealousy, especially if you're planning collabs or if one of the two wants to have their own career.

Do you know any couples that have broken up but still work in porn? 

J: I know of a couple. We hear of them, but we don't know them personally. Obviously we haven't thought of breaking up, but we have talked about what we would do. I think it’s an awful situation to be in because I wouldn't want to have to pretend to be a couple while you're going through the grief of a breakup.
K: We heard about people that were a couple just for the business, and they actually ended up being a couple in real life. It goes both ways. 

Okay, last important question. Where can we find your work? Because it sounds like it's amazing. 

J: Yeah, on OnlyFans: @karmannandjosie
Our Insta is: @josieandkarmann
On X: @karmannandjosie     
And our website is karmannandjosie.com!

Awesome, is there anything you want to add from your side, anything we haven't covered?

J: I just wanted to add, we were talking about our jobs and what we hated about them. I really don't think that I was cut out for that kind of work. It's not even about the pay. Even if I was a doctor or a lawyer earning loads of money, I just do not like that structured job kind of thing. I like being able to wake up today and be like, “no, I really can't do this now, I’ll do it a couple hours later” or “I don't want to shoot today, I'll do something completely different”. With this flexibility, my mental - our mental health has been so much better. So as much as it seems like we work a lot, yeah…
K: It's working a lot for yourself so you choose the pace. 
J: Every day around midday we'll go have a coffee and a walk in the park and if we want to we'll go longer. That control of your own work life is amazing. 

Josie and Karmann, thank you for the interview!

Photos (gallery and header): Ocular Spice