August 20, 2003
Big Business Pushes Porn Into The Mainstream
Phil Kloer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reports:
From the nasty spam that clogs your e-mail account to the XXX video rental stores that have mushroomed all over metro Atlanta, the once underground pornography industry is now very much aboveground and impossible to avoid.
And profiting from that industry now are major corporations and mainstream entertainment companies, including network TV, movie studios and book publishers. Revenues for the porn industry -- about $10 billion a year -- now equal the domestic box office for all of Hollywood's major film releases.
"You're seeing a corporatization of pornography," says Blaise Cronin, professor of information services at Indiana University and a former consultant to the Justice Department on Internet pornography laws. "You have major corporations involved in the distribution, and the profits are very high."
Absolutely, says Jonathan Littman, executive producer of "Skin," a drama series airing this fall on Fox Television that is set in part in Los Angeles' porn movie industry. "It is a business, a very, very big business," Littman says. "And there's a fascination with the mechanism of how it runs, how it works, what's going on behind the curtain."
So mainstream entertainment is showing what's behind the curtain in the XXX industry, rolling out books, feature films and documentaries that cater to what is perceived as increased public interest in -- and acceptance of -- pornography. The result is that the line between pop culture and porn culture is increasingly hard to find.
"There's been a glamorization, coupled with a relaxation of society's mores," says Tim Connelly, editor in chief of the industry newsletter Adult Video News. "It's permeating the culture now, particularly with young people. There's a whole generation that's grown up with MTV and video porn and girls cavorting around with musicians."
At the Junkman's Daughter clothing store in Atlanta's Little Five Points, girls come in looking for popular T-shirts that read "Porn Star" across the front, sometimes in girlie-cursive, glittery letters. "They see it on TV, being worn by [rock star] Kid Rock, and they want to emulate it," says store manager Alex Wilson. Indeed, real porn actresses are as ubiquitous in MTV music videos as tattoos and tousled hair.
Christy Crutchfield, 20, of Tucker found out how far mainstream culture has gone in embracing so-called adult entertainment. One Halloween at Elon University in North Carolina, she dressed as a porn star as an inside-joke tribute to a lyric by one of her favorite rock bands, Jump Little Children: "I'd like to see you out one night, dressed up like a teenaged porn star."
She put on boots, fishnet stockings, a plaid schoolgirl skirt and a white blouse and wore her hair in pigtails. The only problem was, pop culture had pre-empted her attempt to be outrageous. "Everyone thought I was Britney Spears."
Other signs of the blurring lines:
ä Recycling big names from porn's past has never been bigger. The movie "Wonderland," coming in September from Lions Gate Films, stars Val Kilmer as legendary porn actor John Holmes, with Lisa Kudrow of "Friends" as his wife; former underage porn actress Traci Lords' autobiography, "Underneath It All," has just hit bookstores and the New York Times Best Seller List; and an off-Broadway, PG-rated theatrical takeoff of the famous 1978 movie "Debbie Does Dallas" closed in February after a successful run.
ä A Porn Star Ball, sponsored by XXX company Vivid Entertainment Group, one of the biggest producers of hard-core sex videos in the United States, will come to Atlanta on Sept. 5 as part of a national tour. Women are encouraged to dress as porn stars and compete for best costume. Instead of holding it in a strip club, Vivid is renting the Riviera Club, a popular Midtown music nightclub.
ä When it was revealed that "Joe Millionaire" finalist Sarah Kozer had appeared in bondage videos, the Fox reality TV show played up her past to boost viewership.
ä XXX actress Jenna Jameson has a book, "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," coming early next year from HarperCollins, which also is publishing "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," written by several Vivid actresses. Jameson was one of several adult actresses hired by Pony sneakers for an ad campaign this year featured on billboards and in mainstream magazines like Vanity Fair and Vibe.
"The breakdown of the wall between the pornographic industry and the mainstream industry has been going on for some time, but it's become increasingly acceptable," says Evan Lieberman, a lecturer in film studies at Emory University.
Porn sells|
Americans spent $465 million in 2001 screening adult PayPerView movies on their home TV sets, and most of that money goes to big media like AOL Time Warner and AT&T Broadband, Eric Schlosser writes in "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market," much of which covers the adult entertainment industry.
"The way we see it is, it's another type of programming that we offer, along with movies, sports, news and all the things that cable brings," says Reg Griffin, spokesman for the Atlanta division of cable giant Comcast, the biggest cable operator in both metro Atlanta and the United States.
There are limits, though. "The mainstream is not interested in showing porn or glorifying the industry, but it's interested in finding out how far it can go and what it can get away with," says Susannah Breslin, who writes about the sex industry for the Web site Salon.com and runs a popular Web log on the subject.
How far the mainstream will go is generally just this side of actual sex. Traditionally, sex in mainstream entertainment, from R-rated movies to "NYPD Blue" to late night on Cinemax, has been called soft-core -- actors pretending to have sex. Hard-core, also called XXX, shows real sex acts.
Adult Video News reports that rentals of hard-core videos in the United States soared from 79 million in 1985 to 759 million in 2001, an increase of almost 1,000 percent.
Griffin says Comcast does not break out figures for how much of its business comes from adult PayPerView movies. Time Warner Cable, the second-largest U.S. cable operator, also does not provide separate adult figures. (Most cable systems, including Comcast, offer a mix of hard- and soft-core adult movies on PayPerView.)
"There is a group of people who are genuinely interested in adult entertainment, and they are a sizable group," says Mark Harrad, spokesman for Time Warner Cable.
In addition, many major hotel chains profit from adult in-room movie rentals. A 2002 report by ABC News' "Nightline" stated that adult movie rentals were available in about 1.5 million hotel rooms and accounted for 80 percent of in-room movie profits.
'Everywhere I look'|
Another reason for the high profile of the formerly taboo is the erosion of structures that once kept porn in its place -- outside the main culture -- argues Robert Peters, president of the anti-porn watchdog group Morality in Media.
"The barriers are basically gone," he says. "Obscenity laws are rarely enforced. The religious community has become a silent giant. [Television standards and practices] departments are a joke, if they even exist anymore. And the sense of self-restraint is basically gone."
"Today porn is everywhere I look," Lords writes in "Underneath It All." "I find it in the junk mail folder on my computer, it peers at me from local magazine racks, and sits blatantly in the window of the liquor store where I buy my wine. Porn stars play themselves on television shows, appear on billboards and give interviews about how 'liberating' porn is for women."
There is much uncertainty about the role women play as consumers of porn.
"I think the porn industry is pushing very hard for women to consume porn, and popular culture is following suit," says Nina K. Martin, assistant professor of film studies at Emory University, who wrote her dissertation on pornography. "Just as it's cool to take exotic dancing classes at the gym," she adds, "it's also 'cool' for women to be sexually experienced. Still, I can't help but wonder who the consumption of porn by women really benefits."
Web delivers at home|
John Cornetta, owner of the Love Shack adult video stores, says his company has issued 15,000 video rental cards in metro Atlanta, about one-third of them to women.
"It's really difficult to tell, but it's safe to say there's probably more women viewing [porn] than ever before," says Adult Video News' Connelly.
However, cautions sex industry Web columnist Breslin, "the rap you get from the industry about appealing more toward women is mostly a lot of talk. There are not women in massive numbers going in and renting adult videos."
According to a public opinion poll published in June in American Demographics magazine, only 9 percent of women acknowledged viewing porn or strippers regularly or occasionally; the comparable figure for men was 44 percent.
The mainstream entertainment industry may believe, however, that women are more accepting of porn now, and that may be fueling some of the projects.
But the biggest reason for this shift in entertainment values is the Internet, says Emory's Lieberman. Porn certainly predates the Internet, but "the Internet has taken some of the mystique out of it," says Lieberman.
"At one time, only certain people would go to a peep show or an adult bookstore," he continues. "But now it's available to everyone, and the fact that it's so available has taken away at least some of the stigma of the anti-social."
Cronin agrees that what he calls the "Web-ification of pornography" has not only increased demand, but also made the hard stuff more acceptable. "We know millions of Americans every day are looking at porn on the Web," he says. And the privacy of that experience, he adds, "may remove some of the social inhibitions.".
The appeal, says Breslin, is that porn "allows us to look at this strong lust that we have; it's about our own sexual desire. It's about things you're scared to look at in yourself, and it's sort of horrifying and beautiful at the same time."
And as porn booms, the mainstream tags along for the ride. The idea of "porno chic" was negligible 30 years ago compared with today, when "Friends" devotes an episode to porn, or the popular rock band Blink 182 puts a XXX star named Janine on an album cover bought by millions of youngsters. But the original porno chic will be revisited next year in a documentary about "Deep Throat," in the works for cable network HBO. It's being made by Imagine Entertainment, the Oscar-winning studio co-owned by Ron Howard.
When it airs, society will officially be down to only one degree of separation between hard-core porn and "The Andy Griffith Show."