Pornland
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Penthouse is not the only porn magazine to branch out into other areas that are more profitable than magazines. Hustler has built a large business empire and Flynt now has a number of Internet sites, the most profitable being Hustler.com and Barely Legal, which specializes in women who look more like adolescents than adults. Some of his more successful businesses include a Hustler Casino in Los Angeles, a chain of sex shops, his adult video productions, and a distribution company. In an interview in 2004, Flynt revealed that the magazine was 80 percent of his business in the 1980s but in 2004, it accounted for only 20 percent, with the rest Internet and video.74 Flynt is thought to be a billionaire by some in the industry, but whatever his wealth, he has been extremely successful in diversifying his business interests.
Of the three magazines, Playboy is the most visual brand in pop culture. According to an article in Multichannel News, “The overall Playboy image remains a potent brand in magazines, television and the Internet, not just in America but around the globe.” Although Playboy Enterprises has been losing money for some time—in March 2009 it reported a losing quarter, with net losses of $13.7 million—its consumer product division continues to do very well. This is because the Playboy brand has penetrated the mainstream like no other pornographic product. Playboy licenses a whole range of products, including underwear, socks, notebooks, pens, watches, and sunglasses, and is always on the lookout for new items. Bob Meyers, president of Playboy media, is quoted as saying, “Our brand is unique in that we have this certain aura.”75
Playboy launched a cable station in 1982—the Playboy Channel, later renamed Playboy TV—and it quickly made its way into 750,000 homes through 450 cable stations. In 1994, Playboy became the first magazine to have a Web site and by the mid-1990s, Playboy launched Adultvision and bought up a number of the “Spice Channels,” as well as Club Jenna, which was originally started by porn star Jenna Jameson. Some of these channels carry hard-core porn, but Playboy has been careful to keep a distance from these ventures so as not to tarnish its soft-core image. Recently Playboy has been strategizing how to get into the mobile phone porn business, and in 2008 the company “signed a deal with THQ Wireless to develop Playboy-branded lifestyle-themed mobile games, which will not have nudity.”76 Playboy is also going into casinos and what they call “Playboy concept Boutiques” that carry only Playboy-branded products. According to Chris Napolitano, Playboy’s editorial director, “The whole licensed products business now generates in excess of $800 million in global retails sales in more than 150 countries.”77
One way that Playboy has recently gained increased public visibility is through The Girls Next Door, a popular reality show on E! Entertainment, which supposedly documents Hefner’s life with his young “girlfriends.” The show, launched in 2005, provides a sanitized version of life at the Playboy mansion, never showing the reality of the experience for the young women who live and sleep with eighty-three-year-old Hefner. In Bunny Tales, Izabella St. James, an ex-“girlfriend” of Hefner’s, writes about what really went on at the mansion; how Hefner would have unprotected sex with a number of women, one after the other, but regardless of how many women he penetrated, he could orgasm only by masturbating to pornography. St. James discloses that many of the young women didn’t want to have sex with Hefner but “it was part of the unspoken rules. It was almost as if we had to do it in return for all the things we had.”78 Needless to say, this is not the image the show depicts.
All three companies have had to retool in order to stay afloat in the contemporary porn market. The industry now looks very different from when they began, with men today demanding harder and harder porn. The question is whether they keep up with this demand and move into more hard-core porn or whether they’ve sowed the seeds of their own destruction by helping to create an appetite for such porn. While the future remains unclear, what we do know is that without these three magazines and publishers, the porn industry would not be where it is today. Each publisher was willing to push the boundaries and in so doing, made pornography increasingly visible in mainstream pop culture. The more Flynt and Guccione pushed the envelope, the more acceptable Playboy looked, and the more Playboy penetrated the mainstream, the more latitude Hustler and Penthouse were given to move hard-core. This symbiotic relationship meant that by the time the Internet was introduced into homes, the culture had been well groomed to accept pornography as a part of everyday life rather than as an industry that produces a system of images that debases and dehumanizes women and men.
Chapter 2. Pop Goes the Porn Culture
Mainstreaming Porn
Pornography has become the media’s darling topic these days. Right now there is invariably something about the business and/or pleasure of pornography staring at you from a newspaper column, cable TV show, local news report or magazine article.
—Tripp Daniels, Adult Video News
We have come a long way from the days when porn was thought of as dirty pictures for seedy men who couldn’t get a real woman. Today porn is being celebrated everywhere, from Howard Stern’s popular TV and radio broadcasts showcasing rising porn stars to one of the most successful cable TV shows ever, Sex and the City, which regularly features porn as a fun addition to a woman’s sex life. Even Oprah Winfrey got in on the act, with O Magazine carrying pro-porn articles by “sex educator” Violet Blue, who encourages women to use porn as a sex aid. An article in the LA Times in 2008 titled “Porn Stars Are the New Crossover Artists” focused on how porn has become an integral part of mainstream pop culture: “Once largely shunned as pariahs by the entertainment industry, porn stars are turning up with increasing regularity on shopping-mall movie screens and in prime-time television shows, underscoring pornography’s steady migration over the last three decades from the pop-culture margins to the mainstream.”1 How did this shift to the mainstream happen? The answer is simple: by design. What we see today is the result of years of careful strategizing and marketing by the porn industry to sanitize its products by stripping away the “dirt” factor and reconstituting porn as fun, edgy, chic, sexy, and hot. The more sanitized the industry became, the more it seeped into the pop culture and into our collective consciousness.
While there is a long list of sanitizing agents, I have selected for discussion some that are more contemporary and have had a major impact on our cultural shift. Chief among these is the Girls Gone Wild franchise owned by Joe Francis, a man many liken to Hugh Hefner in his public persona as a jet-setting playboy. Just as Hefner acted as a bridge between the two worlds, so too does Joe Francis, since his product has been whitewashed as belonging to the world of pop culture, not porn. In this chapter’s discussion of the links between pop culture and porn, what becomes clear is that the lines are increasingly blurring and we are seeing a mingling of the two forms to the point that our pop culture resembles the soft-core pornography of ten years ago.
Girls Gone Wild I’m not selling Bibles, you know . . . at the end of the day, I’m selling naked girls. People want to buy naked girls.
—Joe Francis, creator and owner, Girls Gone Wild Girls, often drunk, are the commodity that Joe Francis sells to consumers. Famous for getting girls to “go wild” for the camera, Francis is today a multimillionaire businessman who owns what is often seen as a fun, young, hip company that spontaneously captures young women undressing and flashing in public.2 In most of the media articles on Francis, it is mistakenly assumed that Girls Gone Wild (GGW) is merely a show where inebriated college girls flash their breasts, while in reality much of the footage, especially on its Web site, is explicit sex, ranging from woman-on-woman sex to solo women inserting dildos into their (shaved or waxed) vaginas. Francis set out to deliberately and carefully craft an image of GGW not as a porn product, but rather as hot, sexy fun that pushes the envelope of mainstream pop culture. The more visibility GGW has in pop culture, the bigger the potential market. That this was a successful marketing scheme is evident in the $40 million a year GGW does in sales.3
Fra
ncis’s business plan to develop a brand that stood out from other mainstream porn videos by giving it a more soft-core-focus gloss worked, since he has created what he (correctly) defines as “one of the most widely recognized entertainment and lifestyle brands in the US. This one-time pop culture phenomenon has become a part of the fabric of America and is synonymous with youth culture.”4 But for all his claims that his show firmly belongs in pop culture, in reality GGW is closely tied to the pornography industry and its distribution channels. One of the most telling business deals that Francis recently brokered is with WebQuest, a California-based interactive services firm whose client list is 95 percent pornographers, including Vivid and Hustler, two of the largest and most successful pornography corporations in the world. According to XBIZ, WebQuest built “the GGW Cash members area, constructing new tours and preparing to launch the program as a continuation of the Girls Gone Wild video line of flesh-flashing co-eds.”5
On the GGW Web site, the usual warning posted on pornography sites flashes on the screen: “GirlsGoneWild.com (the website) is an ‘adult-oriented’ site containing images and text of a sexual nature. Only adults at least 18 years of age are permitted to enter.” A “bonus” offered by the Web site is free access to other pornography Web sites, including Lipstick Lesbos, a pornography site run by the hardcore company Hustler. The ad for Lipstick Lesbos on the GGW site reads, “Hustler proudly presents their top selling XXX Lesbian Video Series. You get a front row seat to see what goes down when the boys are away and pussy comes out to play.”6 The links to these pornography sites illustrate how Francis actually sees GGW because it is standard practice to host links only to those businesses that are directly related to the corporate positioning of the company’s site. It is also noteworthy that the GGW site does not have even one link to any pop culture site that is also known to push the sexual limits of mainstream media (for example, MTV, Maxim, or FHM ).
Another sign of how GGW is positioned is its visible presence at porn trade conventions that showcase the porn industry’s wares. At a 2007 three-day pornography consumer trade show in Los Angeles called Adultcon, models from GGW wore scanty clothing and posed with fans who wanted to take their pictures. This was clearly a marketing strategy to promote GGW DVDs; over forty are listed for sale on the wholly pornographic Adultcom Web site. In the promotional copy accompanying the DVDs, the products are pitched in ways that will appeal to porn consumers. The copy for GGW Sexiest Moments Ever reads: “At Girls Gone Wild, hot and sexy college girls are our business, and business is booming! This volume is loaded with girls from all over the country, getting wild for our cameras, and for you. We’ve truly outdone ourselves with this mind-blowing edition of sexy and steamy moments.”7
The largest pornography convention in the world is run by Adult Video News every January in Las Vegas. In January 2007, IVD (one of the major distributors of pornography in the world) hosted a party for GGW that was described as one of the most exclusive parties held during the convention. According to AVN: “Mainstream models and party-girls mingled with hardcore starlets, suits groped sluts, and it wasn’t long before the girl-girl smooches began amid the inevitable ‘Woo-hoo!’ mating call of genus Whoranicus Americana. . . . Spotted in the throng of revelers [was] Girls Gone Wild mogul Joe Francis.”8
Probably the most succinct description of the way GGW links pop culture to porn is WebQuest president Bruce Benevento’s use of the word “bridge” when describing how GGW’s image will help place pornography products in the mainstream market. WebQuest’s other major pornography client is Hustler, and when comparing the two companies, Benevento is quoted as saying: “Larry Flynt has been branding for 30 plus years, but if you say Girls Gone Wild, everybody knows exactly what you are talking about. . . . GGW is a socially acceptable adult product because it conjures up images of young college kids having fun, frolicking on the beach—it seems very innocent. And while the Hustler brand has tremendous power, there are some markets that are closed to it. You don’t see Hustler.com at night on television like you do Girls Gone Wild. . . . This is a unique opportunity to bridge markets.”9 What separates Hustler from GGW is, in Benevento’s opinion, not that Hustler is pornography and GGW is pop culture, but that GGW is, unlike Hustler, a pornography product that can be marketed as pop culture.
The success of GGW is largely due to the way that the porn industry has shifted toward the more hardcore. As body-punishing gonzo sex became the norm, it crowded out the softer porn. Francis filled the resulting void with GGW. It never shows male-female sexual relations so there is no intercourse, erect penises, or ejaculate—all markers of hardcore porn. Instead all we see are young women, lots and lots of them in various stages of undress and sexual activity. These women are indeed the selling point of GGW, and not just because they are young and conventionally attractive but because they are what Francis calls “real.” All over the GGW Web site are phrases such as “real girls,” “all real,” and “raw, real and uncut.” Francis argues that it is, in fact, authenticity that distinguishes GGW from other porn products: There really was never anything like it in the mass market before. You didn’t ever get to choose real girls. . . . What Girls Gone Wild doesn’t have in sexual desire, it makes up for in its voyeuristic realism. One can compensate for the other without seeing full male female penetration sex. It’s so compelling; it doesn’t have to be harder. I think what a lot of adult companies do is they just keep getting harder and harder and harder and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier, that’s how they feel it needs to go. But you can be more compelling without having to do peeing or those different fetish things. What makes it compelling is it’s real. Those are real girls doing these things.10
What appears to be so important about “real” is that the GGW images are perceived by users as a documentation of reality rather than a representation of it.11 In place of the scripted and carefully crafted scenes of hardcore porn, the user supposedly gets to witness a real woman doing porn for the first time in her life. By using “real” women, GGW socializes users, suggesting that everyday women are sexually available. These are women the user can imagine hooking up with for the very reason that they are not professional porn performers. This brings the porn story of “all women are sluts” right into the center of pop culture and subsequently the lives of men. Like reality TV, the viewer can insert him-or herself into the action by believing that what he or she is watching is actually real and not staged.
What makes GGW look real is the women’s lack of sophistication, which is evident in their nervous giggles, their sometimes clumsy moves, and their need to be coached by the cameramen on how to perform. They look more like girls than women. In the more explicit GGW videos, the unexpected sometimes happens; clothes get tangled up, dildos aren’t inserted properly, women collapse in a heap of laughter, and orgasms—whether real or fake—take a long time to happen, and when they do, they appear to be authentic. Real seems to be what the viewers want, and while many porn sites advertise that their women are real women (rather than porn performers), few can actually deliver on the promise because they use women who are often recognizable to seasoned users.
The voyeuristic thrill men get from GGW with its “real” girls—after all, it’s not called Women Gone Wild—would seem to be akin to watching a female lose her virginity, as this is the first time the girl has performed sex on camera. What she also loses is her “good girl” status as she shifts from being the girl next door to the girl who is just as slutty as the other women in porn. That GGW particularly goes after the “good girl” is evident in the comment made by former GGW production manager Mia Leist that the camera crew hones in on “the ones you wouldn’t expect to do it.”12 This adds a kind of authenticity to GGW that is missing in the more formulaic, scripted type of porn. In GGW it is not always clear just how far the cameramen can push the girl. Will she stop at flashing or can they get her to go all the way?
Many of the people I speak to when lecturing are baffled as to why young women agr
ee to appear in GGW at all—after all, they get only a tank top or a hat for doing so. From the Web site and videos, it seems that literally thousands of girls are ready and willing to throw themselves at Joe Francis. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which are connected to the sophisticated recruiting machinery of GGW and some as simple as the fact that nearly all the young women are in late adolescence—a time of special vulnerability to cultural messages. After speaking with young women who appeared on GGW, what has become clear to me is that Francis and his team are experts in manipulating these women into becoming the raw material of his product. The important point to remember is that these women have already been seasoned by the culture to see themselves as sex objects, and Francis and his team build on this by overwhelming them with compliments about how hot and beautiful they are and what beautiful bodies they have.
Given its visibility in pop culture, young people tend to associate GGW with celebrity culture. Beyond the appeal of celebrity cachet, though, the party culture message associated with GGW is that everyone featured is having fun. By editing out those women who refuse to cooperate, GGW creates a closed world where everybody seems only too willing to perform sexually for the camera. The public image of GGW itself then becomes a recruitment tool as it draws in young people looking to do something adventurous and edgy.