by Gail Dines
If we look beyond the inherent misogyny in Eye Balls a Bleeding’s post (all women, or rather, “porn chicks,” are interchangeable), it is interesting to see that he has identified one of Jameson’s biggest contributions to pornography—her ability to act as a recruitment tool. Before Jameson there was no woman in porn who had a lifestyle that was in any way desirable. The sleaze factor, together with the low pay and abusive work conditions, did not seem very enviable, but today, as the culture becomes more pornographized, and as well-paid jobs become a thing of the past for many working-class women, Jameson’s life does indeed look inviting. Because the mainstream media largely ignore what actually happens to women in porn, the acts they need to perform, their short shelf life, and the ongoing risk of STDs, and instead use Jameson as a porn mascot, then more and more women facing a life of minimum-wage labor are likely to be attracted to the sex industry.26
Jameson has also opened the door for other porn performers to enter the mainstream. The one who seems the most likely to succeed is Sasha Grey, a woman whom one porn producer at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas described as “willing to do any sex necessary to be a star.” In 2008 she was offered the lead part in a Steven Soderbergh movie, and that same year XBIZ News reported that “Sasha Grey continues her move into the mainstream with a racy appearance in an ad for the American Apparel clothing line.”27 Sasha Grey is now poised to become as big if not bigger than Jameson, and her rise to fame will no doubt help pave the way for more women to become celebrity porn stars.
Vivid Entertainment
This is a business, and we treat it like a business.
—Steve Hirsch, founder of Vivid Entertainment
No discussion of porn going mainstream would be complete without mentioning Vivid Entertainment, the biggest and most successful porn studio in the world. Launched in 1984 by Steve Hirsch, the studio produces high-end Hollywood-film-like features as opposed to cheaply made gonzo movies. With an estimated revenue of $100 million, Vivid dominates the feature market and has virtually become a household name. With its high-tech, upmarket movies, this studio has become the acceptable face of porn, especially when compared to the more body-punishing, cheaply made gonzo.
The company’s promotional copy describes Steve Hirsch as a “creative visionary who saw the potential for a company to grow beyond the confines of the adult entertainment industry.”28 Vivid releases over sixty videos a year, the movies distributed through a range of platforms such as DVD, pay-per-view, video-on-demand cable and satellite television, and the Internet. In addition to porn movies, Vivid also promotes such products as snowboards, calendars, and condoms.
Famous for its conventionally attractive stars, Vivid uses the old Hollywood-type contract system, in which the performers sign on to do a number of movies. These women have become known as the “Vivid Girls” and are often featured on Howard Stern and in men’s magazines such as Maxim. When Hirsch explains why he uses the contract system, it is apparent how he treats these women as commodities: “If I was going to put a girl into a movie and I am going to spend a bunch of money promoting and marketing this movie then the next time a guy wants to see a movie with her I want him to come back to me. I don’t want to be spending my money to promote and market a girl that’s in another guy’s movie next week or next month or next year.”29 There are usually ten to twelve women signed with Vivid at a time, and the majority is white because the goal is to promote these women as the public face of porn as well as to have them serve as ambassadors for Vivid in the mainstream media. While the company may have a few “ethnically ambiguous” women, it mostly doesn’t hire African American women, who are still on the lowest level of the porn industry.
Hirsch has stated in interviews that he wanted to make porn mainstream, and given his appearances in the mainstream media (E! Entertainment, Fox, MSNBC), he has become somewhat successful. I appeared on Rita Cosby: Live and Direct with him on December 14, 2005, and the show was a perfect example of how the corporate media mainstream porn. Cosby began the show by saying: Tonight, we’re going to take you into the epicenter of the multi-billion-dollar porn industry that is booming in the digital age in ways that you may not even know. We’ll show you why the person next to you looking at their cell phone or iPod may really be watching porn.
We want to emphasize tonight that, like any industry, there are good and bad elements. We’re not passing judgment on the merits of porn tonight . . . that’s a whole other topic—but instead, we’re reporting to you on just how pervasive it is becoming in our modern-day society.
The stage was set for a “nonjudgmental” show that in the end turned out to be an hour’s advertisement for the porn industry. Making no attempt to explore the range of genres in porn, Cosby focused only on the feature side, and for the first fifty minutes most of the people she interviewed were connected to Vivid. I appeared in the last ten minutes but was quickly silenced when I said that the show was an example of shoddy journalism as it promoted only a positive image of the porn industry. Adult Video News wrote the following commentary: “It was called ‘Rita Cosby: Live & Direct,’ but on Wednesday evening, the more appropriate title would have been ‘The Vivid Show.’ The company was described during the telecast as ‘the largest adult film company in the world.’ Until the last 10 minutes, every guest was either a Vivid owner, a Vivid employee or a Vivid contractor, and nearly every location shot was on a Vivid set, or featured a Vivid contract girl doing a Web-cam show. What can we say but, ‘Kudos to Vivid’s publicity department!’”30 Kudos indeed! What was missing from the story is that for all its gloss and upmarket chic, Vivid produces pornography that exploits women. The sex in the videos is hardcore, with anal, vaginal, and oral penetration. While the acts are not as rough as those in gonzo, acts such as gagging, slapping, putting the penis in sideways so the woman’s mouth is stretched, and rough anal penetration, which are typical in gonzo, are filtering down into Vivid movies. The movies, like all porn movies, are penis-centered: the job of the women is to arouse the man, keep him erect, and bring him to orgasm. Female sexual pleasure is nothing more than a reflection of what the man wants, as she is there to please him. However glossed up the movies are, they are still pornographic in their depiction of women and men and the stories they tell about relationships, sexuality, and intimacy.
In my interviews with porn producers, I have discovered that the sense in the industry is that this is the type of porn made for couples. Some of the producers I spoke to at the Adult Entertainment Expo told me that men buy this porn because it provides women with a gentle introduction to porn; it is a way for men to encourage their partners to perform certain acts they may not be interested in doing. In addition, the glossy style, the conventionally attractive porn performers, and the “story line” make it more woman-friendly.
Even though Vivid is a leader in producing feature porn, in 2007 the company experienced a 35 percent drop in DVD sales, which AVN describes as disheartening, “considering Vivid is one of the largest, most respected adult content producers in the world.”31 However, this decline in sales did not signal an overall downward trend for Vivid but rather a move away from DVDs to other forms of technology, especially Vivid’s Web sites and pay-per-view services on television and online. By developing its Internet presence, Vivid is able to both drive and harness the new cutting-edge technologies, as porn has been a leading innovator in developing and popularizing new technologies.
The examples of GGW, Jameson, and Vivid were selected because they clearly show how pornography is infiltrating the mainstream culture. Added to these are numerous other people, media genres, movies, and companies that have further brought porn into pop culture. Music videos, for example, with their soft-core images of barely clothed young women writhing around on the floor, look like much of porn did a decade or so ago. In his documentary on music videos, Dreamworlds, Sut Jhally highlights the various ways that women’s bodies are represented for male consumption.32 He specifically talks about th
e methods used to segment the body into bits and pieces, such that the women become merely a collection of interchangeable body parts. Jhally also points out that female artists themselves must conform to these strict codes of representation. Britney Spears’s video Womanizer is a good example of how a female performer must look like a sex object. Lying naked on a bench, she writhes around looking semi-orgasmic. Jhally makes the point that one of the main reasons for this mode of representation is that the videos are geared to an adolescent male consumer.
Men’s magazines such as Maxim—called “lad mags” in Britain because of their crass and adolescent-type content—similarly cater to a young adult male audience. With their pinup-type images and articles on sex, alcohol, and sports, these magazines construct a world of male fantasy where women exist solely as sex objects. The tone of the magazines is probably best described by Sean Thomas, a founding member of Maxim: “Magazines like Maxim are not in the business of news reporting—there are papers and TV stations for that. No, the purpose of the lad mag is to tell guys that it is OK to be guys—to drink beer, play darts, and look at girls. When we started Maxim we consciously felt that we were leading a fight-back against the excesses of sneering feminism. I believe we succeeded.”33 Part of the anti-feminist stance that Maxim so proudly adopts is the way it constructs masculinity as predatory and aggressive. Sex in Maxim is what men want from women, and articles abound on how to please her, not for her sake, but as a way for him to manipulate her into having more sex.34 Issues relating to intimacy and relationship building are rarely discussed in Maxim or any of the other lad mags, as the sex is presented as casual and male-oriented. In his study of the content of men’s magazines, Laramie Taylor found that “these magazines offer little in the way of sexual information that is different from the broad, stereotypical perceptions of sex as androcentric and men’s sexuality as focused on variety.”35
Because these magazines and their Web sites are not classed as pornography, they are available to males of any age and are often the reading material of choice for men in public places such as trains and planes. They are powerful vehicles for disseminating a pro-porn ideology without actually getting the label porn thrown at them. As feminist scholar Matt Ezzell has argued, “The ideology of the lad mags, which constructs masculinity as sexually aggressive, competitive, and consumerist, is virtually indistinguishable from that of the mainstream pornography industry.”36
Probably the biggest “lad” in pop culture is Howard Stern. Known for his incessant chatter about porn and porn stars, he has been described by Vivid owner Steve Hirsch as a key player in the mainstreaming of porn. According to Hirsch, when Stern started putting porn stars on his show, “there was a huge amount of people who listened . . . and bought and rented movies.”37 A favorite among adolescent boys, Stern is known for pushing the envelope in pop culture and has even had porn producer and performer Max Hardcore on his show, a man that even some in the industry feel goes too far. A misogynist and bully, Stern often taunts the women from the porn industry by asking them personal and demeaning questions about their private lives, gets them to do demonstrations of oral sex with dildos on camera, and in some cases, asks them to describe their childhood sexual abuse as a way to titillate his audience. As feminist activist and author Jackson Katz writes: “Stern seeks out and destroys a variety of human targets, but his specialty—and a good part of the reason for his popularity with men—is his sexual bullying of women. He constantly belittles, ridicules, and provokes women—often young, surgically enhanced, and desperate to please men—to degrade themselves sexually for their moment of fame.”38 Howard Stern personifies the porn culture we live in, and for this he is well rewarded; in 2006 he was the second-highest paid celebrity in the world, with an income of $302 million.
As pornographic imagery increasingly filters down into mainstream pop culture, the porn industry has grown in volume and power. Porn should not be understood as an avant-garde “art form” allowing for the creativity and playfulness of independent directors, performers, and producers. It needs to be understood as a business whose product evolves with a specifically capitalist logic. Moreover, this is a business with considerable political clout, with the capacity to lobby politicians, engage in expensive legal battles, and use public relations to influence public debate. As with the tobacco industry, this is not a simple matter of consumer choice; rather, the business is increasingly able to deploy a sophisticated and well-resourced marketing machine, not just to push its wares but also to cast the industry’s image in a positive light. As a major industry, the porn business does not just construct and sell a product; it constructs a world in which the product can be sold: the technologies, the business models, the enthusiastic consumers, the compliant performers, the tolerant laws, even the ideologies that proclaim porn to be the apogee of empowerment and liberation. One major sign of how mainstream porn has become is its interconnections with large non-porn corporations that form the DNA of our economy. The next chapter takes an in-depth look at just how porn functions today as big business.
Chapter 3. From the Backstreet to Wall Street
The Big Business of Porn
Mainstream corporations are still discreet about the profits that adult entertainment brings them; they prefer to keep it on the down-low. But those profits are very real.
—Alex Henderson, “Making Bank,” XBIZ
The size of the porn industry today is staggering. Though reliable numbers are hard to find, the global industry has been estimated to be worth around $96 billion in 2006, with the U.S. market worth approximately $13 billion. Each year, over 13,000 films are released, and despite their modest budgets, pornography revenues rival those of all the major Hollywood studios combined. There are 420 million Internet porn pages, 4.2 million porn Web sites, and 68 million search engine requests for porn daily.1 While videos and DVDs drove the rapid growth of the pornography market in the two decades from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, it is the rapid growth of the Internet, especially broadband access, that has galvanized continued market expansion in recent years. Andrew Edmond, president and CEO of Flying Crocodile, a $20-million pornography Internet business, stated that “a lot of people [outside adult entertainment], get distracted from the business model by [the sex]. It is just as sophisticated and multilayered as any other market place. We operate just like any Fortune 500 company.”2
The scale of the pornography business has important implications. In a profound sense, the entertainment industries do not just influence us; they are our culture, constituting our identities, our conceptions of the world, and our norms of acceptable behavior. But the scale of the porn business has more far-reaching ramifications. Porn is a key driver of new technological innovations, shapes technological developments, and has pioneered new business models, which have then diffused into the wider economy.3 In turn, evolving technologies and business techniques have shaped the content and format of pornography. Porn is embedded in an increasingly complex and extensive value chain, linking not just producers and distributors but also bankers, software, hotel chains, cell phone and Internet companies. Like other businesses, porn is subject to the discipline of capital markets and competition, with trends toward market segmentation and industry concentration.
A key factor driving the growth of the porn market has been the development of technologies allowing users to buy and consume porn in private, without embarrassing trips to seedy stores or video rental shops. These technologies also enable pornography to be viewed anywhere, anytime; even the cell phone market for porn reached $775 million in Europe in 2007, and $27 million in the States. According to the Britain-based Juniper Research Company, the global market is expected to reach $3.5 billion in 2010.4 Porn does not just benefit from these technologies, however—it has helped create the technologies that expand its own market. As Blaise Cronin and Elisabeth Davenport put it, “Certainly, it is universally acknowledged by information technology experts that the adult entertainment industry has been at th
e leading edge in terms of building high-performance Web sites with state-of-the-art features and functionality.”5