by Taylor Marsh
I desperately wanted to be sexually liberated, but I just wasn’t. I absorbed the career part of liberation early, by making money performing, starting in my teens, but my body and my mind just didn’t talk to each other, and erotic desires were out of the question.
When online dating started to explode, I found myself restless. Still at the LA Weekly, I’d been given a taste of what was just beginning online. So, it didn’t take long before I was contacted out of the blue about joining a soft-core adult business that had found its way onto the World Wide Web early. It was 1997, and I was gnashing to learn all I could about the Internet, which had already shown me the way I was going to keep writing.
I knew from the cataclysmic changes absorbed by the adult industry when the VHS tape arrived that entrepreneurial lust would inspire them to latch on to the web quickly and exploit every aspect of it to make money. So when I was asked about joining a soft-core company, I simply couldn’t resist. The tech world was exploding with possibilities, professionally and financially, which meant I’d be there at the very start, when it all began, a time when my lack of technical expertise wasn’t prohibitive, especially with me joining a company that wanted me on the management side, as well as to direct the content.
The film Boogie Nights was made the year I dropped into the soft-core side of web smut. The film starred Mark Wahlberg as porn icon Dirk Diggler, whose résumé for his job is his huge penis. Burt Reynolds makes an impression as a porn-king filmmaker facing the moment when smut flicks go from film to video. Julianne Moore plays the porn mama, in an outrageously audacious portrayal that takes on the professional and personal sides of women in hard-core porn.
The company I joined was at the other end of this spectrum — high-tech and web-based only, with offices that represented a legit corporation. The company betrayed none of the seediness most would automatically associate with the adult industry, because it produced only soft-core fare.
The company was called Danni’s Hard Drive (DHD). It was launched in 1995 by Danni Ashe, a stripper who had decided to take her fan club onto the web after “a table dance that crossed local decency regulations” got her arrested, as the Los Angeles Business Journal reported it in 1997. It was all female when it started, except for one lonely male. Danni Ashe, whose real name was Leah Manzari, was the most popular woman on the Internet at the time, her images having been downloaded an astounding one billion times.
What I never expected was that my boss would be the woman who would become one of the very first to make money on the web, beating all the boys. NBC News’ Internet Underground website reported in 2000 that Ashe was the first woman to establish a major adult site on the web. By extension, did that make me the first female editor-in-chief of a soft-core website? Likely, but who cares? I kept my clothes on and managed the content, creative and tech teams behind the scenes. What I inherited and how the team I brought on board supercharged what Ashe had started, allowed DHD to take the next leap forward, which would be one of many that continued long after I’d fled the scene.
My story begins in July 1997 and abruptly ends in September 1998. Danni’s Hard Drive was bought in 2004, then sold again in 2006 to Penthouse Media Group, Inc. for $3 million. Whatever happened after I left has absolutely no connection to what I write about here. One reason I decided to take the job in the first place was because the site was strictly soft-core, which meant I could learn the Internet without stepping into the worst of hard-core pornography. Back in 1997, there was a stark distinction between the two.
I self-published My Year in Smut: The Internet Escapades Inside Danni’s Hard Drive in 2000; it’s now long out of print. In its review, the website for Adult Video News (avn.com) wrote: “Marsh, a sharp sociopolitical writer, says Ashe insists on soft-core image but never says no to hard-core profits.” Adriana Manov, producer/ host of KPFK’s “Feminist Magazine,” wrote, “My Year in Smut is an alchemy of the sleazy with the feminist, and the results are pure political gold! This is an emancipation proclamation!” David D. Waskul, a professor of sociology and author of empirical articles covering Internet cybersex, featured excerpts of my story in his book, net.seXXX: Readings on Sex, Pornography and the Internet, writing that it was “a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a major Internet pornography corporation.”
For me, it was never about reviews or sales. It was meant as a record, which is why I can recount it with accuracy today. What it was like at the beginning, one brief moment of Internet history, when the economics of the Internet were harnessed, which happened through the adult industry. Danni Ashe, a self-starting, determined and difficult woman, led the way, and I was there to see it and mine it.
Ashe wanted to cash in, so she taught herself the tech basics, starting with HTML coding, to launch the site herself. She was one of the very few naturally big-breasted beauties who didn’t do sex scenes with men, though soft girlie scenes were a subscriber favorite. She wanted to succeed, she said “by promoting non-exploitative erotica.” She wouldn’t call it porn when I was her editor, only erotica, after Hugh Hefner’s model. “I just hate the word pornography,” she’d say. That was Danni Ashe, determinedly trying to separate herself out from the hard-core purveyors. What she was doing back then doesn’t exist in the same way anymore in an online industry that has now become a hard-core flesh-fest, due to competition for eyes on the page and the frenzy to draw subscribers to pay up.
A pioneer of the subscriber model that would become a craze, Ashe was no dumb blonde. She knew a lot of strippers, including big-name babes, all of whom had girlie pictures galore. Boasting around eighteen hundred photos on DHD, the subscriber portion of the site, the HotBox, had more than fifteen hundred video channels and counting. Ashe offered models, strippers and XXX-rated actresses a page on her site in exchange for a photo, the girls providing information for a short DHD bio, which included a link to anywhere they wanted, even back to their own sites. DHD instantly became the number one big-breasted, naughty-babe portal on the web.
The model bios were simple, personable and as digestible as a piece of chocolate. Ashe’s model was inviting guys to indulge their ultimate fantasies with girls they’d created fantasies about in their minds, but now could do so in the new online world, which offered the ultimate in privacy — their own homes or dorm rooms. Subscribers even got a chance to interact with girls during online shows, including chatting with their favorite big-breasted babe or XXX-rated “actress,” using that term very loosely.
In an era of boob-job mania, Danni’s naturally buxom figure was a huge draw. What Ashe performed in herself was different from what the HotBox site offered. But she had no trouble providing all sorts of pornography in HotBox, content that DHD didn’t produce. It mostly originated through outside web porn channels and external feeds that subscribers could peruse. Danni Ashe was represented by the gauzy cover of a soft-core front, but behind the paywall was everything the adult film industry offered. HotBox was not under my jurisdiction, thank Eros.
Ashe’s artistic model for the pictorials featured on the site was complicated. There were no penetration shots during the time I was at DHD, not even with toys or dildos. So, a woman could have a dildo in her hand, but she wasn’t allowed to put it inside herself. A man and woman could be seen about to have sex, including the woman holding the man’s penis, but the woman wasn’t allowed to take the penis into her mouth or her vagina. But remember, all bets were off in HotBox. You could also view Ashe exposing herself fully through all sorts of spread shots, see pictures of her in bondage scenarios and fetish-wear, and enjoy her bisexual gal-pal romps, but men were never involved.
When Ashe found out that someone working for a company providing video feeds of live performances to subscribers had offered one of her DHD models fifty dollars to pee in a cup on camera, she just about came unglued. Golden shower variations on DHD? Not going to happen.
Not all the models could figure out what Ashe was offering. One big-boob stripper confronted her while she was signin
g autographs at a Las Vegas convention event, screaming at her in front of fans and adult biz purveyors that she was taking advantage of the DHD models by using their images, but not paying them. Ashe kept her cool, didn’t say a word, while the model unloaded. Ignorant of what being on a huge site meant for her own tiny stripper site and her booking possibilities, she soon found out when she was scrubbed from DHD.
According to a 2006 study by the Top Ten Reviews website, pornography is a thirteen billion dollar industry in the United States, with worldwide numbers at $97 billion. However, itworld.com reported in February 2012 that the U.S. is around 58% of the world’s total $4.9 billion porn bucks. The exact numbers may be up for debate, but it’s big bucks.
Back in 1997-98, DHD made around $2.7 million, which sounds like chump change today. But when the Internet first blasted off, DHD was one of the leading moneymakers on the web. After I left, in November 1998, Entertainment Tonight reported Ashe was expected to clear four million dollars that year. It got Ashe featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal at the time, making her the only woman ever to be on the front pages of the Journal and JUGGS. She was whip-smart and insecure all at once, though few ever saw the latter.
I did, because we clashed from the start, which didn’t abate until I walked out the door after thirteen months of combustibility and an intense course on diva mania. I was there at the birth of the online erotic emancipation of women. Porn was the beginning.
According to the same itworld.com article referred to previously, as of February 2012, Utah had “the highest online subscription rate per thousand home broadband users (5.47).” This is not shocking to me. Religiosity often leads to sexual outlets other than through a spouse or relationship, because desire is so tied up in judgment and shame that men don’t feel free to be mere mortals. This comes with a lot of messy and delicious physical proclivities. The U.S. city “with the most searches per capita of the terms sex, porn and xxx” is Elmhurst, Illinois.
Nearly twenty-five million sites are pornographic, which is 12% of all websites. But only 20% of men admit to watching porn, which is laughable. Sunday is national porn day in the U.S., though it’s not acknowledged. The worst day for the porn industry is Thanksgiving, for obvious reasons.
A search by a teenage boy or a grown man might start with “free naked pictures of girls,” which back in 1997-98 might have taken him to DHD. Girls, too, because we like to look at pretty women, we just don’t like to pay for it. So the ample, free model shots likely would appeal to curious girls, not to mention lesbians, just as much as men.
The adult industry’s history is an all-male power vacuum, with females being the exploited talent with no choice or power. The Internet changed that and gave girls in the adult industry a way to trump the guys.
I didn’t even know what an areola was when I walked through the doors the first day. That changed quickly. For those of you equally ignorant, it’s the darker part of skin that surrounds the nipple. How a grown woman who’d spent her life in show business didn’t know the specific names of her own body parts is hard to imagine, but that’s basically how I went through life on the sexual front. It also explains why my life took the trajectory it did: It was guided by the pure curiosity of a tight-assed beauty queen.
The job came with fluffy publicity, because walking into the company’s headquarters you felt you might as well be walking into a small business success story. The message: Girls are just as serious about making money as boys. The site was covered in U.S. News & World Report, the New York Times, Los Angeles Business Journal, Los Angeles Times, ABC News and CNN. Anywhere Ashe was featured back then, she usually hit the headlines.
A USA Today piece, titled “How Small Operators Can Make Big Killings on the Web” told the tale, and getting our picture together in USA Today validated our business status in an industry where few were making money yet. I’d fallen into the perfect place to learn about the web, but also to exploit the opportunity to do what Hugh Hefner had done with the magazine Playboy — use one of the most highly trafficked websites in existence at the time and see what readers thought about politics. From a liberated feminist’s point of view, the faceoff between Susan McDougal and Ken Starr during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment became a gold mine. It seemed a natural for our site, and for a brief time I was one of the first political writers on the web who also had a huge audience, made possible through tits and ass.
There was a lot of drama at DHD, including a blockbuster stripper out of control and a company that was in chaos when I arrived, because Ashe had outgrown what she could handle on her own. I was hired, not to handle the sex side, but to try to get her business operations in order. There were no deadlines and no set working hours, with content going up whenever it came in and someone uploaded it. What I did first was fire the one person doing any work, Ashe’s good friend and someone she couldn’t bring herself to fire. Jill was unmanageable and rarely showed up, so no one knew when things would be posted. Then I hired an entire new creative, design and tech team, as well as a model representative, someone to deal one-on-one with the strippers.
I was in the land of estrogen, an almost all-female enterprise of women making money on their own terms, the way Hugh Hefner had done. I knew that for me to be involved, I had to be empowered to write political commentary that would give meaning and context to the sexually liberated women making the choices they were making. Erotica without a political component didn’t interest me, and I wouldn’t have taken the job if the agreement didn’t include a great deal for me. My advice column, “What Do You Want?,” was central to “The Editor’s Desk,” which was part of our deal from the start. A section titled “I Have a Past,” which is on my new-media site (www.taylormarsh.com) today, was first launched back in 1998 and gives the reader a tour of my professional life, because it’s been such an unpredictable odyssey.
Men would email me through my advice column asking me all sorts of questions. One that regularly came up was over whether two women with one man might drive a wedge between the primary male-female couple: “Do you think it could hurt our relationship if we try this?” Obviously, there is no one answer to this question, because it depends on the two people involved, the relationship and the candor between the couple. That said, I’ve heard about more fallout from bisexual experimentation than I have happy endings. Most times couples jump into a threesome adventure on a whim, without talking everything out first. Often people do it liquored up or drugged, which is always a mistake.
One story I chronicled in My Year in Smut involved a guy and his girlfriend who started role-playing master and slave scenarios, à la Fifty Shades of Grey, only with another woman joining in — something that would never have happened with Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. According to his emails to me, after two satisfying months of playing together, he woke up to a note from his girlfriend saying she had left him for the other woman, who understood her needs better than he did. The guy was devastated, but not just because he lost his girlfriend. He hadn’t been able to recast her with an equally submissive, bisexual female who liked experimenting. Draw your own conclusions about why he was actually upset, which to me sounded more about his sexual needs than an emotional connection that is the relationship glue that keeps people together.
Sex alone won’t do it in the end, just like love is often not enough either. There’s a bit of magic dust when you meet someone and everything hits, including the elements of friendship, desire and deep understanding. When it does, you don’t mess with that chemistry for anything, because you absolutely can find romance again, but a true connection is harder to find.
I’ll never forget the bulletin board that took up more than half the wall space in one of the corporate offices. It was filled to overflowing with fan letters and pictures that had been sent in from guys from all over the world. Most of the snapshots were nudes or at least partial nudes of men showing their masculinity in full, erect glory. A few guys also sent in pubic hair and even
body fluids, which were quickly discarded. Most of the notes were heartfelt and some were hysterically funny.
One note came from a guy who was pictured fully clothed and smiling broadly. He was handsome and masculine, with a very wholesome, collegiate-type look. The contents of his letter detailed with great pride, abandon and explicitness what he felt was the delicious aroma of his farts. It included written descriptions of the sounds he made as he admitted farting throughout his entire letter writing session. A fart fetish. We were constantly amazed.
Another common email I got through “The Editor’s Desk” section on the website came from men asking why many women don’t like to experiment and only like sex a certain way. That’s a question that has threaded through all of my work in the sex and dating industries. Guys from all corners talked about their shy wives, some who only liked missionary, and asked how to change them. I don’t ever try to play sex therapist, so I could only give them advice on what I’d learned.
Two people have to talk to each other about sex, preferably when they’re not in the throes of passion. To get naked sexually enough to experiment requires a degree of trust and comfort that often takes women time. People have to also be careful how they react to one another. You’ve got to stop and take a breath if you hear something from your partner that shocks you. Be gentle and kind, then ask questions and allow him to talk.
If you can’t talk openly about sex in a relationship, you’re really screwed from the start, especially if you want something lasting. Over time, talking about your sex life together becomes even more important, because you’ve got to keep mixing things up.
You also have to guard what discussions take place in the bedroom. My advice is to make the bedroom a place of corporeal communion, a primal and physical den of iniquity whenever possible. If children invade the space, it’s only temporary, with sensuality easily reestablished if you’re determined. Talks about money shouldn’t happen here, because it kills the mood.