Sex Power Money

by Sara Pascoe

  * Don’t get confused, Gutenberg didn’t write it – God did.

  † This might be too harsh, none of this is Jimmy Savile’s mother’s fault.

  ‡ Loaded went online-only in 2015, and FHM is still published abroad.

  Dirty Talk and Videos

  Everyone knows the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell. At school I was told that phones were an accident, that Bell had actually been trying to invent a hearing aid for his deaf fiancée. This is a super romantic part of history which I fact-checked so I could mention it and we’d all weep and wish we’d married inventors, but it’s not true. Instead I found out Bell believed in eugenics and proposed that deaf people should be kept away from each other in case they bred. The moral, my friends, is that school is awful and we shouldn’t go.

  Phones become relevant to pornography production with the advent of smart phones on which we could view moving images, but first, sexy chat lines. These numbers would be advertised in the back of newspapers and magazines and connected the listener with some nice saucy talking.

  The first advertisement for a chat line was in 1918. I don’t know what it said, but I’d guess … ‘The War Is Over, Now Release Your Soldiers’? ‘Armistickle Your Fancy’? ‘Kill Me So I Don’t Have to Think of a Third One’? Later sex chat lines would sometimes be pre-recorded, but more often interactive so the caller could ask hot questions like ‘What are you wearing?’ and the sex phone operator would answer something sexy like ‘Sexy pants.’ It was usually a lie, but no one cared, they still had a great masturbate while running up their parents’ phone bill. One of my friends from school had an older sister who ran a sex chat line from her bedroom. She earned more money the longer she kept the men on the phone, so she’d tell them disgusting things, e.g. pretending she wanted their penis in her mouth. We’d stare as she lay in tracksuit bottoms, smoking B&H, rolling her eyes and groaning. Carly earned more an hour than her mum did in a day. I thought she was the ultimate con artist. The callers thought her name was ‘Diamanté’ and that she could put her legs over her head, when in reality she was a twenty-stone lesbian who often ate raw potatoes.

  The phone-sex industry was most in demand between the 1960s and 1990s, and while it’s in decline today it still makes millions of pounds a year. Don’t take my word for it, ask Cheap Phone Sex with Karen on 0908 1453050 or Hundreds of Scottish Guys NOW! on 0871 4000814.

  The first spicy movie was released in 1896, after Thomas Edison and his colleague William Dickson invented the kinetoscope, an early type of projector. The film’s title is The Kiss and it was scandalous at the time. There’s only two minutes of footage left as the film has degraded (sauce goes mouldy) but those salacious 120 seconds show a male and a female face, side by side, kinda miming eating their dinner. It’s a side-by-side almost-kiss, with lots of chewing. Look it up on YouTube, and make sure to scroll down for the disappointed comments. The Roman Catholic Church campaigned for The Kiss to be censored, which is cheeky bearing in mind they were still pushing the incest, sodomy and begatting-filled Bible.

  Recording and projecting equipment became more sophisticated via the Lumière brothers and John Logie Baird. As film-making progressed, so did depictions of people having sex. By the 1920s ‘stag’ movies were popular in America. These were hardcore short films, usually without sound or colour and generally unedited, but no one seemed to mind. The equipment to project the reels was expensive and producing the films was illegal, so there was little money to be made. That is, until the 1960s, the so-called ‘Golden Age of Pornography’, when porn began to be shown on ‘loops’, 8 mm or 16 mm films that played continuously. A man called Reuben Sturman created coin-operated peep booths screening these loops, and boy did he make a lot of cash ($1 million a day) and pay very little tax.*

  X-rated cinemas screening porno films opened in Europe and the US throughout the 1960s. But by the late 1970s affordable VCRs became available and people could watch other people having sex in the privacy of their own home.

  I knew nothing about any of this. I hadn’t heard of any of these Golden Age films, but apparently these are the most noteworthy and highest-grossing:

  1971 Boys in the Sand was the first and only gay hardcore film to have mainstream success and remains the only adult flick ever to be reviewed by the New York Times – well done, guys. The title is a parody of The Boys in the Band, a movie released the year before. Porn films have continued to parody mainstream movie titles and I could list some for you but I’m not two chapters of Ron Jeremy’s autobiography.† Boys in

  the Sand was the first triple-X film to credit its director and actors. I haven’t seen it, but it sounds lovely and summery, featuring men having sex, oral sex, interracial sex and using sex toys at the poolside and by the beach.

  1972 Behind the Green Door sounds like a song a Teletubby might sing, but this film is not for kids. It was the first hardcore movie widely released in the United States. It involves a woman called Gloria (played by Marilyn Chambers) who is kidnapped, massaged, spreadeagled and given oral sex in front of some priestesses. Then there is some multi-partner trapeze sex and – no spoilers, I won’t give away the ending in case you’re planning to see it. The film took over $1 million in theatrical releases, and $25 million from its video release.

  1972 Deep Throat is the highest-grossing porn film ever. There are many ways I could humorously misconstrue the word ‘grossing’ here but I won’t, if you wanted that kind of grossing you’d be reading Ron Jeremy’s autobiography.§

  I haven’t seen Deep Throat (I haven’t seen any of these films, but I am enjoying the blurbs). It stars Linda Lovelace as a character called Linda Lovelace, who has a clitoris in her throat rather than with her genitals. This means that to gain satisfaction she has to swallow penises deep into her – you guessed it – throat. I have a lot of problems with the science of this. Firstly, surely just having a sandwich would be nice and stimulating for this neck-clit … why does it need to be a penis? Also, any fans of the female anatomy will know that while the tip of the clitoris is nestled just above the vagina, the organ continues iceberg-like destroying the Titanic beneath the groin to a length of about four inches. This Deep Throat character would suffocate. It’s unrealistic. But apparently no one cared how biologically unlikely the plot was; the film played for thirty-nine weeks in New York, took $600 million and became a cultural phenomenon, a symbol of sexual revolution and a feminist discussion point. People argued that Deep Throat was a fantastic exploration of female sexual pleasure because Linda was getting really satisfied by all the dicks in her gob. Pretty handy for the men that satisfying Linda involved something that was so great for them rather than, you know, stimulating an actual clitoris. Maybe I’ll write a sequel where men have penises for fingers and they like pressing them on – naaaah, you’d just touch your own dick with your finger penises, wouldn’t you, you greedy bastards?

  Linda Lovelace is a very interesting woman. Years after making porn, she revealed that she’d not been willing and made claims of rape, domestic violence and coercion. She was embraced by anti-porn feminists as proof of how damaging the industry was to women. Lovelace later fell out with the feminists, claiming they were just as exploitative as the porn industry.

  Didn’t she have sex with a dog?

  In a film, yes. In Ron Jeremy’s autobiography he visits Linda’s ex-husband,¶ the man she says abused her and forced her into doing these things. His dog was fathered by the dog Linda had sex with and he refers to it as ‘Linda’s son’, and it’s so horrible and full of hate towards her. These men laughing at her, believing her to have been denigrated by sex. Some people do believe women are denigrated by sex, even the men who have had all the same sex, like Ron Jeremy. This sexism has cultural influences but it’s also built on paternity certainty, as we’ll explore later.

  In 1973 Gerard Damiano, the writer/director of Deep Throat, released The Devil in Miss Jones. The movie begins with a lonely spinster in her thirties, hello my life, slit
ting her wrists in the bath, oh dear. Justine the spinster isn’t allowed into heaven (cos she killed herself), so instead she does a deal with the devil. She’s permitted to live her life again but this time having more sex. Justine does it with men and women, has threesomes, masturbates with a hose in the bath, slithers with a snake, uses a butt plug (in her butt, not the bath) and puts grapes in her vagina. When she dies again, she finds that Hell is an eternity spent with an impotent man. What a twist! No wonder this porn movie is one of the most successful of all time.

  1976 The Autobiography of a Flea. This X-rated film was ground-breaking because it was the first to be directed by a woman, Sharon McKnight. It was also, I presume, the first porn movie to be told from the POV of a flea – no, you’re not high, this is happening – living in a fourteen-year-old’s pubic hair. This parasite-ridden child is seduced by a priest, and lots of people watched the movie and liked it apparently.

  Did you make that one up?

  I wish.

  1978 Debbie Does Dallas is arguably the most famous porn movie ever and is one of the most lucrative of all time. It was hugely successful and was released on video for home use. I remember it being talked about when I was at primary school, it was the punchline to jokes I didn’t understand and very much part of the collective consciousness. There’s a version of Debbie Does Dallas on YouTube that has all the sex scenes edited out … I’m not saying you should watch it, but I did. The full version is about a cheerleader called Debbie and her friends, who need to raise money so they can be cheerleaders. They perform sexual favours for teachers and other men in positions of lowly power. Then Debbie has full sex with her boss so that he’ll pay for all the cheerleaders’ expenses, but obviously I didn’t see that bit. The version I saw was composed of short vignettes of men introducing themselves to cheerleaders, reaching out a hand and then, cut, next scene.

  By the end of the 1970s advances in electronic equipment were changing how people could watch, obtain and make pornography FOREVER. There were two home video formats available to the keen consumer: the Betamax, released by Sony in 1975, and the VHS, released by JVC shortly afterwards. This ‘format war’ is often cited as an example of pornography fuelling technological advancement. I was lectured by a red-haired man at a party who said that Betamax had prohibited porn on their format. This meant that people who wanted to watch porn had to buy VHS recorders. Which meant they purchased their non-porn films on VHS too, so films were put onto VHS not Betamax and Betamax went out of business.

  It’s a great and salacious story that I believed (and repeated) but it’s not true, FAKE NEWS everyone. Mr Redhead – a school teacher, I presume? The VHS was more affordable and that’s why it won the format war. It was a war with one casualty, the Betamax, the oxymoronically named video player who died before we were all born.||

  Throughout the 1980s more and more people purchased VCRs and the films and programmes to watch on them. There was a boom market for video rental stores well into the 1990s, the most famous of which was Blockbuster Video, now more commonly referred to as ‘what, who?’ Most rental stores had whole sections devoted to adult movies and the industry increased exponentially. The US went from producing about a hundred porn features in 1976 to eight thousand releases in 1996. That’s why now, everywhere you look, there’s someone asking ‘What’s a VCR?’ and being pointed to a corner of the Science Museum.

  There were DVDs and Blu-rays, sure, they did their best. But nowadays no one is watching porn on a living-room TV after their partner has gone to bed. Instead people of every age are viewing hardcore sex on their phones, and it’s all Alexander Graham Bell’s fault. If only he’d stuck to practising eugenics on deaf people like he wanted.

  * I can’t help judging this guy. Let’s all pay our taxes and be proud to contribute, yeah? Note to selves: Sturman died in prison, a place that wouldn’t exist without taxes.

  † If that sounds bitchy you read Ron Jeremy’s book and see how you feel about his contribution to literature. TREES DIED. Big beautiful trees were chopped down so that he could write about his big woody penis, pausing only to list the times he has kissed his own penis.‡

  ‡ I’m not being fair. He also lists the famous people he has met and the aforementioned movie-porno puns.

  § I’m sorry, I seem to have really taken against this man.

  ¶ Chuck Traynor. He died in 2002 and is unavailable for comment.

  || If you remember Betamax, you go to bed right now.

  Hotel Porn Party

  We’ve been exploring pornography that existed before I was alive. I’ve outlined events and facts that are interesting or enlightening and I’m attempting to be unbiased. I’m not trying to build an argument, I’m saying, ‘This happened and after that, so did this.’ I’ve not mentioned any murderers who were inspired by the porn they watched, we’re not venturing into filmed paedophilia or snuff, or the market for squish videos. Some things, once envisioned, flavour an intellectual discussion about pornography too strongly. Some truths of the industry can be so overwhelming they obliterate everything else.

  It’s the same with individuals – if I introduced you to a person and said, ‘Here’s Michael, he cooks homemade sausage rolls, he can speak four languages, he killed a man,’ you wouldn’t be focusing on how he rolls his pastry.

  I’ve noticed with the discourse about pornography that both sides are blinkered. Imagine a debate about Hollywood where one side focuses on how many horses died during the filming of Ben-Hur and their opponents counter-argue that Angelina Jolie does a lot of charity work: neither extreme is representative. There’s a whole spectrum of good and evil within all industries and pornography is no different. Our perception of what is good and evil is subjective, and that is why I now need to once again acknowledge my bias.

  I was anti-porn for a long time.

  The first time I ever saw hardcore pornography was in 2001, when I was nineteen. Doesn’t that seem old? Don’t I seem naive, like a nun or a Brontë sister? But I was an adult, I’d been having sex for a few years, stopping briefly to move out of home and get a job. I was working in a hotel near Nottingham as a backing singer for Robbie Williams’s dad.* One night I was at a party hosted by a couple who worked in the kitchen. A few people were taking turns to smoke weed, sitting on the floor around their bed. We lived in hotel rooms, we had the same plastic mattresses and trouser presses and tiny televisions tuned to four special channels: Channel One showed the news, Channel Two local news, Channel Three showed the film What Women Want, starring Mel Gibson, on a purgatorial loop, and Channel Four was devoted to announcing all the crafts, events and sports the guests could take part in the next day.

  What do women want?

  Let me tell you. Mel Gibson does some great research into women: he puts on nail polish, speaks to his daughter (a woman), then electrocutes himself with a hairdryer. EUREKA, now he knows what women truly desire, all of them, every single one from sixteen to 105 years old, across every culture, race and religion in the world. What they all want is to be hounded by a man who looks like Mel Gibson until their life isn’t worth living, he’s ruined it, they might as well shag him.

  I was probably talking about this at the party, I was always referencing What Women Want. I sometimes quoted the guest activities channel too, but that’s cos there was some low-level Orwellian shit going on.

  *looks around, lowers voice* Our fourth channel always claimed there would be archery at 15.30 the next day if people requested it, but the archery never happened because no one had ever asked for it. The Events Team put archery on there so it looked like there was something for people to do. But no one ever wanted to do it. The Events Team had cleverly arranged it so they didn’t ever have to do anything. This hotel specialised in holidays for older people, and it turns out the aged don’t want sports and activities. They want a holiday that’s exactly like a care home with the option of archery. They don’t want to do archery, but they like to know they could if they wanted, which they do
n’t. *puts cloak over head* Go now, mention this to no one.

  ‘Anyone up for archery tomorrow?’ was one of my witticisms. I’d said it three times already that night. I was uncomfortable cos I don’t smoke drugs and was worried someone would offer me some and I’d take it because I need to be liked. Everyone else was chatting away, the TV was on behind me but I wasn’t looking – I didn’t need to watch What Women Want, this was a party! It took me a moment to realise that someone had changed the channel. The sounds being emitted from the TV were unfamiliar. There was muzak but not the tune from the ‘archery tomorrow’ doublethink … why would there be squelching noises on the news? I turned my head and was met by a flesh apocalypse.

  THERE WERE MORE CHANNELS! You must’ve had to pay for them, and look (or don’t, I wished I hadn’t), I’d never seen penetration from that angle before. I had never seen a penis so large or furiously purple. I did not recognise what I saw on the screen as sex but as a butcher’s window, a slimy massacre. I interpreted it as agony. A crime committed by a male who intended pain, a woman receiving vigorous punishment.