Pornland (10 page)

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!’”
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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 hard-core, 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.”
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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.
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He specifically talks about the 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 the leading edge in terms of building high-performance Web sites with state-of-the-art features and functionality.”
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Porn has proven to be a reliable, highly profitable market segment that has accelerated the development of media technologies, from VCRs and DVDs to file-sharing networks, video-on-demand for cable, streamed video over the Internet for PCs, and most recently, video for cell phones.
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Video uses vast quantities of data, and the demand for porn has driven the development of core cross-platform technologies for data compression, search, and transmission. File-sharing networks such as Kazaa, Gnutella, and Limewire are better known for music, but are widely used for porn video files as well. According to historian Jonathan Coopersmith, a common pattern across these various technologies is for pornography to blaze the trail, then gradually decline as a proportion of total business as the media mature and develop more general commercial use.
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The percentage of pornography on the Internet declined from about 20 percent to 5 percent between 1997 and 2002, according to Amanda Spink and Bernard J. Jansen.
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The porn business has also been a pioneer of new business models such as Internet subscription and advertising techniques that help to make commercial video profitable, opening the way for commercial viability of video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube and television series downloads to cell phones and iPods. The porn industry has been able to exploit the unregulated, freewheeling nature of business on the Web, which makes it easy for small companies to enter new markets with very little capital and pursue international strategies, while the jurisdictional ambiguity of Internet geography facilitates the avoidance of taxation and regulation. The porn industry has also developed marketing devices that have later diffused to other Internet sectors, such as free “supersites” that build traffic and cross-link to numerous providers. It has also led the development of Web-based subscription business models, antifraud security, and micro-payment systems for pay-per-view customers.
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That porn is first and foremost a business means that the content itself is shaped by the contours of marketing, technology, and competition in the industry. The low cost of entry and the intense competition to find and hold users have led to a proliferation of porn sites and extensive experimentation with formats, subgenres, and delivery systems. The rate of evolution of the industry is far faster than in the old days of print, when competition between
Playboy
and
Penthouse
gently pushed the envelope of what was considered acceptable. Where users once relied on a local porn store with limited selection, they can now avidly check hundreds of sites in minutes. It is perhaps not surprising that Web-based competition for eyes and wallets is fueling a rapid increase in porn depicting extreme situations, violence, and pseudo-child pornography. In a similar way, classic games such as Monopoly and Scrabble remained unchanged for decades. Now that gaming has moved largely to computers and the Web, the intense competition drives a market for thousands of new games every year, ever more interactive, violent, and sexually explicit.

The growing similarity between the porn and the video game industry is more than coincidental.
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New technologies and business models are driving a convergence in entertainment platforms, so that young adults increasingly use their computers for watching television and videos and for playing games. The general public is not far behind. In early 2009, new TV sets with beefed-up computing power started coming on the market advertised as “Internet ready,” ready to plug into your home Internet connection. But there is also convergence in form and content, so that the line between games and porn is becoming blurred. Porn producers are experimenting with interactive interfaces so that users can click or speak to direct performers to engage in specific acts. Sites specializing in “simulated” child porn have borrowed from the game industry the use of increasingly realistic animated graphic representations of the human form, which can be programmed to behave in any way imaginable. At the same time, the “rewards” for winning in games such as
Grand Theft Auto
include the chance to rape or kill a simulated woman. And just as games give physical feedback to players via vibrating controllers, the porn industry is beginning to experiment with “virtual sex.” “Real Touch” was launched at the 2008 AVN trade show, a “machine that, when connected to your computer via USB, simulates the mouth, vagina, or anus of a real human, matching the on-screen action from supplied pornography.” The porn will, of course, be proprietary and premium priced.
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Just like the gaming industry, the porn industry engages in the normal business activities that other industries pursue. Porn businesses raise capital, hire managers and accountants, undergo mergers and acquisitions, organize trade shows, and enter into co-marketing arrangements with other companies. Private Media Group was the first diversified adult entertainment company to gain a listing on the NASDAQ exchange (though it should be noted that porn businesses have struggled to raise capital through public share offerings). There is now an investment firm that deals specifically with the porn industry. Called AdultVest, the company boasts that it brings together “accredited investors, hedge funds, venture capital funds, private equity funds, investment banks, and broker dealers with growing adult entertainment companies and gentlemen’s clubs who are looking to sell their business, raise capital, or go public. Investors can utilize their AdultVest.com membership to research a wide variety of private placements, reverse mergers, IPO’s, public offerings, buyouts, joint ventures, and business opportunities.”
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While these activities are in themselves unremarkably normal business operations, they signal that porn is becoming a mainstream, normal business—a legitimate business, one that is being taken more seriously by Wall Street and the media. These other businesses become allies and collaborators, with a vested interest in the growth and continued viability of the porn business. As Stephen Yagielowicz stated in an article for
XBIZ:
“The corporatization of porn isn’t something that will happen or is happening, it is something that has happened—and if you’re unaware of that fact then there truly is no longer a seat at the table for you. It’s Las Vegas all over again: the independent owners, renegade mobsters and visionary entrepreneurs pushed aside by mega-corporations that saw a better way of doing things and brought the discipline needed to attain a whole new level of success to the remaining players.”
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The economic connections between porn and mainstream industries were the focus of a 2007 article by Alex Henderson on Xbiz.com, a business Web site for the porn industry. Henderson begins by noting that although executives from mainstream companies don’t want to talk about their connections to porn, they are indeed “profiting nicely, consistently and discreetly from adult entertainment.” Some of the examples he gives illustrate the multiple ways that porn has increasingly become interconnected with companies that are household names. In the cable television business, for example, porn is distributed by Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, and Comcast—the latter being the largest cable TV providers in the United States (Comcast also owns E! Entertainment, a cable station that often carries porn-friendly documentaries, such as one on Jenna Jameson, as well as the show
The Girls Next Door
). Although it is difficult to come by any precise numbers, Kagen Research “estimated that in 2005, cable operators earned about $282 million from adult video-on-demand and approximately $199 million from adult pay-per-view sales, though other researchers have said that the numbers are much higher.”
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Pornography is also distributed via satellite TV, with one of the biggest companies, DirecTV, offering Playboy’s Spice Network and LFP Broadcasting’s Hustler TV.

DirecTV has an interesting history, as it was sold by General Motors in 2003 to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Murdoch owns the Fox Television Network, Twentieth Century Fox, the
New York Post
, the LA Dodgers, and
TV Guide,
to name just a few. Murdoch at that time also owned the second-largest satellite provider, EchoStar Communications Corporation, which, according to the
New York Times,
made more money selling hard-core pornography films through its satellite subsidiary than all of Playboy’s holdings combined.
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An example of synergy here is that Murdoch also owns HarperCollins, the company that published Jenna Jameson’s best-selling book
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.
In 2006, the Liberty Media group took control of DirecTV, and it also has part ownership in Sirius Radio, which carries the Howard Stern Show, a show that serves as an advertisement for the porn industry by regularly inviting porn stars.

Another major distributor of porn is iN DEMAND, which, as one of the nation’s largest pay-per-view distributors, is owned in part by Comcast and Time Warner. Time Warner also owns HBO, which regularly features pro-porn documentaries such as
Pornucopia.
The WB network, owned by Time Warner, ran a reality show starring Ron Jeremy, a well-known has-been porn actor. Jeremy is the first porn actor to be the star of a network show. Time Warner’s other ventures include CNN, Castle Rock, AOL,
Sports Illustrated,
and part ownership of Amazon, a major distributor of porn in its own right.

Porn has been a major source of revenue for hotels, with chains such as Holiday Inn, Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Radisson, and Hyatt offering a variety of pornographic movies. Henderson puts the annual revenues from hotel porn at more than $500 million. While there have been some groups, especially right-wing ones, that have lobbied the hotel industry to stop selling porn, the debate really became more public in the 2008 presidential primaries when Mitt Romney, a high-ranking Mormon who had been on the board of Marriott Hotels from 1992 to 2001, was heavily criticized for not pushing the hotel chain to stop selling porn. Pressure was brought to bear on Marriott by the Mormon Church, but the owners refused to stop selling porn. Romney tried to distance himself from the hotel chain during his bid to become the Republican candidate, but after he lost, he quietly rejoined the Marriott board. Henderson points out that hotel porn not only makes money for the hotels but also for the companies that supply it, which include mega-giants such as LodgeNet and On-Command.
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