Sometimes Bill Asher can’t believe what he hears. As
the president of Vivid Entertainment Group, the biggest name in pornography,
Asher makes a living lucrative enough to send his 16-year-old daughter to
one of Los Angeles’s most expensive private schools.
He's not
intimidated by the school’s other parents: It’s not seen as an odd thing
that I’m a pornographer. They know what I do, and they talk to me
about it, it doesn’t faze anyone. What stuns him most are the reviews he
gets. They talk about my movies like you’d talk about Julia Roberts. They
say, ‘My favorite is Jenna Jameson,’ or whatever. A lot of the women will
say they’d like to see more plot. It’s nice to hear the advice, but it
always feels strange to me to have someone’s mother give you her take on our
porn movies.
30 years after men first dragged their wives to the seamier side of town
to see Deep Throat, pornography has gone mainstream all over America.
From movies to television shows to music videos and magazines, porn stars
and porn iconography are everywhere, pointing to a national comfort level
that few would have predicted even a decade ago. Just a few current
examples: Jameson, perhaps the biggest adult female star of all time, played
herself this season on NBC’s Mister Sterling. The Friends gang
once got obsessed with an all-porn channel. Val Kilmer will play the porn
legend John Holmes in the movie Wonderland. In the coming weeks,
former underage porn star Traci Lords plans to promote her autobiography, Underneath it All. The numbers, meanwhile, are huge. In 2001, Americans
rented 750 million adult films on video or DVD alone. Total industry
revenues now stand at between $5 billion and $10 billion.
How’d we get here? Adult entertainment initially entered
America’s homes in the 1980s, with the first videocassette recorders, and
blossomed in the 1990s with video-on-demand, phone sex and of course, the
Internet. We’ve also become more comfortable with sexual information in
the general culture, says sociologist Pepper Schwartz, But it’s not a
change in our basic values. We’re just lightening up a little bit about sex.
Besides the VCR, other factors helped win America over to
porn. A more explicit sexual dialogue emerged, brought about by the AIDS
crisis, and pop culture has pushed the boundaries of what’s acceptable. In
the 1980s, rock bands such as Motley Crue started putting porn stars in
their videos; now they’re staples in videos by Eminem and others. Howard
Stern’s radio program has turned many porn players into household names.
John Wayne Bobbitt became famous for having his penis cut off in the early
1990s, then parlayed his notoriety into a short-lived career in adult
entertainment. Who can forget the infamous Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee tape,
which only added to the two stars’ allure? The 1997 film Boogie Nights
told the story of one man’s journey in the business. And with the 1998
Monica Lewinsky scandal, life imitated porn.
More than anything else, however, the Web is responsible
for porn’s increased visibility and acceptance. Because of the anonymous
nature of Internet surfing, porn sites have proliferated since they first
started appearing 10 years ago. As the technology advanced and high-speed
access became more available in people’s homes, the business boomed.
Analysts estimate that the Web’s 100,000 adult pornographic sites now take
in $1 billion annually. Similarly, as with the Internet, satellite systems
and video-on-demand now allow users to order up skin flicks without leaving
their sofa—or their hotel room. Adult titles are estimated to be viewed 10
times as often as standard fare by business travelers, and they’re often
more expensive, too ($6.95 compared with $3.95, for instance).
As some aspects of porn have taken off, others have fallen
apart. Many porn magazines have seen their circulations drop by 10 percent a
year since the mid-1990s. Longtime adult magazines Playboy and Penthouse
have lost millions of customers. Penthouse, which once sold 5 million copies
a month, now has a circulation of well under 1 million and hasn’t had an
issue on newsstands since April. You gotta keep changing in this
business, says Legs McNeil, whose book, The Other Hollywood: The
Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, is due in January. Wherever the new technology is, that’s where porn goes.
McNeil says the business itself, most of which is done in
Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, has gotten more mainstream, too. Girls
line up and audition to be in these films now. Jameson, he points out,
has set a new standard for career management. Besides doing films, she’s CEO
of ClubJenna Inc., an Internet management, production and licensing company.
Jameson has written a book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, that
will be released next year.
A porn producer and actor who’s also making the most of
his infamy, Adam Glasser (a.k.a. Seymore Butts) stars in Family Business,
Showtime’s reality show about the daily life of a porn mogul. This series
is an opportunity to show people that the industry is filled with normal
people, says Glasser. The mini-mogul thinks America’s been ready to have
porn stars in their home on a weekly basis for a while now. It’s about
demand. Why would somebody put a porn star on a snowboard unless they
thought it would sell a lot of snowboards and get them a lot of publicity?
They’re not going to do it just to get clobbered by the Moral Majority.
But what will we see next? How about porn stars in prime
time? Paul Fishbein, founder and president of The Adult Video News Media
Network, says he’s had meetings about taking the AVN Awards show—a gala
event dubbed “the Oscars of porn”—to television. In years past, the ceremony
has been broadcast, but only on the Playboy Channel. Now, he says, we’re talking about mainstream TV.
