The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] The Spanking of Adult Retail

I visited AVN.com recently for my daily dose of info about the business of porn. There on the home page amid the bulletins about starlets’ tit jobs, briefs about corporate aquisitions and articles with incomprehensible headlines like “Stroke Emperors Street Gals Gulpin’ Gallons, Cum Hose,” there was a notice about the release of Rachel Kramer Bussel’s anthology Spanked: Red Cheeked Erotica from Cleis Press. Why did this surprise me? Because seeing books promoted on the AVN home page is rare; usually, book news rating stories in AVN concerns the sale or release of an adult star’s autobiography or sex guide, not a book of erotica with no direct connection to the video porn industry. It’s not unheard of to see an erotica book showcased in porn industry sources, but the fact that it’s happening with greater frequency illuminates something very interesting, and kind of unexpected to me, about the changing porn world.

To be sure, the fact that Spanked was featured on AVN’s home page has to do with proper promotion; a press release goes a long way toward getting space in the publication (or any publication). Most of the time, “literary” erotica books don’t bother to include adult video and novelty industry sources in their promotion. There’s a great divide in retail between, if you’ll forgive me, “erotica” and “pornography,” and the sale of the written word in dirty book form doesn’t usually show up in industry sources like AVN. The main reason for that divide is not about any prejudice on the part of book publicists or illiteracy on the part of adult video sellers. It’s about simple economics, and as the gap is bridged we see great forces at work here.

For some years, most adult stores have focused on DVDs and novelties; there’s been a steadily dwindling representation of dirty magazines and, for at least a decade, almost no paperback books in your average mom & pop or chain local/regional sleaze shop.

Magazines once formed the backbone of the wank industry, but started hurting for circulation in the ’90s as the magazine industry in general lost market share to other entertainment options like VHS and later DVD; in the porn industry that decline was even more dramatic. The magazines often featured dirty stories, but the real sources for erotic text were the porno paperbacks, 150-to-180-word pocket books that featured nonstop narrative fucking. To my way of interpreting things, two trends almost eradicate that species of sleaze: porn tapes and DVDs got cheaper, and people started reading less. When looking for a wank, a tape from the bargain bin that costs the same as a couple of paperbacks offers more immediate titillation for a lot less work. Ditto goes for tape or DVD vs. a magazine, and plus the pictures move!

Now, the video porn industry is hurting. For what it’s worth, industry scuttlebutt I’ve been hearing is that DVD sales are down 30% since last year, partially replaced by download sales but also showing an overall downturn. Many in the biz blame it on tube sites, which give away porn for free. Also having an impact are pay-per-minute services, where frenzied masturbators can pay only for the five minutes of a porn movie they really need, rather than for a whole DVD. Then there’s the anemic US economy, which doesn’t help. Simultaneously, the profusion of mobile players like the iPod and mobile gaming devices means that more people are enjoying their media in public; has that had an impact on whether they choose adult material when spending their entertainment dollars? Nobody knows. But it’s clear that porn, like movies and TV, is competing with more types of entertainment every day.

Meanwhile, over on the retail front, the ease with which novelties can be ordered online, and porn downloaded, have made the traditional sleazy, icky porn shop, which only felt (just barely) comfortable for male consumers, less viable. Consumers buy online with greater ease; the privacy offered has easily trumped the oft-spoken of fears of credit card fraud. And while we’re at it, more and more women are comfortable with porn, making women and straight couples a growing part of the market. When it comes to buying porn and novelties, it’s the consumer’s choice: click and download, or click and wait a few days if you want a dildo — or brave an uncomfortable retail environment with some very interesting smells.

The end result of all this? The “boutique,” a “classy” store meant to be comfortable for an “upscale” clientele, has become important both online and in brick-and-mortar. The adult retail industry knows it, too; the purchase of Good Vibrations by adult retail giant GVA-TWN is just one example of mainstream adult trying to get into the “boutique” market. Hustler Hollywood is a somewhat more famous example. When I lived in New Orleans not long ago, the adult stores in the French Quarter always seemed fairly clean and fairly hip, and on Saturday nights would feature a clientele at least 25% and sometimes 50% couples.

Clearly this is a growing trend, and it’s been going on for a while. To my mind, the growing interest in the “boutique” style by porn giants represents the co-opting of the indie esthetic by mainstream porn forces — and to be more direct about it, the potential ripping-off of sex-positivity in the name of retail exploitation. Or maybe I’m just a cranky old man, and it’s actually about social forces making sex positivity and women-friendly porn more viable. I opt to be cranky.

I don’t want to be too much of naysayer, anyway, because as an erotic writer I find a big piece of ironic love in all this market shift: those swanky boutiques, faux or not, are a lot more likely to carry books. And every time you wank to a dirty story, God sends me ten cents in an unmarked envelope. So get to it.

Thomas Roche blogs about fish, mobsters and cocktail-fueled interracial ’80s dance orgies at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 22 July 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.