The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Porn Still Doesn’t Get It. Live Streaming Video At 11.

This week I am at Internext, the annual conference on the adult internet industry. This three (or so) day conference is primarily focused on affiliate programs and affiliate marketing, but dips its toe into the artistic pond every once in a while, with sometimes bizarre results. Some years ago, at one of the first Internext events I attended, one of the program items was a Barely Legal photoshoot in which a real, live model was shot. “We’re going to want to make her look younger,” said the speaker in a prim English accent, “so we’ll be shooting down on her from above.” I was pretty new to the industry, as was everyone back then; I’d been writing porn novels since age 17 and teaching sex ed for several years at that point. It creeped me out.

This year, I find the event no less creepy, though I’m sure it’s nothing personal. After almost week of the the glitzy, weird, outrageous and infuriating ordeal that is the Adult Entertainment Expo — porn’s annual conference, primarily focused on DVDs and feature-length downloads — Internext seems small and sordid and seedy — which is normally a good thing in my book, but not so much here.

The first day of programming featured only two panels, one of which was “Future Vision: The biggest names in adult discuss the next generation of the industry.” There were some heavy hitters sitting at the table: Paul Fishbein, cofounder of AVN, the main trade journal of the porn industry, Jay Grdina aka Justin Sterling, head honcho at Jenna Jameson’s Club Jenna, Michael Klein, president of Larry Flynt Productions/Hustler, and Joone, cofounder of Digital Playground and director of Pirates, possibly the only hardcore porn video with fewer pop shots than press releases. Also on the panel were Lars Mapstead from Adult Friend Finder and Ron Cadwell from CCBill, the biggest company that provides billing services for smaller, independent porn sites.

With a lineup like that, I figured we’d mostly be talking business — which we did. This panel had plenty of business-to-business type thoughts on where the industry is going in purely greenbackian terms. But I, being a creative professional of some sort and fairly tired at this point of hearing adult industry professionals talk about themselves, was hoping we’d get to the creative end — where is the adult entertainment industry going in creative terms? And eventually we did.

A couple of notable points were made — that gonzo continues to outsell feature productions, and that feature productions outsell gonzo; that consumers want costume dramas and that they want big black butts. I discovered lots of contradictions and not a lot of takeaways, but most telling was when Jay Grdina of Club Jenna made the comment that it may be easier for customers to make a product selection if they’re looking for “big asses” or whatever than if they’re looking for a high-quality drama like what Club Jenna produces. “They’re not the smartest people,” he said. “It’s like” [Grdina mocks retarded-person voice] “…big buts…uuuuuuhhhhhh!” [Grdina pantomimes clicking a mouse while staring slackjawed at a computer screen.]

This was part of a discussion in which Digital Playground’s Joone, Hustler’s Michael Klein, and Grdina all patted themselves on the back for the fact that they’re producing the high-quality features that the customers demand. I get a lot of Hustler and Club Jenna screeners, and am not entirely convinced of that — in my duties as porn reviewer, I write about as many bad reviews as good, and my good reviews for either of those studios are never, ever because of the great acting or clever storytelling, but because of reasonably hot sex. Joone I will cut some slack, for while I frequently mock Pirates as an overblown and overrated hypemobile, I do think DP is doing some of the most interesting work in the industry — and, more importantly, Joone never picked on people who like gonzo or big butts or whatever. But just a day before Joone had told me in an interview that he saw the sex scenes as being a way to finance independent cinema — sort of a commercial that makes Pirates saleable, as evidenced by the fact that they recut it to an R rating and the softcore version blew off the shelves. But that’s comparing apples to oranges — there was already an enormous publicity engine behind Pirates, and you can’t get hardcore at Blockbuster, so it was already in a perfect market position to take the video chains by storm. The confluence of hardcore and mainstream was what was being sold — and smartly — not any single title.

But back to Grdina: Was he, known for being cheeky, actually displaying contempt for porn consumers who want to get off to a particular body part or sex act instead of a feature with story and plot and costumes? Does his retarded voice indicate that he thinks less of his potential customers who want to jerk off, now, rather than be slowly seduced by an inexplicable porn story? I would not pick on Grdina if this wasn’t indicative of a pretension I see all over the adult industry — while cashing at times enormous checks written by people who want to jerk off, they think that people who want to jerk off are filthy, and that jerking off is not nearly as important as their junior-college art student pretensions. “This is all fine,” says the actor, “but what I really want to do is direct.” Joone and Grdina, obviously, are at the high end of creative professionals in the industry in market terms, but there’s a whole range in the biz, down to the peepshow worker. That sense of not-good-enough permeates down to the 18-year-old starlet showing up at the Expo for the first time — you’re not good enough until you’re directing something with a story. Ultimately, I assert that the divide is about hating sex, about not respecting what pornographers do.

Given that the typical porn feature is some clichéd melodrama that couldn’t make it past the development stage at the world’s awfullest cable network, I resist on an almost daily basis the overwhelming urge to scream at these people: “Just take off your clothes and fuck!” So often, what’s being sold to me seems more derived from what the creative people think they’re supposed to be doing with their lives than from any real passion they have — certainly not a sexual passion. Ultimately it seems to reek of a contempt for things sexual, a distaste toward fucking for money. I find it much more refreshing to talk to someone like Tory Lane, who regarded me with raw contempt when I said she was a porn star. “Porn star?” she said. “Phhhht!! I fuck on film. If I wanted to be a fucking porn star, honey, I would have moved to fucking Hollywood. I’m a fucking pornographer.”

Porn reviwer Scott McGowan said once of alt-porn director Eon McKai’s work: “If people jack off to your art, you’re not the artist you think you are.”

I don’t believe that shit for a second; I’ve seen strippers work, and I’ve written plenty of porn. It’s a different kind of art than the Mona Lisa, but then people surely jerk off to that, as well. Porn features that are bad are not bad because people jerk off to them. They’re bad because they’re bad. And there are plenty of them.

But it’s the jerking that keeps this industry going. Porn is healthy because masturbation is healthy. It does not make you smarter to jerk off to people in costumes, on sets, or ensconced in a story. Because jerking off does not make you stupid in the first place, and the porn industry needs to remember that.

Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.

Share This

This entry was posted on Monday, 14 January 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. 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.