by Gail Dines
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.6 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.7 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.8
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.9
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.10 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.11
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.”12
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.”13
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.”14 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.15 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 2
006, 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.16
Microsoft also makes money from the porn industry as the industry spends what Henderson calls “a fortune” on various financial, accounting, and graphic design software. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari, and Mozilla Firefox are used to search for porn, and credit card companies are increasingly making money from porn transactions as the industry moves away from brick-and-mortar stores that still take cash to Web sites that require credit card payment. Henderson points out some of the more hidden mainstream industry partners of porn: real estate and banking. For the former, the porn industry “brings high profit to realtors in the San Fernando Valley, and in many different parts of the U.S., Europe and Asia, real estate people prosper when they sell or rent commercial property to adult webmasters or sex toy manufacturers.”17 Banks also make money from the porn industry as the revenue it generates is invested in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and so on. Indeed, everyone in the supply chain from production to consumption is complicit in building and strengthening the porn industry.
The porn industry is carefully nurturing a more respectable and mainstream image as it seeks to build not only partner organizations but legitimacy. A May 13, 1999, press release from Private Media Group reads, “We are committed to meeting our goals to increase shareholder value, on a quarter-by-quarter basis, taking us forward as a complete lifestyle global company, providing our services to the mainstream adult communities of the world.”18 In early 2009, adult entertainment studio Pink Visual launched PVExposed.com, a promotional site designed to give media outlets and financial analysts a source for the latest news and announcements from the company. “We created PVExposed as a way to showcase all our products in a safe for work environment where we could build traffic from our various, disparate campaigns like ‘Erection ’08’ and ‘Plant Your Wood,’” said Kim Kysar, brand and product manager for Pink Visual.19
Just as the gambling industry, from racetracks to casinos, has sought to reposition itself by adopting the label “gaming” industry and emphasizing its contributions to government revenues, so the porn industry is seeking to position itself as part of the entertainment and “lifestyle” sector.20 There are now a number of PR companies whose job is to promote porn in the mainstream entertainment industry. Brian Gross, the president of BSG Public Relations, which counts Adult Video News, Penthouse Films, and Joanna Angel (a gonzo porn producer and performer) among its clients, is quoted as saying that in the porn industry there is a consistent demand for mainstream attention, but “the adult industry can’t advertise the same way other industries can, they can’t market their products like other industries.”21 The solution is to garner publicity in mainstream media by placing stories, people, and products that advertise the porn industry. In the case of pornographer Joanna Angel, Gross has repackaged her as a mainstream spokeswoman for punk and Goth sex and tattoo culture. In addition, thanks to Gross, she not only appears frequently in tattoo magazines, she also writes columns for Spin magazine and has been featured in the New York Times.22 In 2008, Indiana University invited Angel to speak on campus—she showed clips from her movies and handed out sex toys.
The industry has also been successful at product placement wherein actors playing leading roles are seen consuming pornography, or where porn is just folded into part of the story line. In the 2004 independent movie Sideways, the main character, a mild-mannered man played by Paul Giamatti, is seen reading Hustler’s Barely Legal magazine, which features women who look younger than eighteen. No comment is made in the film about the magazine; it is just simply part of the scenery. A more blatant example appeared in season 3 of Showtime’s Weeds, where one of the lead characters, Andy Botwin, played by Justin Kirk, gets a job on a porn set. The well-known porn performer Lexington Steele, appearing mostly naked, is in the background of a number of scenes, simulating penetration. Again, much of the dialogue had little to do with pornography; it was just a mere backdrop to the story. In the movie I Am Legend, starring Will Smith, two of Joanna Angel’s movies are displayed in one scene that takes place at Tower Records.23 Porn performers are now increasingly showing up in pop culture to such a degree that the Los Angeles Times ran a story called “Porn Stars Are the New Crossover Artists.” The article mentioned Sasha Grey and ex-porn performers Traci Lords and Katie Morgan appearing in Zack and Miri Make a Porno. The article continues: “As pornography has evolved from a shadowy racket to a multibillion-dollar global industry based in San Fernando Valley office blocks, top porn stars become just one more celebrity life form among many: dishing behind-the-scenes gossip on talk radio, dashing off autographs for besotted trade-show fans and generally marketing themselves as aggressively as any NBA MVP or ‘American Idol’ champ.”24 Indeed, the article itself is one more example of how porn is now a newsworthy story.
Zack and Miri Make a Porno was big news in the porn industry. Interviewed by XBIZ, director Kevin Smith expressed his fondness for porn. Asked what sort of an impact porn had had on him professionally and personally, Smith replied: You gotta remember I’ve been involved with porn, in one way or another, since I was eleven years old. Whether it be trying to steal some skin mags from the magazine store in town, to trying to track down stag films in neighbors’ houses, friends’ houses—maybe their parents had ’em, because my parents never kept that kind of thing, so I had to look for it elsewhere. Before the days of internet, where it is easily accessible, it was tough to get your hands on grown up stuff. Part of the reason I took the job at RST Video back when I did in 1989, was because it was a mom and pop shop, and they actually had a porn room, as opposed to Blockbuster Video. So, I’m like, “Finally, I’ll be able to take home porn flicks without having to rent them on my parents account. This is gonna rock.” And that led me to making Clerks. So, without porn, I’m not talking to you today.25
Another film that makes porn the focus of a comedy is Adam Sandler’s forthcoming Born to Be a Star. The film is about a teen who goes to Hollywood to follow in the footsteps of his porn star parents. XBIZ News made this a top story since it is well aware that movies with a porn theme help to mainstream porn.26 After reading the XBIZ story, Dawn Hill, the editor of the Web site for the sex toy company Liberator Bedroom Adventure Gear, contacted the production house to offer
its products as props in the film. According to a follow-up article in XBIZ, the prop master liked the products and now actresses in the movie will be wearing Liberator Lingerie and Liberator Latex costumes.27 This is not the first time that Liberator goods have been in mainstream movies. In the movie Meet the Fockers, Barbra Streisand was carrying around one of their products. According to Acme Andersson, a writer for XBIZ, “Liberator’s products had such a big role in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading that they should be SAG-eligible. Expect to see more of the products in Jack Goes Boating, which Philip Seymour Hoffman is directing and producing.”28 Liberator’s vice president, Joshua Maurice, told Andersson that the company has developed contacts with those people who are responsible for placing products in movies.
Mainstream positioning also requires that an industry present a more socially responsible face and pursue modes of self-regulation that try to stop the more blatant abuses, while fending off more unwelcome governmental regulation.29 In 1991, the industry launched the Free Speech Coalition to engage in lobbying, public relations, and litigation. Its mission is to serve as an organization that “helps limit the legal risks of being an adult business, increases the profitability of its members, promotes the acceptance of the industry in America’s business community, and supports greater public tolerance for freedom of sexual speech.” Its current 2007–9 strategic plan calls for an Internal and External Communications Plan that identifies “audiences (industry, members, media, legislators, etc),” and develops “methods and materials to reach those audiences.” It also promulgates a Code of Ethics and Best Practices.30
