AMONG THE PORNOGRAPHERS
LABASH, MATT
AMONG THE PORNOGRAPHERS By Matt Labash Editor's note: Because of the subject matter, some material in this article is sexually explicit and may offend some readers. Just look at them sitting...
...No one here would dream of asking the question, What do we become by watching porn...
...He regards pornography as "inherently wild, nasty, and vicious...
...Marcus in front of a roomful of photographers...
...a long time in coming—excuse the pun...
...Despite unmerited accusations of bluenosery from more thoroughly debauched Europeans, the fact is, Americans love porn...
...I ask...
...All hard bones and hollow eye-sockets, her head involuntarily bobbing side to side like a springnecked dashboard ornament, she lowers herself onto an empty Bud Light bottle...
...He's speaking of the professors, who slither through the halls ogling passing porn actresses and purchasing wares like the "Flesh-light—Man's New Best Friend," a lifelike molded-gel insert made from "Real Feel Super Skin (TM)" and used for—well, for educational purposes...
...And here are the belles of the ball—the porn stars and starlets, in all manner of neoprene saris, split-to-the-cervix gowns, do-me pumps, reptile tattoos, and black banded shirts fastened with onyx studs like the ones favored by soft-jazz saxophonists and effeminate magicians...
...The truth, as reported by the Adult Video News, is that there has been no better time in American history to be a pornographer...
...in child development...
...Jena tells me such exhibitions are good for business...
...is "very educational...
...But if anyone entertains lingering doubts about what fuels Stagliano's artistic vision, he need only walk to the back of the room, past the beard-tugging academics, past the beaded water pitchers, to the table that contains an advertisement for Stagliano's Buttman magazine...
...This whole world is new to me...
...Over in "Cum Shots: History, Theory, and Research," Dr...
...All right," she relents, "go ahead...
...These are actors, directors, producers, and technicians, and journalists, and professors...
...She starred in the mainstream Boogie Nights, once lectured at Harvard, and is highly regarded for her script-memorizing ability and educational fare like Woodworking 101: Nina's Guide to Better Fellatio...
...It all started THE PORNERS LOVE THEIR NEW ACADEMIC CACHET...
...he says, exasperated...
...Sharon is wearing gold shoulder glitter and a stitch of a dress with nothing under it...
...This is an egalitarian argument— and it can truly be said that porn women are just as autonomous, as morally bereft, and as capable of making bad decisions as porn men...
...Loathed in the porn industry for aggressively reporting stories such as an HIV epidemic that has seen five stars test positive since January, Luke is forced to cadge a Sydney Morning Herald press pass to gain admittance to the conference...
...There, Harris Mirkin, a political scientist from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, asserts there is no real evidence that children are harmed by being photographed naked...
...She told a roomful of porners "how essential" are their efforts to overcome "our puritanical heritage" and applauded their "vital contribution to First Amendment freedoms," adding, "Keep it up...
...I ask Vern Bullough, the center's founder, whether he is bothered by such a display, especially since the photographer wasn't the child's father...
...Of course, many of us have been operating under the illusion that sex is a fairly straightforward proposition...
...About sex...
...We spend $8 billion a year on it, more than on hot dogs or country music...
...Luke can't attend, as he has to keep the Sabbath holy...
...The Cal State types have even taken to calling porners "adult entertainers," much as they call prostitutes "sex workers...
...When I had children, they explored me in the shower...
...Just look at them sitting together, luxuriating in one another's gazes like fat hounds in the sun: Over there, the First Amendment lawyers, with their chalkstripes and barrel cuffs and owlish widow's peaks...
...While autograph seekers congregate around Strossen, Al Goldstein, the corpulent vulgarian who is the editor of Screw magazine, stands next to her signing programs...
...Marcus couples with 101 co-stars...
...Peter Lehman, a University of Arizona professor and Blake Edwards scholar, reads from a laborious treatise laced with allusions to Godard, Lumière, and Méliès...
...In the past, feminist politics—not conventional morality—has stood as the chief impediment to the open acceptance of pornography on campus: Pornography, preached the old feminists, objectifies women within oppressive power hierarchies...
...These professors have tripped upon a glorious discovery...
...When she finishes, Nina barely has time to slip into her floral dress before being stormed by inquisitive academics, including a white-whiskered educational psychologist who wants to talk about developing a program where porn stars work with the handicapped...
...In the meantime, he serves as the industry's Matt Drudge, operating a porn-news Web site, where profiles of Wendy Whoppers and Max Hardcore are garnished with Torah references and discussion of whether Jewish porners keep kosher...
...Another barely coherent platinum-haired actress in a silver-sequined cocktail dress spreads her hands against the wall to gain her balance...
...In the same room over the next hour, various awards-night attendees and industry shutterbugs view other impromptu livesex shows...
...As Ray Browne, architect of that department, once noted, academics found respite from neuroscience and deepest Descartes to rejuvenate themselves at these "intellectual fat farms...
...She begs me not to write about it, until I remind her that she fellated Mr...
...Peter Sandor Gardos, a San Francisco clinical sexologist, explains his research on the ejacu-latory "money shot," the genre's most sacred convention...
...He wishes to remain anonymous since he's affiliated with Los Angeles public schools...
...My first introduction is to Ed Powers, whose soft-leather boots and head-to-toe black make him look like a Riviera pimp...
...As Luke sees it, "the best arguments against pornography are religious ones: that sex should be sacred, that the human being contains the image of God, that we should not act like animals but live in a more moral, elevated sense...
...I ask him why he stays on this beat, and after feeble protestations about being the only critical observer in a racket filled with industry shills, he finally shrugs: "Good question— it's something I talk about weekly with my shrink...
...We're not just wankers...
...Bill Margold, who has starred in over 400 films, begs to differ, asserting that such shots represent "vicarious revenge exacted upon the cheerleader by X-number of men who could not get that cheerleader...
...MacDworkinites typically will not debate the merits of pornography...
...The entertainment, dubbed "Pornocopia, Our Body of Work," doesn't disappoint...
...All I wanted to do was make videos that really turned me on," he mumbles, his shirt unbuttoned to mid-sternum...
...At the "Role of Fetishism" panel, philosophy professor David Austin of North Carolina State University has determined through rigorous Internet study that the number of "necro[philia] enthusiasts is about three times that of [menstrual] period enthusiasts...
...He illustrates with clips of Buttman in Barcelona...
...Luke is from Cooranbong, outside Sydney...
...To expatiate on the "binary collapse" and "epistemological flippage" brought about by "the erosion of the once-secure border distinction between the private and public spheres...
...They're all these things, and feminists as well...
...Papers are presented at conferences with titles like "Body Slam: Professional Wrestling as Greek Tragedy" and "1960s Spy Films as the Locus of Heteronormative Masculinity...
...These people are divorced from the foundations of our civilization...
...But over the last decade, a spate of Nina Hartley types have given voice to the noble savage...
...But I ask the good doctor what he has in mind...
...Rare is the speaker who does not make at least one "no pun intended" or "so to speak" aside...
...In the picture, a cherubic, naked two-year-old grabs and explores the penis of the photographer, who is reclining naked on a bed...
...they burrow clammy hands in snug chinos pockets like nervous ethnographers dropped into an Amazon tribe of sexpot savages...
...Sociology professor James Elias, the conference host and director of the Cal State Northridge sex-research center, says he tried to find someone to represent a countervailing view but was unsuccessful...
...This led to the proliferation of victim studies and human-sexuality courses and, more important, to the advent of pop-culture departments, whose prototype hatched at Ohio's Bowling Green University in the early '70s...
...Luke breaks with the academics and porners who've adopted a chipper Rousseauian view of things: No impulse should be subjugated...
...But the real aim is simpler: to celebrate pornography...
...At least it looks like Stagliano...
...Over 500 academics—sociologists, anthropologists, sexologists, film and gender-studies teachers, and interdisciplinary seekers from across the country—are attending under the guise of studying "Eroticism and the First Amendment...
...This is no less than a sea change...
...He says the shoot took one day, though industry sources snit that it actually took three...
...She's here to pick up a lifetime achievement award from the Free Speech Coalition, the conference co-sponsor and porn-industry trade association which has made a major bid for respectability...
...As for porn critics whose objection is religious, Elias says that "to take an evangelical person [and] put them up against one of the top defense attorneys in the country to debate—it would be an embarrassment for everyone...
...But porn plenaries make for unorthodox encounters...
...As media attractions, these spectacles tend to garner more coverage than discussions of the epidemiology of gonococcal infections...
...Buttman, one of porn's top directors, a Cato Institute benefactor, and an unapologetic gluteus enthusiast...
...She is on her knees pleasuring Mr...
...The meeting is sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at California State University, North-ridge—a sort of Left Coast Kinsey Institute...
...Lehman concedes to me that he and his colleagues "are legitimizing [porners] within the culture," but only in a way "that I think they deserve...
...Not your classic, fang-baring Andrea-Dworkin, Catherine-MacKinnon, all-sex-is-rape feminist theoreticians incensed by pornography and harassment, but "sexpositive feminists," as Nina calls them...
...He settled on porn, and his A History of X will be published next year...
...There's a certain seductive bonhomie among the positivists, as I learn traveling with Hartley and Sharon Mitchell to a $65-a-head porn-industry benefit to combat racism (an event not linked to the conference...
...There's the professoriat, suited up in seat-cleaving Dockers and itchy tweeds or camouflaging guts in frowzy guayaberas...
...Porn is now so mainstream that there are even blooper videos: Watch "PJ...
...Lorenz's purpose...
...The Canadian boom-mike operator eagerly nods...
...After a bout with atheism in his twenties, he converted to Judaism on hearing Dennis Prager, the Jewish radio theologian...
...Susan Block, who looks like Little Bo Peep on leave from a French bordello, in her layers of ruffled chiffon, peek-a-boo garters, and barely contained décolletage...
...Despite his inner conflict, Luke serves as my Sacajawea, guiding me through the alien biosphere that is this convocation, pointing out people I should meet...
...I don't know, we haven't sat down and talked," he says, still glassy-eyed from Nina's performance...
...when the old canon was torched in the late '60s in favor of spot-scholarship on any given researcher's own personal interests, manias, viewing habits, and turn-ons...
...The headliner, though, is porn veteran Nina Hartley...
...The next speaker, Midori, a "FetishDiva" squeezed into a black rubber Emma Peel catsuit with six-inch stiletto boots, shows us slides of 19th-century Austrian pumps that "render the wearer immobile and thrust the foot forward like an offering...
...It is hard to imagine riding in a limo drinking bourbon with an underclad MacDworkin...
...But I have lots of ideas, so does Nina...
...In this way are new disciplines erected ("LesBi-GayTrans Film Studies"), a new lingo created ("patriarchal hegemony...
...Still, that's 33.6 women a day, and nobody's questioning his work ethic...
...Another idea I had was to make a video about, uh, my obsession, uh, with female butts...
...This conference will show you how incredibly stupid people get when they don't have a fear of God...
...Luke moved to Los Angeles and decided to write a book on either ethical living or pornography...
...Himself a panelist, Stagliano looks slightly embarrassed by the attention...
...Meanwhile, David Sonenschein, formerly of the Kinsey Institute, illustrates the supposed ludicrous-ness of child-pornography restrictions by showing us a photograph once forced out of an exhibition...
...Another panel deconstructs Ed Powers's Dirty Debutantes oeuvre...
...I ask Bullough whether anyone else's children explored him in the shower...
...Unprompted, she removes a rubber phallus from her purse and hikes up LaVonne's dress, baring her derrière...
...Block paddles it and kisses it while LaVonne coos...
...I don't think that's an appropriate question," interjects the conference's eavesdropping legal counsel...
...We ought to [let children] explore...
...Block graduated magna cum laude from Yale and earned her doctorate in philosophy at San Francisco State University...
...Ten minutes later, I find her in a meeting room where stragglers are eagerly congregating...
...Most thought they were merely escaping lives rolling gorditas on Taco Bell assembly lines when they took up rutting strangers for money in badly acted films with poor production values...
...Powers's contribution: He displaces "the monotonous emphasis on the meat shot" and constructs instead "a comic Woody Allen-like Jewish persona for himself, acknowledging insecurities such as worrying about his penis size...
...Nina dances topless and virtually bottomless while lipsynching an old Alberta Hunter tune until her glutei glisten like the haunches of a slightly dimpled Clydesdale...
...About what...
...Marcus, who looks like a tightly coiled anaconda with elephantiasis of the deltoids, is fresh from starring in the World's Luckiest Black Man, so titled because Mr...
...Citing Stagliano's voyeuristic vérité travelogues, which begin as interviews and culminate in sex in public places, a straight-faced Lorenz launches a lengthy exegesis comparing Stagliano's persona to the late-19th-century flâneur as described by Baudelaire...
...Marcus for the benefit of 20 or so onlookers...
...This odd assemblage has gathered for a four-day World Pornography Conference, August 6-9, in the Universal Sheraton, amid the strip-mall sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, porn-production capital of the world...
...Luke points out Vanessa Del Rio, who once sucked milk out of a cow's udders on a magazine shoot...
...Verdict: Visionaries...
...I'm just exploring and seeing what I can do that's instructive...
...Because his name is recognized and reviled by industry regulars, Luke intermittently uses an alias, and I join in for sport...
...Harm or degradation does not reside in the image itself...
...gone is the stigma that once forced smut enthusiasts to slink away to red-light strokehouses...
...It's difficult to tell...
...The porners, of course, love their new academic cachet...
...Against this consensus, panels explore the particulars of porn's artistic merits and cultural significance, harvesting insights so minute as to be barely detectable...
...Even on campuses, the porn-positive feminists sunny-up the business enough to lend it cover and discourage scrutiny of its bothersome aspects (AIDS, rampant drug use and suicide, miscellaneous violence—Sharon Mitchell was nearly killed by a fan who broke her larynx while biting her all over her body...
...His data have led him to conclude that "no pornographic image is interpretable outside of its historical and social context...
...Once able to abstain from watching the stuff, he has developed a taste for the roughest hardcore...
...Academics, it seems, are the only people who can de-eroticize sex more completely than pornographers...
...As Luke loudly proclaims in the hotel lobby, aiming to reduce the toxic levels of pretension, "These are not whores and pimps and mafiosi...
...Two starlets lie on a table, engaging in sexual activity as matter-of-factly as if they were exchanging business cards...
...The coalition provides "talent" with health insurance, peer counseling, AIDS tests, and diagnostic information on scabies, syphilis, and venereal warts (the porner's carpal-tunnel syndrome...
...Most of the panels, however, present no vexing dilemmas: Porn is good...
...It also sends articulate porn stars like Juli Ashton out to lobby against sin taxes and zoning ordinances and to "educate" the world at large to see that "we're just normal, nice, moral people...
...Getting paid for teaching porn is "a good gig if you can get it," says porn star Sharon Mitchell, who like Nina Hartley occasionally lectures in these classes (when not pursuing her goal of a Ph.D...
...I think it's one of those gray areas," Bullough says, adding that it WHEN ONE VIEWS ONE'S PERVERSIONS WITH SCHOLARLY DETACHMENT, IT SEEMS ALL THINGS BECOME PERMISSIBLE...
...Nina says all this while receiving a foot-rub from Sharon, whose gazelle legs gape apart as she sits in the low-slung seat across from me...
...In the crowd milling around the cash bar, we run into a truly extraordinary apparition: Dr...
...Riding up to the opening session in a packed elevator, I watch fellow journalist Luke Ford come eyeball to areola with a porn producer's statuesque companion...
...She's an orthodox Jew...
...The profs are hardly alone in their enthusiasm...
...With the Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...This isn't the place...
...A sex therapist and bestselling author (The 10 Commandments of Pleasure), she hosts a syndicated cable talk show, where she dispenses advice on matters coital...
...Cal State Northridge has conducted other sex conferences—in 1995, the First International Congress on Gender, Cross Dressing, and Sex Issues...
...He's a kind of shaggy-haired, acid-washed Brad Pitt, the 32-year-old son of a former Seventh Day Adventist evangelist...
...The brains behind the ever-popular Dirty Debutantes series, Ed considers himself a true "innovator" and thinks the scholarly attention afforded by the organizers of this conference has been AS LUKE SEES IT, "THE BEST ARGUMENTS AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY ARE RELIGIOUS ONES: THAT SEX SHOULD BE SACRED...
...Pants-suited porn starlets wax self-analytic at a session headlined "Victims or Visionaries...
...His face is buried in some girl's fleshy keister...
...Harder still to imagine wanting to—and probably unnecessary, since MacDworkinism is increasingly marginalized by sane people everywhere...
...Oy vey," says Luke...
...The most striking instance comes when U of Cal Irvine's Jay Lorenz delivers his presentation on the "gonzo" films of John Stagliano, a.k.a...
...Gardos recruits college sophomores to view porn-movie clips of actors ejaculating on their female counterparts, then gauges whether they find the images degrading...
...Before she can return to explaining her philosophy, Block is seized by inspiration: "Wanna hear me tinkle...
...I am riding in Nina's stretch limo, drinking Nina's bourbon, listening to Nina prattle on about the need for increased interaction between porners and profs and how, were she not so exhibitionistic, she'd like nothing better than "to retreat happily to the study of sex and books in a life of contemplation...
...She entered the business three weeks ago and has already starred in seven films—Fresh Flesh and six others she can't quite remember...
...Though MacKinnon and Dworkin—or "Mac-Dworkin" as the sex-positivists pejoratively call them—would have us believe that the women of the porn industry are victims of patriarchal hegemony, Hartley and company claim to do what they do for profit and pleasure...
...Though Jena has promised to take me to an afterparty at a place called the Rubber Room, she disappears with Mr...
...Instead, the question is, What kind of porn should we watch...
...Not so the academics...
...As center founder and professor emeritus of history Vern Bul-lough says, speaking for the 12-year-old in all of us, "We hope to get more [pornography] deposits from the industry—so we'll have the biggest porn collection in the country...
...There's a lot more I need to learn...
...When one views one's perversions with scholarly detachment, it seems, all things become permissible...
...The only genre denounced at the conference is child pornography—except at the child-pornography panel...
...Juli has sex with a pair of circus clowns in New Wave Hookers 4.) The opening ceremony will take place in a panoramic rooftop conference room...
...I buy that," he says, "even if I don't live up to it...
...Nearly half the people in the room raise their hands (including Luke, who sheepishly admits that he recently completed a pseudo-documentary, What Women Want...
...break up her co-stars by passing a little gas...
...It is small surprise, then, that the same state system of higher education that harbored Mario Savio's Free Speech Movement and brought us Angela Davis's appointment as "professor of the history of consciousness" has seen fit to confer scholarly legitimacy on this once-closeted form of entertainment...
...Hartley is a brainy red-diaper baby and socialist who contributes essays like "Frustrations of a Feminist Porn Star" to turgid anthologies, tossing off references to Newtonian and Einsteinian physics and correctly deploying words like "etiology...
...One would think, listening to Strossen and her ilk, that Anthony Comstock were still screening our mail...
...He's referring to the American Civil Liberties Union's Nadine Strossen, who has come to the conference to defend the proposition, as the ACLU has for years, that engaging in all modes of depravity is a cherished and absolute American right...
...in 1997, the International Conference on Prostitution—on the principle that they enhance "the university's service to the community...
...Sprinkle, so named for her practice of urinating on stage, slogs through a tortuously blue monologue, which elicits belly-laughs from the hundreds of profs intent on proving they're in on the joke...
...So to speak...
...She calls herself an "ethical hedonist...
...Only later do I learn that she has a husband who knows nothing of her extracurricular networking (her six-year-old daughter doesn't even know of her "acting" career...
...Only now are they realizing that what they do is worthy of study...
...Proverbs says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom...
...Once the sex-positivists gain the advantage, political unanimity prevails— everybody at the conference is a staunch libertarian— and the only remaining issue is esthetic...
...After the show, which is broadcast from her home-studio "pleasure palace" in Beverly Hills, the guests and onlookers often dog-pile in some sort of living-room bacchanal...
...The profs are gawking, cotton-mouthed, at the bounty of stilettoed vixens...
...But unlike anyone else here, he seems perplexed about porn, offering eloquent disquisitions on its corrosive effect and tendency to desensitize...
...As she sits sprawled on the floor, emitting alcohol-induced giggles, souvenir-seekers take turns cozying up behind her to have their pictures taken...
...Any nugatory pastime should be seen as a "text," to be decoded by liberal-arts gnostics...
...I look at your wife with the utmost respect, a coequal partner in the search for truth," Luke booms in his Aussie accent...
...People's relations have never been an issue at this conference...
...Needing a new guide, I turn to Jena, an attractive 25-year-old just off the bus from Orlando...
...By now, "porn studies" is featured at several universities (the State University of New York-New Paltz, for example, and the University of California campuses at Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and Berkeley), though the courses may hide under headings like "community studies...
...Last year the industry released 7,970 porno flicks—35 times the number of mainstream Hollywood features...
...Also available is an array of catalogs from which to order classroom materials...
...She talks about promoting "worker control of the means of production" to reclaim porn as the embodiment of female empowerment and sexual expression as originally envisioned by our foremothers during the sexual revolution...
...As we talk, she pulls me and Luke and a Canadian documentary film crew into the ladies' room, along with her lovely assistant LaVonne...
...The male animal is very bad news," he says, "and pornography exemplifies that...
...ACADEMICS, APPARENTLY, ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN DE-EROTICIZE SEX MORE COMPLETELY THAN PORNOGRAPHERS...
...Nobody laughs...
...Porn's pervasiveness on VHS and AOL and DVD and pay-per-view allows any midwestern pharmaceutical salesman on expense account to access Sorority Slumber Sluts in La Quinta Inn, queen-sized solitude...
...Like many of the academics at this conference, Block has constructed her own discipline...
...Marcus...
...Marcus saunters up behind her...
...Not much of a hedonist, I rejoin the scholars, now taking their seats in front of the stage for the first evening's proceedings...
...It is all based on the material we presented in a professional and scholarly manner...
...Some took up tenured residence there and are bingeing still on postmodernist sweetmeats: All things are worthy of study...
...There, beneath a letter from the editor entitled "From the Crack," is a picture of Stagliano: Auteur, Libertarian Champion, Toast of the Academy, Harbinger of Tomorrow's Canon...
...porn is nothing but natural man expressing himself in the most natural of ways...
...She is met with cheers from her carny-barker escort and from the sweaty spectators who have pressed around her like punters at a Balinese cockfight...
...Like everyone else here, Luke discounts claims by feminists and fundamentalists that pornography leads to violence against women...
...Performance artist Annie Sprinkle, porn's Yoko Ono, asks the crowd how many of them have made pornography...
...We introduce ourselves to potential sources as retired gay porn stars Dick Dundee and Jack Hammer...
...Obscenity prosecutions have slowed to near-extinction under the Clinton administration, and adult-industry output has doubled in the last five years...
...Jena is fairly finicky by porn-actress standards: There are varieties of sex she won't engage in on screen, including interracial—that is, until Mr...
...THE CAL STATE TYPES HAVE TAKEN TO CALLING THEM "ADULT ENTERTAINERS...
...90s resurgence of Quiana-draped, '70s-era porn chic (Boogie Nights, Larry Flynt's deification, etc...
...Except, it turns out, at the "Night of the Stars," the Free Speech Coalition's awards dinner, which serves as something of a porn-star prom night and is held during the conference at the same hotel...
Vol. 4 • September 1998 • No. 2
