Home

Back to Essays


Books

While pornographic books are common, books on pornography are relatively rare. The best of a bad bunch is John Hubner's 1993 work on the Mitchell brothers, Bottom Feeders.

(Luke's books.)

"Some day there will be big fat books," predicted director William Rotsler in 1974, "with titles like Early Porno, The Love Directors, Stars of the Golden Age of Pornopix, The Films of Marilyn Chambers, How Deep Throat Was Made..." He couldn't have been more wrong. Despite porn's proliferation, nobody wrote anything close to what Rotsler prophesied.

About 70% of books published on porn defend the industry's right to exist. The most prominent exceptions come from radical feminists and passionate Christians.

Though most persons in the media oppose almost all forms of censorship, they generally portray porn in a negative light. Newspaper and magazine editors, particularly feminists, shy away from portrayals of sex as sport or entertainment.

"Editors don't want anything about porn other than a cautionary tale," says one reporter. Los Angels Times Media critic David Shaw backs up that point in his book The Pleasure Police.

"Newspapers and magazines - the New York Times Magazine in particular - routinely publish photographs that depict scantily clad women, women whose heaving bosoms are fairly bursting out of their bras, women who sometimes appear sexually aroused. But those photos only appear in advertisements. Never mind Mapplethorpe; neither the New York Times nor any other mainstream newspaper would consider publishing these lingerie photographs in their news columns, not even to illustrate a story in which the woman's attire is absolutely critical to the story. The (immoral) moral: using sex to make money is okay; using sex to tell a story is not."

Magazines like Esquire avoid coverage of porn for fear offending advertisers such as car companies.

Books on porn by mainstream publishers are rare, unless the books are so academic that few will understand them. The best of a bad bunch in this category are Robert Stoller's Porn, and Coming Attractions.

Pat Riley used Dr. Linda Williams' Hardcore "to combat insomnia. Impenetrable prose, references galore to her mates in academia - there's really only one sociologist here doing any work out there, the rest are just quoting each other - and lack of a clear direction put this in the top ten of the most boring books to have even the slightest connection to the porno industry.

"With Hardcore, you know you're in trouble by page three when she starts quoting Foucault with the phrase "Foucault reminds us..." as though he were the great god from whose lips all wisdom falls. You don't know who Foucault was? He was the father of deconstructionism, a method of generating psychobabble that is much revered by academia. But he's not quite so revered by the homosexual intelligentsia (although they don't talk about it) because, when he found out he was HIV positive, he hopped on a plane to San Francisco (he was French) to make a tour of the bathhouses and thereby infect others. Totally unrepentant, he justifies it in his diaries with more of the usual psychobabble."

In 1974, Pat Riley saw his first X-rated movie - The Devil In Miss Jones. "I thought the acting was poor, the plot stupid and the production inept but it did deliver on the "things I had never seen before". Was it erotic? Not at all. The women were ugly and the movie provided little build up. R rated movies were much better."

During the rest of the '70s, Riley saw about a dozen pornos. The only one he remembers is Fiona On Fire starring the "marginal" Amber Hunt.

"I got my first VCR in 1981 - you remember those days: video stores charged membership fees, lines of 30 people to check in and out movies, near-fights over the latest release, the most commonly available series was Victory At Sea. After exhausting the mainstream potential, rather than go home empty handed, I rented the occasional porno. No real difference. The women were still ugly, the plots sucked (little did I know how much worse they could get) and the production values stank..."

Upon subscribing to porno review magazines including AVN, Pat noticed a problem. "For a scene that I would have described as "A butt ugly cleaning lady with tree-trunk thighs gets f---ed by a guy who looks like he's in the terminal stages of AIDS" the magazines would tell me "The delicious Ethel Pop-Your-Rocks is irresistible in her scene with handsome Fred Stud." Huh? Did they see the same movie? They also neglected to tell me that Ethel Pop-Your-Rocks also goes under the name of Big Boobs Freida so when I rented my next AAAAA volcanic heat movie, I had to endure another couple of scenes of Ethel/Big...

"I fired off a stream of letters to various publications bitching and moaning including one to Holliday which he answered by phone and then in his column. Naturally there was no change in any magazine's PC policy.

"Things looked up when Bob Rimmer, to whom I had written a long missive primarily about his inability to ID actresses, offered me a partnership.

"I despise most of what the industry produces. My function is to point out the few pornos that might be worth watching and tell you about how bad the rest are."

After Rimmer wrote the first two editions of the X-Rated Videotape Guide, Riley co-authored with Bob volumes three and four, before taking over the franchise. The Prometheus series is the most indepth guide to X-rated videos. The most important book of porn reviews, however, is Jim Holliday's 1986 Only The Best.

The best selling book on porn is Linda Lovelace's mendacious Ordeal. She also "wrote" (with Mike McGrady) a 1986 followup, Out of Bondage.

During the early and mid '70s, Linda wrote two pro-porn books about herself. Various pornographers, from Harry Reems to Marilyn Chambers to have written forgettable biographies.

The year 1997 saw a rash of books on porn. The best written work was Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano, by Charles Isherwood.

Books on the hetero industry included Hollywood Blue by Harris Gaffin (www.batsford.com) and The X Factory by Anthony Petkovich who writes for HEVG under the name Captain Sid.

Porn In America By James Lambert. (POB 80341, SD, CA 92138-0341)

Published 1997 By Huntington House Publishers, POB 53788, Lafayette, Louisiana, 70505

James Lambert's book is subtitled, "The Drift Towards Decadence in Our Society and the Way Out." The way out, of course, is through faith in Jesus Christ. This is another anti-porn Christian book.

Easy to read, and generally accurate with its facts, the paperback Porn In America runs 150 small pages.

"James does an excellent job exposing the poison that is the pornography industry," says decency crusader Dr. Donald E. Wildmon.

"We understand that constant smoking of cigarettes causes cancer," writes Lambert in his preface, "alcoholism causes liver damage, heavy drug use causes addiction, and a high divorce rate creates a weakened family structure. In the same way, constant use of pornography develops sexual addiction, obsession, and distortion of truth."

Among the mistakes in Porn In America, are:

· "Porn videos showing full sex scenes in the early 1980s are tame when compared to today's hard-core pornography." Not true. The nastiest porn came in the 1970s, when the industry gave explicit depictions of rape and other forms of violence, as well as bestiality and child porn.

· "While most experts classify Playboy's brand of pin-up publications as "soft porn," the magazine over the years has progressively become more sexually explicit." Not true. While Playboy briefly followed Penthouse in showing pink, Hefner's magazine stopped publishing spread female genitalia in 1977.

· "Penthouse ran a comic strip entitled "Chester the Molester." Not true. That was Hustler.

Pat Riley responds on RAME 2-98: "The bitter misogyny of the Black's and Max's of today has no real counterpart in eighties or seventies porn nor did the seventies and eighties porn present such a clinical over-emphasis on emotionally uninvolving deviant sex.

"Bestiality and child (defined as pre- or peri-pubertal) porn in the seventies were tiny side issues, appealing to much the same insignificant segment they do today. The vast majority of seventies porn did not have rape or other violent sex scenes and certainly the early eighties (post MIPORN) was a time practically devoid of non-consensual sex.

"The porn movies of the seventies--even the grinders--had vastly superior plots to today's movies and to be interesting a plot has to deal with the unusual. Most Hollywood movies today--even PG movies--in the adventure section and many in the drama section have some form of violence, much of it homicide, even if it's simply implied and not explicitly shown. Of course a plotted seventies movie will follow the same rule. Is the fight between John Holmes and Bob Chinn in Tropic Of Passion (1971) a violent scene? Sure, but no more so than any mainstream movie of today or of that era and it was not a "violent sex scene".

"What has happened is a "defining down" of various activities so that(in this case) the religious right can make a point by manipulating the meaning of the words. For example:

-- Child porn is defined down to mean persons under 18 or appearing to be under that age.

-- Rape is defined down to include overcoming the natural resistance of females to sex as in the John Wayne (obviously a rapist!)/heroine scenes where she flails her arms against him as he kisses her in the clinch and then melts into his arms.

-- Porn movies are classified as violent if they include plot elements common to mainstream movies (example above) without making the distinction of violent sex vs. normal plotted violence.

"None of this should be construed as saying there were no rape movies in the seventies, nor that many seventies movies didn't include violence, nor that high school type sex scenes weren't a common occurrence.

"Far from complaining about today's porn, the religious right should be very happy with the improvement (from their perspective). The themes that encourage sex to be viewed as a recreational activity and which presented a credible alternative to the right's family, marriage, and all those conservative issues have been replaced with mind-numbing anals, facials, and sex-for-pay scenes complete with misogynistic attitudes that attract only the immature and the basest elements of society. No real risk to society's fabric there."

Here are excerpts from an interesting review of what may be an interesting book. From Newsday, 05-25-1998.

When Pornography Defeats Love and Life

By James Marcus.

HOPE, by Glen Duncan. Riverhead, 322 pp., $23.95.

GABRIEL JONES, the protagonist of Glen Duncan's first novel, comes out of an honorable tradition of sexually addicted narrators. Humbert Humbert liked little girls, for example, and Alexander Portnoy couldn't stay away from his privates. Gabriel, a 20-something dropout living in London, is inexorably drawn to hard-core porn. The "thrilling starkness of revealed buttocks and nipples and navels and flanks" is no mere hobby for him, but a source of higher knowledge - a kind of triple-X epistemology.

Like most obsessives, Gabriel has thought long and (ahem) hard about his subject. And on one level, "Hope" is a philosophical investigation of exactly what dirty pictures do. According to Gabriel, the naked ladies supply only half the thrill. The rest comes from the transparent falsity of the whole enterprise, what he calls "the cornerstone of the pornographic structure, the first Article of Faith - that the consumer must not believe that the product is real. It's supremely cynical; pornography is now such a sophisticated mechanism that it can (a) repeat the old message that all women are filthy whores, and (b) explicitly tell you that the women used in bringing you this message are NOT filthy whores, thank you very much, they're professional models."

His theoretical smarts would seem to distinguish Gabriel from your average trench-coated consumer of hard-core delights. Alas, they didn't prevent pornography from wrecking the great romance of his youth. As we learn, Gabriel spent his university years as one-half of the United Kingdom's happiest couple. His infatuation with Alicia Swan actually eclipsed his ancient appetites, allowing him to experience "the Nirvana of selflessness." Love makes a new man of Gabriel, or at least a more wholesome one. During sex with Alicia, however, Gabriel recognizes a familiar, filthy set of subtitles materializing in his brain.

Books that I used to write my book include:

Arcand, Bernard. The Jaguar and the Anteater. New York: Verso. 1993.

Bret, Steve and Elizabeth. Couples Guide to the Best Erotic Videos. New York. St. Martins. 1997

Capeci, Jerry. Goombata. New York. 1994.

Capeci, Jerry and Mustain, Gene. Murder Machine. New York: Onyx. 1993.

Cohen, Angela and Fox, Sarah Gardner. Wise Woman's Guide to Erotic Videos. New York. Broadway Books. 1997.

Dannen, Fredric. Hit Men. New York: Random House. 1990.

Davis, John. Mafia Dynasty. New York: Harper Collins. 1993.

Denfield, Rene. The New Victorians. New York: Warner Books, 1995.

Di Lauro, Al, and Rabkin, Gerald. Dirty Movies. New York: Chelsea House, 1976.

Director. Adult Movie FAQ. http://www.rame.net

Kendrick, Walter. The Secret Museum. New York: Viking Penguin Inc. 1987.

Faris, Daniel, and Muller, Eddie. Grindhouse. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1996.

Flynt, Larry. An Unseemly Man. Los Angeles: Dove Books. 1996.

Gaffin, Harris. Hollywood Blue. London. B. T. Batsford Ltd. 1997.

Grey, Rudolph. Nightmare of Ecstasy. Los Angeles. 1992.

Heidenry, John. What Wild Ecstasy. New York. Simon & Schuster. 1997.

Hubner, John. Bottom Feeders. New York. Doubleday. 1992.

Isherwood, Charles. Wonder Bread and Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano. Los Angeles. Alyson Publications Inc. 1996.

Knight, Arthur, and Alpert, Hollis. "The History of Sex in Cinema." Playboy, 19 articles published from April 1965 to January 1969.

Kurins, Andris and O'Biren, Joseph F. Boss of Bosses. New York: Island Books. 1991

Lenne, Gerard. Sex On The Screen. St. Martins Press. New York. 1978.

Linedecker, Clifford L. Children in Chains. New York. Everest House. 1981.

Lovelace, Linda. Ordeal. Berkley Books, New York. 1980.

---------------------- Out of Bondage. Berkley Books, New York. 1986.

The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. New York: Bantam Books, 1970.

McCumber, David. X-Rated. New York. Simon & Schuster. 1992.

McDonagh, Maitland. The 50 Most Erotic Films of All Time. New York. Citadel Press. 1996.

Petkovich, Anthony. The X Factory. Manchester. Headpress. 1997.

Potter, Gary. The Porn Merchants. Kendall Hunt. Dubuque, Iowa. 1986.

Rotsler, William. Contemporary Erotic Cinema. New York: Penthouse/Ballantine. 1973

Joseph Slade, Movie Artifacts, Nelson Hall Publishers. Chicago. 1982.

Stanmeyer, William A. The Seduction of Society. Ann Arbor: Servant Publications. 1984

Stoller, Robert. Porn. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1991.

-------------------- Sexual Excitement: The Dynamics of Erotic Life. New York: Pantheon Books. 1979

-------------------- Coming Attractions. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1993.

Turan, Kenneth, and Zito, Stephen F. Sinema. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974.

Tynan, Kenneth. The Sound of Two Hands Clapping. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, Publishers. 1975.

U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, Final Report, Washington, 1986.

Williams, Linda. Hard Core. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1989.

Ziplow, Stephen. The Film Maker's Guide to Pornography. New York: Drake. 1977.

Zuckerman, Michael J. Vengeance is Mine. New York: MacMillian Publishing. 1987

05/07/98

The Times of London

PORNOCOPIA. By Laurence O'Toole. Serpent's Tail, Pounds 13.99. ISBN 1 85 242395 1

IN HARM'S WAY. The Pornography Civil. Rights Hearings. By Catherine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Harvard, $45. ISBN 0 674 445783

There is little to be said for Laurence O'Toole's Por nocopia . Unfortunately something has to be said, not least because it is published by an innovative publisher with an excellent reputation - which is cheapened by the appropriately named O'Toole's book. Salacious puns aside, the author has indeed made himself a tool, by his slavering, schoolboyish sycophancy towards those who make billions of dollars out of the degradation of women and the debasement of sexual love. One could dismiss Pornocopia as a tawdry exercise in wilful leftist ignorance, were it not for the wholly shameful lie at its centre.

O'Toole's intention is to sell porn as a fun thing, and a genre in its own right. He gives a potted history of "the porn wars", describes some movies in detail, and shares some of his research experiences - which include being feted by what he calls "porners", seeing the "stupendous siliconised assets" of porn star Sindee, but making his excuses and leaving when invited to witness a lengthy sex session on set. In language which is a bizarre mix of Sun headline ("bikini-clad lovelies", "hot and horny sex diva") and polyspeak (" porn auteur "), he celebrates "the industry" as "capitalism in the raw", while simultaneously seeing its products as evidence of "democracy" and "no longer the exclusive pleasure of the privilged". According to this theory high art has bourgeois status, while porn is a great leveller, therefore " porn is political". Oh, please.

O'Toole is commendably frank about his intentions: "...the risk of becoming a social outcast, simply for recognising the potential of porn for arousal, was weighed up against...the need to get it across to the uninitiated that they, too, could actually get to like porn , and be aroused by it." In other words he is peddling the stuff too. No wonder the merchants love him. No wonder he devotes 350 pages to selling the notion that all the porn in the garden smells sweet: "Despite various rumours to the contrary...men and women are working in porn voluntarily, happily and successfully".

British author Laurence O'Toole, his real name, writes to Luke 6/99: If you recall, you emailed me early in 1998 after you saw my piece in The Face (UK) about 70s porn. You asked details about the publication of my book, said you'd like to list it on your web site. You were all enthusiasm and charm, in other words. You never did list my book, as far as I am aware, but I noticed that you occasionally made a few swipes at it. (I am a fairly regular visitor to the site - we love gossip in the UK).

And then the other day, on a visit to your site, like any sad author, I checked the 'books' page, and saw you had appended a scathing review that Pornocopia received in The Times (UK) about a year ago. That's the only mention my book gets. I think I smell a rat, but maybe I'm being unfair. It's possible you may not be aware that my book received numerous glowing reviews - especially here in the UK - and the one from the Times was, to my knowledge, the only bad one.

In the interests of fair play, even handedness, ethics, good practice, all of those attributes I know you value so highly - things you are quick to berate porners for falling short on - I thought I'd offer you a quote file for Pornocopia. Also to mention that a new, updated, extended edition is due out in the Autumn of this year, in the UK, and early spring 2000 in the US. You might like to read these quotes. Who knows, you might even want to use a few next to the anti porn tirade from The Times, to even the score a little. Of course, it's your web site, and you may do with it as you please. So, I'm not holding my breath.

I know this is a small matter in the great porn cosmos, but it sort of matters to me. So, what do you say, Luke, as a man who proclaims at length about his ongoing pursuit of moral excellence, here's your chance to be a mensch. Are you going to take it?

Pat Riley adds on RAME this list of books on porn:

The Jack Wrangler Story or What's a Nice Boy Like You Doing 1984 St. Martins Press.

Penetrating Insights 1994 Peter North: available from 1-800-874-1993

10½ by Marc Stevens (no publisher or date).

Making It Big by Marc Stevens (no publisher or date).

The Autobiography of Francesca Kitten Natividad Van Nuys Nuance 1984

Traci Lords--A Perspective by Paul Hugli

2000 Men by Liz Renay

The Cinema Of Transgression by Jerri Rossi and Duane Davis--Primal Publishing

Suze by Suze Randall 1977 Circus Books

Film As A Subversive Art by Amos Vogel

Porno Star by Tina Russell, Lancer Books, paperback early seventies, white cover with her photo.

The Lina Romay File by Tim Greaves and Kevin Collins (British)

Candy Goes To Hollywood autobiography of Gail Palmer.

Red Light: Inside The Sex Industry, 1997, Powerhouse Books Photographs by Sylvia Plachy; text by James Ridgeway.

Tales Of Times Square, 1986, Delacorte Press by Josh Allan Friedman. May have been re-issued in 1995 with another publisher.

August 4, 1999

Babylon Blue: An Illustrated History of Adult Cinema From 1960 - 1998 by David Flint attracted this positive review in the mens magazine Loaded: "Here, in intricate and quite literally anal detail, is the history and background to all the major hardcore films of the last four decades. Every key porn star and director gets a lengthy entry, so to speak: John Holmes, Mary Millington, Traci Lords, Jenna Jameson, Ben Dover, the woman from the Oxo ads and Leslie Philips. Flint avoids mere titillation in favour of hard details. A moist 9/10."

From the book description: "Babylon Blue examines the '60s roots of global modern-day erotic cinema - from naturist films to the "nudie-cuties" of Russ Meyer - through to various incarnations of Europorn and hardcore, charting the rise, decline and resurrection of the genre since the early '70s. Finally, author David Flint, expertly chronicles the so-called New Porn Generation - the New Wave of adult movies, as epitomised by the stylist and sophisticated films of Andrew Blake, Michael Ninn and the Dark Brothers.

"Visually loaded with profuse and daring illustrations, Babylon Blue is the last word on sex cinema, featuring profiles of key directors, producers and performers, and detailed critiques of the finest adult movies of all time. The book contains interviews with sexploitation producer David Friedman, screenwriter Antonio Passolini, director Lindsay Honey and porn acress/producer Jane Hamilton, and includes a stunning eight-page full-colour section."

From a customer review on www.amazon.com: "The cover of this book is perhaps the best part. The text itself makes a very interesting reading for all those interested in the subject; and it's the only book I could find that has substantive materials. It covers American as well as foreign adult film industries. But I don't like the writing that much. I can't say exactly why. I wish the writing had been clearer and the presentation a little more compact."