Family
The metaphor of porn as a family, at times, becomes literal. The American twins Brooke and Taylor Young did each other in the 1976 production Sweet Cakes, Double Your Pleasure (1978) and Teenage Twins which was released in the '80s as Twin Tarts. In Double Your Pleasure, the Youngs do a four way with a pair of male identical twins called the Hartman brothers. In the middle of 1997, Charlie and her mother did a video for Totally Tasteless Video with Wil Ravage and his brother Guy Di Silva.Pat Riley: "The amateur video A&B #056 has, according to the box, a brother screwing his sister. I saw this in about 1990 and they're rather ugly people--the girl had a big zit on her butt--and there's no way of proving they're related. On the other hand, A&B have yanked the tape and they've also yanked the Linda Lovelace haggard hound loop they used to sell."
Germany's Magma produced Dirty Twins which features a pair of identical French twins fisting each other.
American sisters in porn include Tara and Tami Monroe as well as the "anal twins," Chrissy Ann and Christy Ann.
As far as gay porn, Tim Evanson says: "Comrades in Arms has the Otov twins--they only jerk off together, but they do also hug and touch. Falcon's Christy Twins are identical twin brothers who would f--- one another on screen. One is married now, the other disappeared. They would not touch anyone else BUT themselves. They did several loops for Falcon. The Rocklands (Hal and Vince) in SADDLE TRAMPS 1, but they didn't have sex. " There were also Kip and Scott Noll and Luis and Carlos Mendez. "Brothers having sex used to be SUCH the trend in the 1980s. It was almost a competition between studios to find real-life brothers and cousins to f--- and suck on screen."(RAME)
Brother-sister Buck Adams and Amber Lynn were offered large amounts of money to perform with each other but refused. Sabrina Dawn and her mother Delilah appeared in a movie together Things My Mother Taught Me but did not have sex with each other. They came close in another video, Wild Cherries, performing a three way with another girl. "They were inches away from 'keeping it in the family' as they each worked over the third girl with their hands and tongues simultaneously," reports Sheldon Ranz on RAME. "Incidentally, Delilah was not given screen credit for her participation in this video. One can speculate as to whether that was intentional, so that no one would discover how close she got to Taboo City."
In their more sane moments, most pornographers seek to shield their families from their work. Publisher Al Goldstein refuses to let his son enter the business. Jordan graduated with honors from Harvard Law School in 1996. Al structured his will so the lad cannot inherit his porno patrimony. Not that he appears to want to. Jordan seems on a trajectory that will land him at the pinnacle of the Establishment.
"This is a road I wouldn't want him to travel," Goldstein says of porn. "I had a bodyguard for 14 years. There have been several death threats. It's not a life I would wish on him."
Pornographers are family, in the same sense that heroin addicts, Orthodox Jews, and stamp collectors comprise a metaphorical 'family'. They are united by common interests and values.
"If you want to go to hell, there are people here who will hold your hand all the way," says porn actress Nina Hartley who appears in the 1997 mainstream movie Boogie Nights which dramatizes much of the following discussion.
Frequently hated by the outside world, usually running away from family and an unhappy childhood, pornographers tend to hang together.
Pornographers evolved their own customs and values, rituals and bonding procedures, which distinguish them from those outside their group. Insiders may criticize elements of the porn industry. But like a Christian who must not question the divinity of Jesus if he wants to remain happily within that fold, those in porn should not question publicly the morality of what they do if they want to get along with their peers. Though pornographers gossip about each other frequently, they tend to present a united front when facing opposition from the outside. Thus, most in porn are loath to criticize the mayhem wreaked by heavy hitters like Max Hardcore, T.T. Boy and Rocco Siffredi, even when these male performers send women to hospital after rough sex.
If you are beautiful or good at what you do, you have more leeway with group conventions. Gregory Dark has made many of the best pornos of the past 15 years and can thus get away with scorning the industry. He points out that pimps and hookers and heroin addicts also call themselves 'family.' "These aren't nurturing, supporting families. They isolate people from society and excuse destructive behavior. I don't see porn as a big happy family where everyone hugs each other. I'm a cold imagist who uses pornography to explore types of emotional imagery.
"I generally try to make the girls feel bad about what they are doing because then they give interesting, real emotional responses and you can watch them squirm if they try to cover it up. The porno girl will often let you see part of the manufactured personality that they believe the public wants to see… There's no depth to most of these people. They're not able to become intimate and close. There's a fear of being real. They were that way when they went into it. Pornography is the great flypaper for these people. Their intellectual depth is "Do you find me desirable?" That's the bottom line. They need to express their desirability, their feeling of well-being through the act of sex." (Hollywood Blue by Harris Gaffin available at http://www.batsford.com)
Like most persecuted groups, pornographers started off as tightly knit. Then they loosened up as the industry became more accepted. In the 1990s, pornographers feel more free to criticize their own than ever before, and many members of the industry support keeping porn away from the public square.
Straight porn revolves around women while the male performers are props or "meat puppets." Therefore, female careers are generally shorter. Men like Ron Jeremy, Tom Byron, T.T. Boy, Randy West, Eric Edwards and Joey Silvera appear in over 1000 productions. The leading female, Sharon Kane, features in about 400 productions.
Upon his return from a three month vacation, former Hustler Erotic Video Guide Editor Scott Mallory discovered a completely new line-up of females. "This non-stop turn-over of female skin is obviously delightful in the sense that variety is, indeed, the spice of life," writes Anthony Petkovich in his 1997 book The X Factory, "but such constantly shifting sands make it nearly impossible to capture the contemporary state of the profession in literary terms. Magazines are notorious for being months behind the scene - by the time a video review hits the liquor stores, a sequel to that same video is already being distributed."
Male performers are the most disposable persons in porn production and are the least likely to bond. The male performer has the toughest job, for there can be no intercourse without an erection, and the penis is the one muscle in the body that can't be voluntarily flexed. Porn, goes the cliché, is hardest on men physically and women psychologically.
Performing sex comes more naturally to men and they are willing to work for less. As Jim Holliday puts it, men are in porn for the sex and the women are in it for the money.
Women tend to have more negative feelings about porn than do men, just as polls show that women more strongly oppose abortion than do men. Both porn and abortion run counter to the female desire to bond.
Pornographers are always secular and tend to be liberal, single, male, sexually jaded, frank, rebellious, open to experimenting with drugs, alcohol and the occult, and consumers of pop culture. Performers typically come from lower-class backgrounds and are generally less educated than their bosses. Women who perform sex in front of the camera do it primarily for money and are far more likely to be married or in a long-term relationship than their male counterparts. The leading male performers through the 1980s came from secular Jewish upbringings and the females from Roman Catholic day schools.
Adult entertainment conventions such as the one at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas every January resemble other business conventions. Many of the participants are monogamous, with the partial exception of the performers who are frequently monogamous outside their work. Like liberals generally, they publicly promote permissiveness while usually leading relatively conservative lives centered around work and relationships. The industry has its share of drugs and promiscuity but no more so than the mainstream entertainment world.
While many porn offices appear sleazy, an increasing number of such sites are clean well-lighted places as nice as any other business environment. Porn theaters, however, usually reside in the worst parts of town and employ the great unwashed. Adult bookstores vary in location and atmosphere.
Desks and walls of offices in porn frequently feature pictures of friends and family, though this is less common than in most workplaces. On one office wall at a porn production company hang several pictures of the Israeli boss with his son at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Each of them wear yarmulkas (religious head coverings). Next to the pictures are piles of explicit boxcovers featuring innumerable combinations of penises, anuses, breasts and vaginas. Trying to reconcile these competing demands of family, community and profession is a constant source of tension for pornographers which is why they frequently avoid using their real names. Many persons in porn keep their work secret from all but their closest friends because of the contempt that many feel for porn.
Sexual harassment appears no more frequent in Porn Valley than elsewhere. Many actresses, such as Marilyn Chambers, say they're received fewer "sleep with me if you want the part" demands in porn than in the straight world. "In porn you don't f--- to get the job," goes a famous cliché. "You f--- after you get the job." Still, sex is one of the perks of power in porn as elsewhere. Such exploits as a director receiving a blow job in the corner of a set, or a producer spending a weekend away with a porn star, are routine. Allowing members of the old boys club to leave deposits in your mouth is a good way to nail down a boxcover. Sexual privileges with porn stars are sometimes unwritten parts of business deals, just as I remember at UCLA, several faculty recruiting athletes to satisfy the voracious sexual appetites of Hollywood big shots.
The first generation of pornographers emerged out of the sexual revolution. Though all of them wanted to make money, many of them also wanted to make a statement, to extend a middle finger to the morals of the bourgeoisie. Today most persons enter porn for fun, money and fame.
With notoriety, however, comes outlaw status. No matter how much porn has mainstreamed in the last few years, its producers and workers are still regarded with contempt by most Americans, even by many who use its product. Men may desire a sexy woman on a boxcover but at the same time despise her for manipulating their sex drive. Few parents, including those in the industry, want their children to grow up to be porn stars.
Porn mavens Tim Evanson and Brad Williams had this interchange with pornographer Nick Long on the rec.arts.movies.erotica (RAME) newsgroup in the fall of 1996.
Tim Evanson <tevanson@netcom.com> writes: "My motive is simple, I want the industry to focus on quality as a way to provide itself with more profit and the consumer with better product. Pure and simple. Along the way, RAME readers have had to deal with snide insinuations from you about corruption in the industry, assertions of which I find hard to believe without more factual details to back them up."
Nick Long: "Pure and simple - the consumer deserves better product. Pure and simpler - I have seen little indication that the industry, in general, gives a shit.
"Last, my 'snide insinuations' as you put it, were in response to Brad's post as somewhat a verification of what he observed, having to deal with certain companies. If you don't choose to believe it, your choice.
"You want factual details? Check the records of the Justice Department. It's all there, along with allegations, prosecutions and convictions. I don't have to give other details, it's all in the records. But then, what do I know?
"Since you choose to harbor doubts, by all means, continue to do so. Without factual documentation, my input is certainly questionable. Therefore, you must be right. All you have to do is convince these reasonable businessmen that you have the answers to their pot-o-gold."
Brad Williams: "I believe Nick's assertions, and stated the same in a post a couple of weeks' ago about the criminal element involved in porn distribution. He can't start casting aspersions or drill the assholes because
he has to rely upon these same people if he's going to be able to survive in porn, even on a small scale. I'm not talking about their monetary support, I'm talking about them not pulling strings and getting him reamed. Sure I think he could get blacklisted and not be able to sell even a video of a Traci Lords' comeback if he said something here, porn has always had a circle-the-wagons-mentality and
exists in its own small closed society. Obviously, independent thought or expressions certainly isn't welcomed."
Nick Long: "Well put, and I'll certainly leave it at that."
Bill Margold disagrees with much of the above. "How can you be thrown out of a litter box?" he asks, comparing the porn industry to a litter box. Margold says the industry is too diverse to effectively blackball anybody. "I criticize the industry all the time and I'm more successful than ever."
I reply that Bill's criticisms of the industry have helped create his many enemies. This number would be overwhelming if it were not that Bill's criticisms of porn come from a pornographer. Bill devotes his life to promoting pornography (and himself). He also has enough talent and industry knowledge to have greater independence than most pornographers. Also, Bill at the end of the 20th Century, has virtually no power and little influence on porn.
Because of the great supply of persons eager to perform, producers rarely need to hire those they dislike. So speaking out publicly increases one's enemies in the litter box and can eventually be cause for getting thrown out. But as porn mainstreams, internal criticism should become more tolerated.
The major reason for the lack of reflection from within the industry about its product and its discontents, is that it's against the pornographer's self-interest to grant any credibility to opposition to porn. Few persons with soul and options stay in jobs that they despise. Therefore, persons in all sorts of well-paying jobs learn to believe in what they do, for not only do our beliefs shape our type of work, but our work shapes our beliefs.
Lawyers, for example, appear to have inner peace doing things such as pleading innocent for a client who murdered, that would keep many, if not most persons, awake at night.
Nina Hartley is a deep thinker on sexual issues but she seeks to avoid remarks damaging to the industry. She won't debate opponents of porn for fear of losing her temper.