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Pornographers

Porn 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.

In his book, Erotic Communcations, Studies in Sex, Sin and Censorship, George N. Gordon reports on his experience addressing the Adult Film Association of America (AFAA) at its annual meeting in 1978. "I found them a surprisingly sincere and intelligent audience and extremely interested in the topic of my talk, which concerned the attitudes of young people today - and tomorrow - toward X-rated films, and the artistic, and even educational potential of such cinema. In many ways, they resemble Hollywood's original filmmakers in the early days of the movies. They are slightly guilty because of their extraordinary financial success, uncertain about the future of their medium, and deeply concerned about public attitudes toward an aspect of culture that much of the public does not understand, but in unspecified ways and without much proof, consider a dangerous form of corruption. Like the other early filmmakers, they, too, consider themselves to be outcasts. Therefore, their drive to band together in their own common interests, as well as their unusual warmth toward a college professor who they perceived as being on their side and who treated them exactly as what they were - his peers - and in terms of common interests, his superiors by far."

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 his sex drive. Few parents, including those in the industry, want their children to grow up to be porn stars.

Pornographers, like secular artists and intellectuals since the Enlightenment, act as critics of society. "Pornography heralds the increasing hostility of the artist towards society," writes the 1976 book Dirty Movies. "By the seventeenth century sexual license is linked with explicit attacks on religious and social conventions; in the eighteenth century erotic writing details sexual orgies in religious and psuedo-religious orders and attack the family through the incest theme. This rebellious trend is definitively expressed by the anarchism of De Sade. The marquis articulates what lies behind pornography's obsessional detail: the superiority of the senses to established moral codes, a Hobbesian naturalism which sees aggression beneath the veneer of social forms, and the assumption that society is based on hypocrisy, that those who do not ackowledge sexuality's claims are fools or liars.

"De Sade is the clearest, most powerful example of the pornographer as transgressor. The first great transvaluer of values, he took piety, conformity, even pleasure itself, and inverted them. With its passionate personal hatred of God and Virtue, his writing offered the first detailed blueprint of the unspeakable depths beneath the façade of…[Western Civilization]."

Hated by such 'artists,' ordinary Americans respond in part through imitation. "Years ago Lionel Trilling wondered what would happen if the adversary culture of artistic elites pervaded all of society. Well, it would look pretty much like what we have now: a culture that celebrates impulse over restraint, notoriety over achievement, rule breaking over rule keeping and incendiary expression over minimal courtesy." (John Leo, US NEWS 4/22/96)

Other Americans, particularly the religious and those who share many of their values, react to elites' hatred of Western Civilization with hatred of these elites' nihilistic values. Thus, to porn in particular, Americans react ambivalently. Many use it, many hate it, and many use it and hate it.

"A society increasingly drawn to antisocial ideas would inevitably be torn by contradictions: People outraged over anti-woman attitudes who can't bring themselves to criticize women-hating rappers, senators who go on the most explosively uncivil radio shows to deplore the loss of civility in politics, the rise of authority figures who don't believe in any kind of authority at all, a culture that mourns social breakdown but keeps celebrating the people who produce it." (John Leo)