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Seventeen

The age of consent in Holland is 16. Thus while foreigner producers promise teenie girls but deliver much older women, VAH delivers the real thing. While most American, German and French pornographers dress up their women in two hair-braids, white socks and a pout, often combined with a childish voice and a red lollipop, girls of VAH's Seventeen label retire before 20. (Journalist Clifford Cremer)

VAH director Arthur Martin, 48, told Cremer: "The idea behind 17 is that we want to show women who are at their most beautiful. And when is a woman at her prettiest? When she's young of course, when she's a girl."

Martin began his porn career in the early '70s, operating a chain of sex shops in Amsterdam. He began working for VAH in 1979. Martin told Cremer in 1997:

"Eighteen years ago we started with Seventeen, a sex magazine which featured only teenagers. That way we not only catered to the traditional porn consumer, but to teenagers as well. Because young people buy sex magazines too, if only out of curiosity. Our magazines for example circulate a lot around high schools. The perception that porn only caters to dirty old men is not true.

"Video Art doesn't have foreign competitors. All foreign producers of teenersex come to us, for we're the largest name in that field. We buy everything from them and they know it."

As far as the models, "Reality, that's important. No plastic. We don't work with expensive glamour models. We don't even have our own make-up girls; the models can do that for themselves. We produce playful rather than professional sex films.

"To recruit models is easy. Hundreds of girls want to join. Mainly out of curiosity. The girls who do this work were raised very liberal-minded, and most of the time even their parents know what they do in our studios. You can't say they're from a certain background, because we get girls from all walks of life. High school or university, the runaway kid of the daughter of the dentist…

"Most of the girls like the idea that later on thousands of boys and men will see their naked bodies. It's a kick for them to undress in our studios. Sometimes they do it out of a spontaneous impulse, just to undergo the experience.

"Biologically, women are exhibitionistic and men are voyeuristic. Look at girls and young women: they like to dress provocatively, to show their bodies.

"Maybe once in ten years a girl regrets what she did. If possible, we try not to use her pictures or films again. But in the last 25 years, that has only happened three times.

"It's unimagineable how sexual freedom changed among young people. In my time you were fast when you bedded a girl when you were 18. Now it's completely normal for a 14-year old to have sex. Last month, I was on a house party with my friend, who is over 30. I've never been to such a party. Some of the girls walked around only wearing slips. Once, a 16-year old girl gave us a big smile while she stuck three fingers at us. I didn't know what she meant. My friend explained: she wanted to have threeway sex with us.

"But most of the girls in our films only have sex with their partners. They don't want anyone else, partly out of fear of AIDS."

Clifford Cremer says that the Seventeen films distinguish themselves by their realism. There's virtually no acting and no story line. Harder material is available with such titles as Teenage Perversions and Extreme. VAH's newest series, Shocking Teens, was exclusively shot in the former Eastern block, in countries like Yugoslavia, Hungary and Poland. Slavic girls will shed all taboos for hard cash, says Cremer.