Home

Back to Essays


Technology

Video cassette recorders (VCRs) began selling to consumers in 1975. Pornography was the first industry to widely distribute its product on the new medium, even though at the time only one home in a thousand had a VCR.

Through 1983, X-rated videos accounted for about three-quarters of all rentals and sales of videotapes. That number is now about 25%. In sexually liberal places such as California and New York, sex videos account for almost half of the revenues in typical video stores.

About one-third of pay-per-view cable TV revenue ($600 million in 1995) goes to the four major adult channels.

Phone sex brings in about $2 billion a year. It began in 1973, when New York's Prism Productions allowed customers to orders phone calls by mail. A woman or man than would phone the customer and talk until the amount of time paid for ran out. Phone sex as big business took off in 1983 when the FCC ruled that the Bell network could no longer monopolize "enhanced services" that outside companies wanted to supply. With in a month pornographers set up lines featuring sexually explicit messages. Carl Rudman, the shy owner of High Society magazine, led the way using his "publisher" Gloria Leonard as a front.

"Live phone sex was not only the first big breakthrough in porn technology since the introduction of video," writes former Penthouse Forum editor John Heidenry in his 1997 book What Wild Ecstasy, "it was truly the first interactive form of the genre…a lucrative lifeline for softcore magazines like Penthouse, Hustler and their scores of imitators. As mainstream advertisers continued to drop out of soft-core publications under pressure from the Christian Right and radical feminists, their place was taken by ever steamier advertisements offering readers the opportunity to indulge in virtually any scenario fantasy could contrive."

Examples such as VCRs yesterday and CD ROMS today demonstrate that porn leads the way in the popular application of new communication technology.

Going back thirty thousand years, we find among the first drawings explicit images of vulvas and breasts. Discussions of sex appear in the earliest writings. The Bible, for instance, features the erotic Song of Songs.

Early painting and photography focused on the naked human body. Pagan religions and Greek myths obsessed over the sex lives of the gods. The pagan sex ethic tended to be natural and promiscuous - though all cultures place boundaries on sexual expression for the sake of their own survival. Incest is virtually a universal taboo.

Judaism, followed Christianity and Islam, desexualized God, did away with cultic prostitutes and pushed men to confine their sexuality to their wives.

Pornographic writings and pictures bubbled up from below this restraint in the 17th century. Camille Paglia describes popular culture "as an eruption of the never-defeated paganism of the west."

Porn helped invent the novel and then to popularize it. Fanny Hill appeared eight years after the first English novel in 1640. Among the earliest moving pictures was an 1896 stag film. By the 1920s, America had a booming porno industry.

Pornographers seized quickly on cable TV's public access programming to produce raunchy shows such as Ugly George - who goes around New York with a camera asking women to undress - and Midnight Blue - by another New Yorker - Screw Editor Al Goldstein.

After the break-up of Bell's monopoly on long-distance calling, purveyors of phone sex led the way in the technology and marketing of pay-per-call services that usually begin with a 900 number.

The latest technical application of porn flows through the information highway known as the Internet.

In the early 1980s, the French had a prototype of the information highway. The government provided every French household with a terminal connected to a nationwide computer system.

"The French government hired academics to do all kinds of studies anticipating the wholesome things people would do with the terminals, like check classified ads or railroad schedules," writes Howard Rheingold in his book The Virtual Community. "To their utter amazement, what the French really wanted to do was talk dirty. When the network started up, the first summer they spent such an amazing amount of time typing X-rated messages to one another that they overloaded the system and brought the network down."

Why is pornography so closely linked to new communication

technologies? A simple answer is that sex interests us. But many topics interest us. There must be more to the desire for porn. And there is.

Men in particular are insatiable for variety of sexual partners, and for seeing endless numbers of beautiful women disrobe and fornicate. If men weren't insatiable, they'd need only one copy of Penthouse to get off. Instead, many men have boxes and garages full of porn. Males constantly desire new sexual vistas.

The desire for "pornography is always unsatisfied," says Walter Kendrick, author of the 1987 book The Secret Musuem: Pornography in Modern Culture. "It's always a substitute for the contact between two bodies, so there's a drive behind it that doesn't exist in other genres."

Another cause for this connection between porn and technology is the male affinity for gadgets and impersonal sex. Independent feminist Camille Paglia writes in her book Sexual Personae that art and technology flow from the male sex drive. "Phallic aggressiion and projection are intrinsic to Western conceptualization. Arrow, eye, gun, cinema: the blazing light beam of Apollonian transcendence. Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive mechanistic male drive in western culture."

Pat Riley writes: "Is the Unabomber right? Is technology killing us?

Would it be better to live in a dugout in some rural area rather than to try to keep pace on the treadmill of newer, better, faster, MORE? The cable industry tells us that 500 channels are around the corner; at least one of those programs should be worth watching. And more programs means more competition, so they'll be better. Right?

"Not if the porno industry is any guide. More means more clutter, more trash, cheaper movies, more bad acting, more pretend-plotted movies and above all more boredom."

Despite improvements in technology, not much has changed for the better since Woody Allen said two decades ago: "There are three things wrong with pornographic movies - they're immoral, they're degrading and the lighting is terrible."

The primary reason for the poor quality of adult fare compared to mainstream is low budgets which are caused by two factors - legal difficulties in selling porn interstate and the disappearance of adult theaters. At the height of the Golden Age, 1978, about 100 hardcore movies were made at a typical cost in today's dollars of about $400,000. Not one movie in 1996 was made at that budget, not one at half the budget. Instead of 100 sex flicks, however, 1996 produced 8000, many of them made for a few thousand dollars.

The biggest selling tape of the past decade - John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut - sold about 100,000 copies. Anything over 1000 units is a success for a bondage or fetish tape. A hardcore tape made for $25,000 needs to sell at least 5000 copies to break even.

Few producers make a vid and try to sell it. Rather, they first get a budget and check from a production or distribution company. Many companies both produce and distribute porn.

An X-rated video may leave at anywhere from $3-$20 each, and the distributor

and store add on five dollars each.

"One of the reasons that movies are so bad," says ex-performer Brandy Alexandre, "is that not one person sees the project through. Neither the writer or editor is at the shoot. And the director rarely participates in the editing." That's why few videos put a picture to a name at the beginning so the viewer can identify who's who.

Andy Roberts edited Brooklyn Night, Guess Again and The Ultimate Squirting Machine.

"I'm a rare breed who not only researches the stage names but tries to place both the name and the performer's image on the screen at the same time so that new actresses are identified."

Budget is also the reason for poor sound quality. "The only way to mike a set is with a boom or wireless body mikes. The latter present unique problems in porn. And, you just can't hand the lunch man a boom and expect he would know how to work it.

"A lot can be done in post-production if you take the time. But that again equates to budget."

Most porn videos shoot three to six hours of footage for one movie. Most of it is never used because of retakes, bloopers, screwups, waiting for wood, etc...

"Even when a softcore version is not planned," says Roberts, "some footage invariably ends up being softcore by the framing or camera angle - close-up face shots, wide shots from certain angles that block the view of the penetration, etc... If the budget is small, no extra footage is specifically shot as "softcore" and it's up to the editor to piece together whatever footage is non-explicit.

"In some cases, a separate scene is shot. This is the easier, quickest, most effective method yet most directors and producers will not do it because it's time consuming. John T. Bone does it because he can't tolerate the notion of softcore sex but must comply with the wishes of his client. He leaves the room after the hardcore scene is shot, allowing the cameraman to direct the softcore segment. All the performers put their clothes back on and start all over again, deliberately hiding their dicks.

"In most cases, during the hardcore shooting, the director will yell "Softcore" and the performer will try to close up any gaps between them that would allow penetration to be seen or the cameraman will shift to a slightly different angle to avoid seeing the penetration. This method has two major flaws. First, it stops the flow of the sex. The passion between the performers ceases as they attempt to comply with the directors order. Often this results in a loss of concentration for the male and having to stop tape as they wait for wood again. Second, some short glimpses of penetration are still shot as the cameraman and the direct cannot have their eyes on every part of the screen image. This makes for a nerve wracking edit session for the editor. These are the moments when it takes all my self control to not throw the tapes out the window and throttle the director."

Brandy Alexandre says "I'd be surprised if a quarter of porn performers gave a damn about what the end product looks like or who views it."

Technology makes it easy for fans to discuss the technical and other merits of porn through the medium of internet news groups such as rame - rec.arts.movies.erotica.. Most of the information in the above 10 paragraphs comes from RAME's FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions - compiled by 'the Director.'

Alt.sex.movies was the third most popular of the Sex newgroups on the Internet until advertisers began bombing the site in overwhelming numbers in 1995. The moderated newsgroup RAME, which began in April 1996, is now the place to go to discuss porn. Pat Riley, Rodney Moore, Brandy Alexandre and Mike South contribute and Peter van Aarle gives updates from Europe where they get to see hardcore American fare that escapes the natives.

"I watched Max 10: Dirty Deeds. Not only does Max Hardcore do his usual set of anal, face fucking and US-fisting (Four fingers up to the knuckles)...but in the Euro version there's real fisting of Cortknee. After Max comes on her face, the watersports begin. Cortknee told me at CES that she enjoys being pissed on.

"Or take Zane's 10th anniversary flick...Anal Sex. It's one 90-minute orgy but includes Tracy Love fisting Missy, Alex Sanders fisting Missy, Jay Ashley fisting Tracy Love and Kyle Stone fisting Dalny Marga."

The linear transfer of adult movies onto CD-ROM is dead says AVN Publisher Paul Fishbein in the 9/96 issue of his magazine. "Why anyone thought that people would want to watch whole adult movies on a little three-inch window on their computers was always beyond me. Why people would want to play an interactive video game with sex on their computer is another story. Truly interactive, new sex CD-ROMS sell well.

"Adult manufacturers flooded the CD-ROM market ... Endless titles, all linear transfers (many deceitfully marketed as interactive, when they weren't) hit the market in varying price categories and much of it was rejected by the consumer."

DCOLDMAN on rame writes: "CD-ROM has struck me as a bad deal since day one. Who wants to sit in front his computer and masturbate; you might get jism on the keys."

Arcus Media developed the world's first adult CD-ROM Virtual Valerie.

"For those who want to make sure there's a lot of computer in their computer-sex, Virtual Valerie 2 is the way to go. A thousandfold improvement over the original, it's one of the few adult CD-ROMs with a sense of humor." (AFW 97)

In a 1995 Los Angeles profile of the four young men who developed New Machine, which made The Interactive Adventures of Seymore Butts II, Robert Jones wrote: "If the New Age of telecommunications is a great beast slouching toward us all, then surely this is its underbelly. New Machine, operated by a group of 25-year olds, does not look anything like the smooth palaces of the Silicon Valley. This dark place, with its computers spewing smut, is hardly the environment where you would expect to find anyone making serious contributions to the electronic future.

"But New Machine, and companies like it, may be doing just that. In the end, it could be places like this - and not Time/Warner or Microsoft - that first explore some of the more interesting niches of the New Age, particularly those areas advancing the ephemeral lures of interactivity. They make their contribution precisely because they deal in sex, not in spite of it."

One tracking firm, PC Data of Reston, Va., estimates that 100 or so porn producers control about 20% of the consumer CD-ROM market, which would put their total sales in 1996 at half-a-billion dollars. As always with porn, its presence is barely acknowledged by the porn establishment.

"If you look at the history of pornography and new technologies, the track record has been pretty good," says author Walter Kendrick. "Usually everyone has come out ahead. The pornography people have gotten what they want, which is a more vivid way of portraying sex. And the technology has benefited from their experimentation. The need for innovation in pornography is so great that it usually gets to a new medium first and finds out what can be done and what can't."

None of the four pornographers in the lengthy LA Times profile allowed the newspaper to use their real name. They were all ashamed of working in pornography.

"Rolle often uses polite language to describe the action in New Machine's productions, referring to "adult entertainment" and "oral pleasure" as if language could neutralize the hard-core banging that takes place on screen."

Like his partners, he indulges in rationalizing. "These other CD-ROM companies can do cool things on the environment...stuff that gets them written up in magazines... But how many discs do they sell? We sell more copies in a month than some of these other places have sold in their history."

Like many pornographers, Rolle, not his real name, claims his interests were never in pornography.

"No, not interested in pornography. It is a phrase that has become a mantra at New Machine. To hear them talk, no one at the company is interested in pornography. They just happen to make it." (LA Times)

No technology effected the sexual revolution more than the pill and it's still the birth control method of choice for many, if not most, female performers. Vaginal sponges, condoms and diaphragms are also used.

RAME's Nick Long says performers use the simple technology of shaving their pubic hairs for three main reasons. Directors don't like hair blocking the penetration shots. Many of the females strip, and shaving their pubics allows them to wear tiny bottoms. And it helps with hygiene.

Digital Video Discs, DVDs, in their first year on the market (1997) sold at a rate three times that of VHS in the early '80s, said 6/98 AVN DVD supplement. Like CDs, DVDs are supposed to not wear out, as it is an optical medium that is read by a laser. "With an average picture resolution of 500 horizontal lines (compared to 425 for laserdisc and a paltry 230 for VHS), and digital sound to boot, DVD is by far the finest-looking and sounding medium for home entertainment ever." (AVN)