Sex Edition: Internet evens score in porn war, adds variety of sexual preferences

Sex sells. And thanks to the Internet, it’s selling in new ways for new people.

When Pittsburgh native Howie Gordon was making movies in the late 1970s and 1980s, the market for pornography catered to straight men’s fantasies of how women should act.

Gordon said the male actor’s orgasm was usually the culmination of a scene in films in which he acted, while women’s orgasms were incidental. Most female actors — often poorly — faked arousal and orgasms. He remembered women often rolling their eyes mechanically and licking their lips in a poor imitation of actual arousal.

“It’s an insult to God and nature what they were calling a female orgasm,” Gordon said. 

While the market for pornography that caters to a straight, male audience is still strong, the Internet has opened up niche markets that fall outside the traditional pornography audience of straight men. Websites can reach the market for fetish pornography in a way that traditional stores and clubs never did. The Internet has also enabled the rise of an industry of “feminist porn” that appeals to some politically conscious female and LGBTQ consumers of adult videos in a way that straight, more traditional pornography does not.

It was only in the 1980s that VCRs became commonplace in American homes and made pornography more privately accessible. Although customers could buy sexually explicit “loops” of eight-millimeter film before that time, consumers of pornography, who were usually men, frequented adult movie theaters, according to Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News, the trade journal for the mainstream adult entertainment industry. 

For obvious reasons, most women — and men — avoided these establishments. Anti-sodomy laws at the time also made filming and distributing gay pornography difficult. Decreased costs of making movies and increased privacy created a larger market for pornography.

The advent of the Internet allowed more non-traditional pornography companies to thrive.

Peter Acworth started Kink.com in 1997 out of his dorm room at Columbia Business School, where he was a graduate student studying finance. Acworth got the idea after he read a newspaper story about a firefighter who was making money by selling nude pictures on the Internet, according to an entry he wrote for The Huffington Post’s blog last year.

Kink.com has grown from Acworth’s personal project into the largest purveyor of BDSM — bondage, domination, submission and masochism — and other fetish-themed or “kinky” videos, according to Michael Stabile, a company spokesman. 

The company’s revenue is now valued at $30 million, according to the website InsideView, which tracks data on companies.

Kink.com’s offices occupy a massive former U.S. Army National Guard armory in San Francisco. It is the subject of a documentary titled “Kink” that actor James Franco produced last year.

“If you were to go into the armory, we’re constantly shooting,” Stabile said.

Stabile said Kink.com films about 1,000 scenes — complete sexual encounters of about 30 to 50 minutes — a year. Its content menu reads like a taxonomy chart for sexual fetishes. For example, “slave training,” “sadism and masochism,” “gay wrestling,” “bondage,” “rope bondage,” “femdom,” “public sex,” “gay public sex,” and “women in bondage” are just some of the tags on display on the company’s home page.

Stabile said the market for fetish material was underserved before the rise of the Internet.

Because obscenity laws defer to the standards of individual communities to determine what is obscene, many distributors of porn worried about facing criminal charges before its large-scale move to the Internet because a local prosecutor could find the material offensive, Stabile said.

Acworth wrote in a blog post last year for The Huffington Post that while he was growing up, he felt turned on when he was watching a cowboy and Indian movie in which actors were tied up. Later, he learned bondage turned him on.

“Anyone with a fetish is likely to find content that appeals to them specifically and, thus, feel less isolation, shame or confusion,” Acworth wrote in the post. “Such negative emotions about sexuality are not healthy for any of us.”

Kink.com says on its website that its mission is to “demystify and celebrate alternative sexualites”.

Stabile said many people assume that BDSM is synonymous with torture, but there is an element of fantasy in all of this genre’s films, even those that depict people inflicting and receiving pain.

For example, in sets meant to resemble prison cells or other settings with cement or hardwood floors, the company uses soft foam painted to look like harder material, Stabile said.

Pink and White Productions is another company based out of San Francisco that distributes porn outside of what most would consider “the mainstream.” The company specializes in “feminist queer porn,” according to its website, which describes its content as a more authentic display of queer sexuality.

Shine Louise Houston, the founder of Pink and White Productions, said the company released its first material on DVD in 2005, but now publishes material exclusively for online subscribers. She said her company faces less overhead this way.

“We don’t have to deal with other distributors,” Houston said.

Larissa Brian, a doctoral candidate in Pitt’s communications department, said feminist porn represents a departure from mainstream pornography, which shows sex as “shiny, stylized and sanitized.”

“Feminist porn doesn’t try to gloss over things in the sense that it shows sex as a messy, untidy and playful process,” Brian said. “It shows bodies as they are.”

Brian described the dialogue in mainstream adult films as more scripted and less authentic than in films produced by alternative companies such as Kink.com and Pink and White Productions. She said this format leads men to regard consent from women as automatic, rather than something they need to explicitly ask for.

Mainstream adult films have generated criticism from feminists for decades.

Activist and lawyer Catharine MacKinnon claimed in a 1985 article published in Harvard Law Review that porn eroticizes inequality between men and women, creating the illusion that women want to “be taken and violated.”

“Pornography codes how to look at women, so you know what you can do with one when you see one,” MacKinnon said. “Pornography defines women by how we look, according to how we can be sexually used.”

Houston described her videos as a more honest depiction of sexuality than that of mainstream porn. People who appear in her films decide beforehand what they want to do.

“It’s all about the models,” she said. “We’re only directing the camera angle. We’re not directing the models.”

Brian also described Kink.com’s approach to sexuality as healthier than that of traditional porn.

Films on Kink.com show models giving their consent to participate in the sex acts in dialogue before the scene and discuss their boundaries beforehand.

“It’s called a yes-no-maybe list,” Brian said. “There’s a clear articulation of what the woman wants to do, what she doesn’t want to do and what she might want to do. That’s something you never see in mainstream porn.”

She said she thought mainstream adult films show men receiving pleasure much more than women, and said this dynamic reinforces men’s expectations in relationships. 

Brian said these more traditional movies generally follow a standard format of foreplay, intercourse and “money shot,” or male orgasm.

Some people in the mainstream adult-film business have moved away from this format. Candida Royalle, a former adult-film star, founded Femme Productions in 1984 to “give adult movies a woman’s voice and something couples could view together,” according to the company’s website. The website also says the films lack the “‘money shot,’ a staple of most adult films.”  

While Brian saw traditional pornography as reinforcing men’s lax attitudes toward consent, Kernes disagreed. He called characterizations such as Brian’s and MacKinnon’s “nonsense.”

He said that while he had no problem with companies outside of the mainstream industry making videos without scripts or talking about sex acts before hand, “that’s not the only way to make a video.”

Kernes said adult-film companies take pains to avoid looking as if the sex in their videos isn’t consensual.

Legally, Kernes added, adult-film companies could not make movies without the express consent of participants.

Like any other industry, adult-film companies are closely regulated by federal and state laws. Under federal law, companies that produce materials that contain sexually explicit conduct must maintain records of performers’ real and stage names, dates of birth and copies of their identification.

According to federal law, these regulations also apply to those who digitize images or upload them onto a website.

“If [someone] is having sex on camera, they’re getting paid,” Kernes said, referring to adult videos produced by legitimate companies. “They’re giving consent.”

While Gordon admitted there’s plenty of misogyny in mainstream adult films, he said it’s a mistake to blame pornography for this attitude. Instead of teaching men to objectify women, porn must reflect something about society’s underlying mentality. 

The unbalanced dynamics between men and women or lack of concern about genuine female desire must appeal to the fantasies of the mostly male audience. Gordon said pornography was catering to those fantasies rather than creating them, and disagreed that these depictions reinforced or encouraged violence against women.

“The question is, are people going to look at this and think, ‘That’s how I’m supposed to behave?’” Gordon said. “If that’s true, then we have a real problem with our sex education.”