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Via of Viviane’s Sex Carnival says

A few Tweeters pointed me to Richard Abowitz’s article on why porn-for-profit is dying:

“Every January, the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas is the biggest annual gathering of the adult film industry. But the biggest is suddenly a lot smaller. The 2010 AEE convention, which ran Thursday through Sunday, had shrunk from packing two floors of the Venetian’s Sands Expo Center last year down to one floor (and that one with lots of empty space).”

Read the quote and follow the links to original sources here.

Following Viviane’s link to Abowitz’s article at Daily Beast the reasons he gives for porn’s decline are the kind of reasons we’d probably like to see.

The first one I’m going to mention is a bit of a wash, seems to be #5 Porn-star prostitutes. These are sex-workers who, rather than put up with the Johnny-Knoxville-ization of porn (double penetrations, etc.), knock off a couple of porn videos mainly so they can put “porn star” on their escort sites in order to impress the mostly-very-vanilla customers with whom they negotiate over social media.

Item #4 doesn’t sound that intuitive, but online games like Halo or 2nd Life are evidently more long-term engaging entertainment. Abowitz doesn’t make the connection directly but this seems to go with Reason #2: video on demand. the average porn consumer spends 4-7 minutes looking at porn while masturbating. They then spend the rest of their spare time playing Halo or 2nd Life or what have you.

The remaining two reasons start getting a little more interesting.

Abowitz labels item #3, “The Taboo Is Gone.” With stigma collapsing there are more aspiring porn stars than there is demand from people who might hire them. And yes, I’m aware that for some people this is a sign of complete moral decay.

If so fine, be that way. But if you consider that just a couple of decades ago it was often the case that most people who appeared in porn had to be either desperate or outright coerced due to stigmatization that’s not a bad thing at all.

Which brings us to item #1, piracy. Abowitz says “According to porn star Dana DeArmond: ‘If people don’t realize it is stealing and start paying for their porn then performers are going to stop performing.’”

I’m not sure exactly how this is a bad thing overall. As a strong proponent of appearing in erotica if and only if one actually wants to appear in erotica it seems like if you wouldn’t do it unless someone paid you then you probably… well… shouldn’t do it.

There are more than enough people who would, will, and do make their own erotica and post it free of charge. And as there’s less and less stigma attached to doing so the social cost of any individual expressing him or herself approaches the social enjoyment she or he may derive from doing so.

I’m sure this is a disappointing position to people who both enjoy appearing in erotica and would like to be paid to do so. Including people I know and like who really do enjoy the work and would like to make their income from it. For which I apologize.

But by and large I’m pretty sure we’d be better off encouraging enough amateurs to get involved that it becomes impossible for anyone to directly profit from it. Indirectly, yes, as with, say, the equivalent of Google AdWords on Blogger or Tumblr pages. But in the grand scheme of things that’s very small change compared to the money that’s been sloshing around in porn.

Summary: After skimming thousands of images one pattern that’s emerging is it’s striking similarity to religious imagery.

I’ve glancingly mentioned it several times that I’ve undertaken a really massive review of porn and/or erotic photos on the web as digested and reposted and redigested and reposted on the Twitter-like photo-blogging service Tumblr.com. It’s been neither as enlightening, nor as distracting as I thought it might be, and obviously the format of any one site, and the obvious tendency of linkers-in-common of photos to have tastes in common as well. So I can’t call the experience at all random.

That said, after skimming something close to 10,000 images on more than 100 sites a couple of points (beyond a lot of probably obvious ones) stand out.

The biggest one, one that finally percolated through this morning, is…

Golly but a lot of porn looks like church.

Downturned heads, skyward gazes, repose, shadows, and over, and over, and over the “Jehovanist” facial expressions (interrupted most often by transgressive but equally gnostic ones), the drapes, the sheets, the clothes, the marble or tile or even the peeling wainscoting and dingy lamps speak as much of the attributes of worship as the attributes of sex. The models often appear as saints, or sinners penitent or unrepentant, taking each other’s offered bits as much as sacrament as satisfaction. Even the stylized agonies and ecstasies of bondage mimic the mortal endurance or higher-purposed stoicism of saints. And then there’s the highly church-like lack of non-ritual eye contact with either camera or each other. Ritual eye-contact, yes, as in “take this may it serve you well,” or “am I doing this right” or during moments of “do you take this person as your lawfully-wedded…?”

That’s totally subjective, of course. And perhaps porn isn’t intended to be consumed in such tremendous gouts, any more than words are meant to be repeated over and over and over till all that’s left is the sound in your mouth.

But if you were to ask me now what porn most reminds me of… what the spatial grammar seemed most like… I’d say church.

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Doh! Just to be clear, I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong, at all, with taking sex very seriously any more than it would be wrong to be serious about church. It’s just that…

I guess…

Thing is that it’s not so much about what happens in bed, any more than what happens in church.

It’s a correspondence in the ways both are presented in photography.

Because in church as in bed, and in bed as in church, more happens in reality than in our representations of it. Again that’s all fine — when we approach events as institutions we tend to filter strongly for that which meets our expectations.

What’s interesting (or maybe just revealing about me if I’m the only one) is that the representations seem so similar.

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What’s also interesting is how thoroughly refreshing it is when little bits of humanity poke through the solemnity. When it looks like people are having fun — not “behind the scenes” between-takes fun but old fashioned “I love this part” or “let’s remember that for next time” comfort/contact fun.

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And a final disclaimer: I’m not so much being critical as curious. When I take my own half-nekkid Thursday photos I’ll usually chuck ten or twenty pictures for every one I post, and I’m sure if I photographed other people instead I’d end up hewing to much the same doughty/dreamy seriousness I’ve been talking about. But now I’d be a lot more curious about what could be found in the spaces between poses.

Hmm. Something to think about.

Back in October Erotic blogger Remittance Girl brought up some interesting points about sex-positive/feminist critiques of erotica

Nobilis pointed me in the direction of Figleaf’s “The No-Sex Class: Men, Women, and Gangbangs in Porn” which led me to “Once more into the breech” by Amanda over at Pendragon.net, which led me to “On Porn, Sex And Pincushions” over at Echinde of the Snakes.

Although each of them stray in their topics a little, all of them are worth reading, as they all deal with the subject of porn tropes, and how those play out in the reality of society, sex education and the bedroom.

These are all very sex positive people who have, in their turns, problems with certain depictions of sex in porn. I’ve dealt with this subject a little myself in a couple of posts on non-consensual sex in erotica and the semiotics of semen.

I think I must agree with Amanda and Echinde that because of a woeful lack of sex-positive sex education, a lot of young men and women are learning about sex from the porn industry and – I’m sorry if this makes people angry – but they are not responsible sex educators. That’s not their job and, with some notable exceptions, like the Tony Comstock films, education is not much of a byproduct of porn.

Neither is written erotica an educational tool. The assumption is made, and rightly so, I think, that once you are reading erotica or watching porn, you already know a decent amount about sex. Certainly I do not put myself forward as a sex educator. However, a lot of these articles demand, subtextually, that porn SHOULD act as an educator by virtue of its reach into the groins of millions of boys and girls out there. The truth about porn and erotica is that they are seldom vehicles for changes in thinking. They are much more likely to be sexually framed reflections of the society in which they are made or written.

There’s more. Read it here.

I think most feminists (and certainly Amanda, Echidne, and me) think that rather than saying porn and/or erotica providing accurate education sex educators should provide sex education. Because, seriously, we don’t have to worry about the Road Runner cartoon’s depictions of gravity. Thanks to education and considerable experience our expectations in reality aren’t influenced by what happens to the coyote. If we could assume the same experience and education it would be the same for sex.

I think she put it extremely well: to the extent porn has a pernicious influence it’s because viewers have no other sources of education and, frankly, relatively limited opportunities for experience.

As for the notion of getting off on dominance or submission she makes another really excellent point: a lot of this stuff really does have a half life. And to build just a bit on her point, if women grow up in a culture that assumes the avenue to authorized sex is submission and self-effacement so deeply that marriage erases your own family name then yeah, it’s not going to be too surprising that submission as release is going to work itself into fantasy.

But in this case I’m pretty sure most feminists (Amanda, me, I’m not positive about Echidne) would say that whatever turns you on in bed is fine as long as you don’t confuse it with the rest of your life or, worse, try to enact your personal turnons into law. For instance a fantasy about Grand Inquisitors could be hot. A reintroduction of the actual Spanish Inquisition would… not.

In other words it’s not so much the responsibility of sexual fantasy-facilitators such as porn and erotica to educate. But it is the case that without somebody doing education porn is going to wind up teaching a lot of people that, oh, say, positions that maximize camera angles are preferable to positions that maximize sexual stimulation.

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For a different perspective see also Katherine Chen, guest posting at Em & Lo about what she learned from porn that she didn’t learn in sex ed. For instance

• “My mom always classified every single sexually active female as either a prostitute or a “dumb animal” who had nothing better to do with her time. I would have probably agreed with her, if it weren’t for Asia Carrera”
• “...the fact that the porn star Belladonna had semi-retired in 2007 because she was concerned about contracting STDs like herpes had a much bigger impact on me than my sex ed teacher insisting I memorize the side effects of every genital infection out there”
• “...even I realize that the scenarios of porn films are unrealistic — they’re fantasies that most viewers understand can’t be replicated in real life. Even if you “set up” a scene with your partner, it’s just not going to be the same.”

• “...whenever I finally do get around to having sex myself, I’m pretty confident that, like the best porn, I’ll have some good moves, I’ll use a condom, I won’t be self-conscious, and — most importantly — I’ll have fun.”

This is the second of two posts by Chen, the first being about how poorly served she was by her first, badly managed encounter with sex education.

Ms Naughty of Porn for Women Blog says the only commercial porn movie I’ve had the patience to watch in years, Jennifer Lyon Bell’s Matinee

In Berlin last year I had the honour of meeting Jennifer Lyon Bell, an American filmmaker with a compelling vision for erotic film. Her film Matinee is a gorgeous work of art, well written, masterfully acted and beautifully filmed. It is a wonderful addition to the growing canon of well-made, female-focused erotic films and I consider it to be part of the new wave of sex-positive movies that are forging a new path in porn.

Naturally this means the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification has banned it.

She said it here.

As I mentioned in my review (I saw it at the Sex 2.0 conference last spring) I had pretty much the same impression of the film. Ms Naughty quotes Bell and her backers as saying that was exactly what she was trying to convey

It’s just two characters enjoying sex in a realistic way that fits with their characters’ personalities. Consensual sex, nothing weird. Why on earth would that be dangerous to watch?

And, seriously, I don’t see how there’s anything possibly offensive or objectionable to the movie except that a) it has direct sex in it and b) the female partner leads the entire way from the first kiss to rousing him to erection to unwrapping and putting on the condom to insertion. Oh, and c) there’s nothing daring or defiant or “gender-bendery” or “toppish” about her actions, nor anything inconsistent with what any two heterosexual lovers might do when they’re both a bit melancholy about their circumstances and are used to finding emotional connection and comfort in sex.

On the other hand that might indeed be the offensive part. Final quote from Ms Naughty:

The organisers rightly point out that the OFLC didn’t have a problem with Lars Van Trier’s Antichrist, which disturbingly depicts a scene of female genital mutilation and seems to be misogynist in intent. Jen’s film, which only shows two people having nuanced, meaningful, tender sex, is apparently more offensive than that.

Not sure what to say here. Violently injuring genitals is ok. Romantic sex heterosexual sex not so much.

Incidentally the OFLC also banned two Tony Comstock’s films about romantic homosexual sex. He and everyone else assumed they were balking at the homosexuality part. Starting to sound like it’s the romance part they can’t handle.

$%!*#@!!!