It may not be scientific but it would seem as valid as most polls. I turned on my barstool, and asked those around me to name a porn star, quickly, and without thinking about it. 75% say Jenna Jameson, 20% say Houston, one wag says Ron Jeremy, and the historian among us names Linda Lovelace. Some one else mentions a gay male performer of whom I have never heard. Then someone says “Paris Hilton”, and an argument breaks out over whether Paris Hilton is really a porn star or just a stinking-rich, under-qualified airhead who happened to have some tapes break lose accidentally-on-purpose. Once it’s been settled that Paris is not a porn star – that she resides in some pink-fog area of celebs caught on camera giving oral – I ask if anyone can name a successful porno series or franchise. 95% immediately say Barely Legal. Someone asks if Girls Gone Wild counts. What about The Sopornos? After that, my random sampling start making up funny names for porno websites and series packages, and I’ve pretty much lost their attention.
A little later, I quizzed a more intimate sampling about how they might go about actually purchasing porn. Suppose you’re in a hotel room and all you have to keep you amused is the pay-for-view. What’s the basis of your selection? After some discussion, the guys, and one woman, decided that they either chose something they might have heard mentioned on The Howard Stern Show, otherwise they’d go for what’s seemed the most promising by title and the synopsis, if there is one. And they complain that these promises are frequently not kept. Much the same seems to apply for web porn. Unless specific acts or fetishes are sought out, the process is again hit and miss. My informants roll out the credit card for whatever they stumble across in spam and pop-ups. A few porno-geeks send round tips, but they’re now into ripping copies. In a nutshell, the customers in my bar pay for their porn sight unseen, the possible and proverbial pig-in-a-poke. They expect to be disappointed and are elated when they stumble across something truly hot. Sure, if you gave it to them on their cell phones, they’d jerk off in the bathroom at work.
I said the data wasn’t scientific, but it would seem to give at least an approximation of how things look in the general marketing of adult entertainment. According to my uneven sampling, we have a multi-billion dollar industry in which – and despite multiple delivery systems, some state of the art – a high percentage of its customers consume the product only a little short of at random. In many respects, after three decades of being at least tacitly above ground, and at least marginally legal, the porn business remains shamefully generic as far as most of its patrons are concerned. It’s an industry with few recognized stars and only limited brand loyalty. It has virtually no promotional infrastructure, no critics, and no media recommendations of what’s hot and what’s not. Hell, they rate video games in Maxim, but not porn.
I keep hoping I’m going to see some grandiose play that would have the Religious Right on the run with its drawers twisting, but nothing is delivered. What became of the megalomaniac breed that spawned Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt. From print to nightclubs to cable TV, plus massive legal capability, they had it locked for the 20th century. So where are the commercial sex moguls of the 2005? The ones who are tailoring new multi-media empires? Where’s the logo-of-confidence that provides everything from epics to video phone streams, with give-away samplings, direct email of product information and a great line in T-shirts. I hoped by now we’d have a star driven talent system that would make Louis B. Meyer jealous, and have quality control and brand recognition to rival Hello Kitty. Far from having the Religious Right on the run, they are what’s happening. Check out the whole web-marketing system for the Left Behind post-rapture science fiction. They may still be peddling books but they have total control of every manifestation of the product and the multitude of spin-offs are synchronized like a North Korean military parade. (And looks, from where I sit, about as much fun.) Meanwhile, porn tends to sit in its moral ghetto and complain, unaware that, in this highly polarized culture, to play a bigger game would be extraordinarily interesting. Richard Branson started out selling punk records and now he’s building the Virgin space ship. Doesn’t the porn industry want in that real grandiosity?
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com
