Porn Industry Has Some Growing Up To Do

Suzi Wahl presents herself and her husband as just a nice, down-to-earth, Midwestern-bred couple who graduated from simple mail-order business planning to making their own strictly amateur adult videos, selling them online, and saying in no uncertain terms that what they call "the California porn industry" needs to grow up, and soon.

"Pornography is in the mainstream now, we all know that," Wahl has told The Vista, the campus newspaper of the University of Central Oklahoma. "It's still a little hidden and people don't like to admit it, but it is mainstream and the dollars are in the billions. And so an industry that size needs to treat its people right."

Wahl said the professional porn industry needs to improve worker's rights, treatment of women, and to make more films and videos that don't seem like just assembly-line productions.

"It's just like any other concept of reality TV - show us who you are, what turns you on, what's good for you," she told The Vista. "We're not looking for pretty blondes, skinny girls with big hair and big huge lips painted up all in the same way. Our customers are looking for variety."

Wahl and her husband became porn makers when they started their mail-order amateur video business and found a gradual increase in customers asking for adult material. The Web has given them an extra marketing outlet, she said, not to mention a way around the arbitrary censorship emanating from local politics and prejudices.

"We're supposed to have free speech and yet we don't," she told the paper. "The Internet gives us that. I'm obviously an advocate of free speech. I think we hurt ourselves when we censor anything at anytime."

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