Adult entertainment once confronted any new technology like a shark—always hungry, always moving forward. Suddenly, though, when Apple unveiled its video-playing iPod, the forward motion ceased. Palpable trepidation set in, and the iPod was approached with extreme caution. In an interview with Wired News, Clinton Fayling, president of Brickhouse Mobile, who licenses adult material for mobile phones for major players like Wicked Pictures, voiced the general reserve: “We want to be conservative in investigating the opportunity of the iPod, to see how we can make money, what are the specifications, and what kind of safeguards are in place."
Part of the concern over the iPod involves legal issues. The religious right is currently fostering the perception that porn producers are deliberately targeting teens. Couple that with the general–although hardly accurate–view that the iPod is some kind of teen toy, and the dangers are plain: negative publicity, more baying from the morality watchdogs, and possible government intervention. Moving into the iPod download realm must seem, for many in the business, like walking blindfolded into a minefield.
So far, the criteria for even considering going iPod is a three-step program of age verification through credit card, a ban on free content, and encoded copy protection. The first two make sense in the Bush era in which cowboy bravado can be a fast track to disaster. The third stems wholly from a second set of fears, and these are purely financial.
The music and motion picture industries are already crying long and loud about how much of their revenue is being lost to illicit downloads, to the point that it’s almost impossible to play a Hollywood DVD that doesn’t come with a lengthy and dramatic commercial warning how it’s a crime to steal movies. In a business that has long been beset by content plunder and copyright piracy, fears that the video iPod could open new floodgates of rip-off possibilities are far from groundless. Again, caution is the obvious course, but I can’t help feeling a pang of regret for the wild and wooly good ol’ days when all technology was good technology and porn was instantly and (almost) fearlessly peddled where no porn had been peddled before.
This is not to say that all of adult entertainment is taking a wait-and-see attitude. Steven Hirsch of Vivid Entertainment told The Washington Post (with what I hope was intentional humor) that Vivid plans to shoot shorter films specifically for the iPod and other portables: “It could be a huge percentage of our business. To be able to carry an adult movie in your pocket is a powerful tool.” Some have gone farther than mere planning stages. PovPod.com has started offering short downloadable videos. Fastest into the field, though, was Suicide Girls with a weekly “sexy, short-form” podcast. “We see technology as a way for our community to be early adapters,” says co-founder Missy Suicide. “We are excited by this technology, and we see it as revolutionary.”
Some might argue, however, that Suicide Girls does not, strictly speaking, offer pornography and is merely a new form of glamour photography in which big hair and high heels have been replaced by tongue studs, tattoos, and combat boots. Subsequently, because Suicide Girls likely has less to fear in terms of censorship or judicial intervention (although in September, the company voluntarily removed some light bondage photo sets from the site to avoid being targeted by the Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ “War on Porn”), the door to new distribution technologies was open a bit wider for them. Regardless, Suicide Girls made its move while Vivid was still in the blueprint stage.
And let’s not forget how on the newsstand, lad mags Maxim and FHM, with their bikini starlets, edged out the full frontal of Playboy and the illustrative gynecology of Hustler. Suicide Girls may be opportunistic, but the adult industry has always run on opportunism, and one could give the founders credit for being the soft spearhead of a whole new “alternative porn.” Both the music and movie industries have been revolutionized by alternatives and independents; the same thing happens in porn. Maybe the porn-enthusiast public doesn’t quite have alt-porn on its radar yet, but listen closely—is that the sound of matching Doc Martens catching up with the traditional Lucite heels?
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com
