They may have been making nice and shaking hands afterward, but during Friday’s heated Good vs. Evil panel on the increasingly controversial topic of how extreme adult content affects the industry, panel participants seemed to be having a hard time keeping their cool.
Things got off to an amusing start, with discussion moderator Larry Walters offering a bit of levity with his opening statement, in which he deadpanned, “Thank you for coming to the Celebrity Deathmatch today.” But the laughs were few and far between once the panelists began to make their opening statements. With four recent 2257 inspections still fresh in the minds of those in attendance, the controversial regulations were “the elephant in the room,” Walters commented, and the panelists didn’t hold back when it came to speaking their minds.
“I’m not going to tell anybody what they cannot do,” opined Home Grown Video’s Spike Goldberg, “but I don’t want people going out on a limb and representing the rest of us.
“I think [extreme content] hurts the adult industry,” Goldberg later qualified. “Putting yourself into that degree puts us in a bad light. The added attention doesn’t do us any good. I know everybody is going to do what they want to do, but I don’t want to support it because it puts my family and my source of revenue in jeopardy.”
ClubJenna’s Jay Grdinia – long a proponent of adopting a “community standard” of acceptable adult content – concurred, offering, “This industry feeds us and feeds our families, so we owe it to each other to be responsible.”
Grdinia never did offer his thoughts on exactly what “responsible” content would entail, though he did say that he considered extreme content to be representative of the degradation of women, including “donkey punching” and anything remotely inferring rape. “You have to be logical and realistic,” he said. “This is a business. How much are you going to make fisting a woman? An extra $20 thousand? Is it worth it for the half million you’re going to have to pay to defend yourself in court?”
Max Hardcore, who remained uncharacteristically silent for most of the discussion, remained stoic after those comments, but the ever-opinionated Theresa Reed (aka Darklady)—who sat in for a mysteriously MIA Rob Black—was quick to counter Grdinia’s statement. “The day you join adult you decide you’re going to fight. Not because you’re out there looking for a fight, but because the fight is going to look for you.” A writer and assistant editor for YNOT.com, Reed has historically gone on record as supporting so-called “extreme” content such as fisting and videos that depict women having sex while menstruating. She talked of how such content could be liberating and psychologically healing to those who often feel ostracized because of their sexual desires—a point which hit home with at least one audience member.
“The first time I saw BDSM porn, it made me feel OK,” said FleshCash’s Halcyon, “because that is the kind of sex I like to have in my real sex life, not just on film. It made me feel that I wasn’t a freak to want that.” Rebelling against the idea that those who make porn as an outlet of self-expression should censor and repress their fantasies out of fear of government repercussion, Halcyon stated, “It’s crazy to think that is has to be simply a dollars and cents issue.”
Grdinia remained unmoved. “We can’t let a small minority of people who find certain kinds of content hot set the standard for the industry,” he maintained, even going so far as to suggest that if pornographers are truly in the business for artistic reasons, they should give their content away for free instead of charging for it. After Walters chimed in with “It’s obvious that you can charge for art,” an audience member asked the panelists whether they thought the industry needed to self-police their content.
“I can’t possibly think of any situation in which the industry would agree on one simple idea,” Hardcore deadpanned.
“I’d like to see us agree on certain business practices,” Reed offered, stressing the importance of treating models with respect and making sure they were of sound mind to consent to participating in extreme content. “I don’t want to be a part of a true democracy, where the minority is silenced. I want to be part of a representative government that doesn’t tell people who like to be tied up and have sex to go back underground where they belong because we don’t have the [courage] to represent them.”
The discussion was filled with several important ideas. However, the statement that seemed to reverberate the loudest belonged to Goldberg, who echoed a now-common idea: “If we don’t have this discussion right now, then they [the government] will do it for us.”
