Lilith
03-25-2003, 10:58 PM
By Jim Phillips
Athens NEWS Senior Writer
Old men in trenchcoats, watching stag films with newspapers in their laps? Teenaged Portnoys with stacks of Hustlers hidden in their underwear drawers?
Ohio University professor Joseph W. Slade III thinks of a huge and growing global industry, and a driving force for cultural and technological change.
"I'm really into sort of the cultural dynamics of pornography," said Slade, a telecommunications prof who has been studying porn since the 1960s. "My thesis is that, like it or not, pornography has enriched American culture."
In 2000 Slade published "Pornography in America: A Reference Handbook," and the next year brought out the three-volume "Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide," named by Library Journal as one of the best reference works of 2001.
For a voluminous reference guide, "Pornography and Sexual Representation" is an engaging read. You have to appreciate a scholarly work that heads a chapter with the quote "Ick," attributed to a college student in an Athens video store "whose girlfriend had just eagerly pulled him into the adult section."
Slade said Thursday that pornography, whose first stirrings he finds in American journalism as early as the late 17th century, is a prime example of an underground, forbidden culture working its way into the mainstream. He cited as another example rap music, which when it first appeared "was routinely called obscene," but which now "has a kind of quasi-respectability... Images that are despised, and images that are outlawed, generally move toward the center."
Slade stressed that in discussing pornography, no matter what sociological or cultural angles you take, it's important to keep in mind that "the real reason for being of pornography is sexual stimulation, sexual pleasure," which he considers on balance to be "a pretty good goal." There is still a common perception, he said, that "people who view pornography are somehow psychologically depraved, while in fact -- and the statistics are very clear on this -- a majority of Americans watch or consume pornography, and they do so across genders."
ONE OF THE STRONGEST INDICTMENTS against porn is the feminist perception that it represents degradation of women by men. Slade acknowledged that in most porn films, it's still a man's world. "There's no question that the view is predominantly masculine," he said. "On the other hand, pornography is first and foremost an attempt at communication."
Slade said more women are getting involved in pornography, both as consumers and producers, and that as this happens, more porn with a female sensibility is appearing. He cited the movies of former porn actress Veronica Hart, who he said makes films with "extremely high production values, nice glistening sex," but whose work -- which has been known to feature middle-aged women frolicking with 20-something studs -- sometimes gets panned by male reviewers wanting more typical raunch, who ask, in effect, "who wants to see 40-year-old women screwing young men?"
When porn started to become a big industry in the 1960s, Slade said, some movie-makers tried to embed the sex in plot and character, as in such classics as "Wanda Whips Wall Street" and "Amanda by Night." In these movies, he said, "they were trying to contextualize the sex. In many ways, the sex is really a small part of the movie."
The current explosion of the industry, however, including Internet porn sites, has brought with it a flood of "gonzo" porn that involves little more than turning a camera on people -- often "amateur" performers -- having sex. "You could compare gonzo pornography to sort of spectacular American movies" that have little plot but lots of explosions, Slade suggested, noting that, like a Schwarzenegger shoot-em-up, dumbed-down porn "travels extremely well" across cultural and language barriers.
The porn market, like so much else in the world of the WTO, has now gone global, according to Slade, driven in part by a vast expansion in TV channels in Europe that, by 1991, had literally exhaused the world supply of soft-core porn.
Porn is a reliable money-maker, Slade said, and in some cases, such as that of the troubled Vivendi corporation, has been the sole bright spot in a company's bottom line. "The demand for American pornography in particular, which has higher production values, soared during the 1990s," Slade said, and also helped boost profits for hotel chains that offered adult films in their rooms. He noted that the center of the European industry is now moving east, with Budapest the current porn capital of the continent.
Slade argues that porn is a largely unrecognized force for development in communications technology, and that without it, we might not have either the Internet or the home video industry in their current form.
"Pornography has largely driven the development of the Internet," he said, noting that pornography suppliers perfected such things as pop-up ads, flash ads, and streaming video. "I call it 'Slade's Law,' he laughed. "When someone invents a new communications technology, someone else will almost immediately invent a sexual use for it."
Likewise with video, he said. In the 1970s, when the Beta format was king, Slade said, there was little market for Hollywood movies on tape -- the main reason people wanted videos was to watch porn. However, the manufacturer wouldn't lease the Beta format to porn producers. Then JVC came up with VHS, allowed anyone to use it, including the porn industry, "and the Beta format is dead, quite literally."
Though many people view the Internet as saturated with pornography, Slade said, this is a misconception driven by the fact that there are many aggressively marketed porn sites. "More and more people are beginning to put sites on, so what you're getting is a kind of horizontal dilution... There is a kind of general cheapening of the product," he said, adding however that Internet content is still less than 5 percent porn, and that few sites earn much money.
"It's a funny industry, in that everybody thinks it's easy," he said. "They think, 'I've got a girlfriend, she's got a great body, she's uninhibited. We'll take a few pictures, we'll make a lot of money.'"
On the theoretical side, Slade views porn as a way to achieve some stylization and control of the incredibly powerful thing called sex. "Sex is overwhelming," he said. "But what pornography does is, it teaches us somehow to master sexual impulses." He added that pornography can be an incredibly rich "text" for studying human nature, through the fantastic range of visual cues that arouse different people sexually.
"Some people like long hair. Some people like small nipples. Some people like inverted belly buttons, or painted toenails," he said. "People are turned on by, on the one hand, amazingly blatant things, and on the other hand, amazingly subtle things. It could be the curve of a back. It could be the bounce of a breast. Sexual representation is protean in that respect. It involves enormous amounts of information, which is why I'm interested in it."
HE ALSO AGREED THAT THE phenomenon of porn may be at least partly a reflection of our general drift into the ghost world of electronic images. "I think we all kind of find ourselves in a kind of artificial environment," Slade said. "We to a certain degree live in a televised world." He cited the view of theorist George Bataille, who "says that eroticism in Western culture has for a long time been divorced from reproduction. We are turned on by things in part because of the artifice involved."
Though academic porn studies are becoming more acceptable these days, Slade began researching the topic when it was still somewhat beyond the pale, and recalls getting early encouragement from the great anthropologist Margaret Mead. "She said, 'Keep going with this... You really should make this into a major research project.' I've always been grateful to her, I guess."
Slade said he believes pornography can become art, and that already, sexually explicit films such as "Romance" and "Intimacy" may have achieved that status. He emphasized, however, that he's neither an advocate nor an opponent of pornography, but takes a "skeptical" attitude toward the industry. And he acknowledged that after decades of studying porn, it's going a bit stale for him.
"I generally just watch everything on fast forward," he said. "But hope springs eternal. I keep hoping that I will come on something that is such an amazing scene that I will be struck by it."
Athens NEWS Senior Writer
Old men in trenchcoats, watching stag films with newspapers in their laps? Teenaged Portnoys with stacks of Hustlers hidden in their underwear drawers?
Ohio University professor Joseph W. Slade III thinks of a huge and growing global industry, and a driving force for cultural and technological change.
"I'm really into sort of the cultural dynamics of pornography," said Slade, a telecommunications prof who has been studying porn since the 1960s. "My thesis is that, like it or not, pornography has enriched American culture."
In 2000 Slade published "Pornography in America: A Reference Handbook," and the next year brought out the three-volume "Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide," named by Library Journal as one of the best reference works of 2001.
For a voluminous reference guide, "Pornography and Sexual Representation" is an engaging read. You have to appreciate a scholarly work that heads a chapter with the quote "Ick," attributed to a college student in an Athens video store "whose girlfriend had just eagerly pulled him into the adult section."
Slade said Thursday that pornography, whose first stirrings he finds in American journalism as early as the late 17th century, is a prime example of an underground, forbidden culture working its way into the mainstream. He cited as another example rap music, which when it first appeared "was routinely called obscene," but which now "has a kind of quasi-respectability... Images that are despised, and images that are outlawed, generally move toward the center."
Slade stressed that in discussing pornography, no matter what sociological or cultural angles you take, it's important to keep in mind that "the real reason for being of pornography is sexual stimulation, sexual pleasure," which he considers on balance to be "a pretty good goal." There is still a common perception, he said, that "people who view pornography are somehow psychologically depraved, while in fact -- and the statistics are very clear on this -- a majority of Americans watch or consume pornography, and they do so across genders."
ONE OF THE STRONGEST INDICTMENTS against porn is the feminist perception that it represents degradation of women by men. Slade acknowledged that in most porn films, it's still a man's world. "There's no question that the view is predominantly masculine," he said. "On the other hand, pornography is first and foremost an attempt at communication."
Slade said more women are getting involved in pornography, both as consumers and producers, and that as this happens, more porn with a female sensibility is appearing. He cited the movies of former porn actress Veronica Hart, who he said makes films with "extremely high production values, nice glistening sex," but whose work -- which has been known to feature middle-aged women frolicking with 20-something studs -- sometimes gets panned by male reviewers wanting more typical raunch, who ask, in effect, "who wants to see 40-year-old women screwing young men?"
When porn started to become a big industry in the 1960s, Slade said, some movie-makers tried to embed the sex in plot and character, as in such classics as "Wanda Whips Wall Street" and "Amanda by Night." In these movies, he said, "they were trying to contextualize the sex. In many ways, the sex is really a small part of the movie."
The current explosion of the industry, however, including Internet porn sites, has brought with it a flood of "gonzo" porn that involves little more than turning a camera on people -- often "amateur" performers -- having sex. "You could compare gonzo pornography to sort of spectacular American movies" that have little plot but lots of explosions, Slade suggested, noting that, like a Schwarzenegger shoot-em-up, dumbed-down porn "travels extremely well" across cultural and language barriers.
The porn market, like so much else in the world of the WTO, has now gone global, according to Slade, driven in part by a vast expansion in TV channels in Europe that, by 1991, had literally exhaused the world supply of soft-core porn.
Porn is a reliable money-maker, Slade said, and in some cases, such as that of the troubled Vivendi corporation, has been the sole bright spot in a company's bottom line. "The demand for American pornography in particular, which has higher production values, soared during the 1990s," Slade said, and also helped boost profits for hotel chains that offered adult films in their rooms. He noted that the center of the European industry is now moving east, with Budapest the current porn capital of the continent.
Slade argues that porn is a largely unrecognized force for development in communications technology, and that without it, we might not have either the Internet or the home video industry in their current form.
"Pornography has largely driven the development of the Internet," he said, noting that pornography suppliers perfected such things as pop-up ads, flash ads, and streaming video. "I call it 'Slade's Law,' he laughed. "When someone invents a new communications technology, someone else will almost immediately invent a sexual use for it."
Likewise with video, he said. In the 1970s, when the Beta format was king, Slade said, there was little market for Hollywood movies on tape -- the main reason people wanted videos was to watch porn. However, the manufacturer wouldn't lease the Beta format to porn producers. Then JVC came up with VHS, allowed anyone to use it, including the porn industry, "and the Beta format is dead, quite literally."
Though many people view the Internet as saturated with pornography, Slade said, this is a misconception driven by the fact that there are many aggressively marketed porn sites. "More and more people are beginning to put sites on, so what you're getting is a kind of horizontal dilution... There is a kind of general cheapening of the product," he said, adding however that Internet content is still less than 5 percent porn, and that few sites earn much money.
"It's a funny industry, in that everybody thinks it's easy," he said. "They think, 'I've got a girlfriend, she's got a great body, she's uninhibited. We'll take a few pictures, we'll make a lot of money.'"
On the theoretical side, Slade views porn as a way to achieve some stylization and control of the incredibly powerful thing called sex. "Sex is overwhelming," he said. "But what pornography does is, it teaches us somehow to master sexual impulses." He added that pornography can be an incredibly rich "text" for studying human nature, through the fantastic range of visual cues that arouse different people sexually.
"Some people like long hair. Some people like small nipples. Some people like inverted belly buttons, or painted toenails," he said. "People are turned on by, on the one hand, amazingly blatant things, and on the other hand, amazingly subtle things. It could be the curve of a back. It could be the bounce of a breast. Sexual representation is protean in that respect. It involves enormous amounts of information, which is why I'm interested in it."
HE ALSO AGREED THAT THE phenomenon of porn may be at least partly a reflection of our general drift into the ghost world of electronic images. "I think we all kind of find ourselves in a kind of artificial environment," Slade said. "We to a certain degree live in a televised world." He cited the view of theorist George Bataille, who "says that eroticism in Western culture has for a long time been divorced from reproduction. We are turned on by things in part because of the artifice involved."
Though academic porn studies are becoming more acceptable these days, Slade began researching the topic when it was still somewhat beyond the pale, and recalls getting early encouragement from the great anthropologist Margaret Mead. "She said, 'Keep going with this... You really should make this into a major research project.' I've always been grateful to her, I guess."
Slade said he believes pornography can become art, and that already, sexually explicit films such as "Romance" and "Intimacy" may have achieved that status. He emphasized, however, that he's neither an advocate nor an opponent of pornography, but takes a "skeptical" attitude toward the industry. And he acknowledged that after decades of studying porn, it's going a bit stale for him.
"I generally just watch everything on fast forward," he said. "But hope springs eternal. I keep hoping that I will come on something that is such an amazing scene that I will be struck by it."