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Susannah Breslin writes on www.forbes.com – You can’t write that,” Seymore Butts says the moment my hand moves to write down the two words he’s said, two words that summarize this story, that say everything there is to say, really, about the state of the adult movie industry, and one of the words is an expletive.
I’m sitting with Butts, born Adam Glasser in the Bronx, New York, 48 years ago, on two black plastic chairs inside of a square. Around the perimeter, porn stars sit on tall chairs at high tables signing glossy photos of themselves for patient men waiting in embarrassing lines.
The last time I saw Butts was for another story, and it was 11 years ago. I interviewed him in the living room of his ranch-style home with a kidney-shaped pool in the yard in the San Fernando Valley. His young son wandered into the room; his porn star girlfriend occupied herself in another part of the house. Back then the gonzo porno pioneer was in trouble with the Los Angeles Police Department, which had decided a movie Butts made, “Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 1,” was obscene.
Now things are different.
What Your Business Can Learn From The Porn Business Susannah Breslin Susannah Breslin Contributor
In the decade since, the adult movie industry has changed completely, and although Butts has gone off the record as I listen, he is telling me the story of everything that happened in between, and it’s a doozy.
***
Once upon a time, pornographers were kings.
I remember what it was like because I was there. The rise of the Internet was spreading porn across the planet like a virus. There were big budget feature movies, stunt sex videos in which lone women competed with one another to have sex with as many men as possible, and gonzo production studios cropping up like weeds across the Valley. With lightning speed, porn crossed over into the mainstream, and consumers couldn’t get enough. Or so it seemed.
A funny thing happened, though. Over the years that followed, porn became ubiquitous, the market was flooded with product, piracy ate up the porn industry’s profits, the Feds served a series of pornographers with a succession of obscenity indictments, and a recession swept across the globe.
By the time I sit down across from Butts at this porn convention on the second floor of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Ill., over which a steady stream of jetliners descends into Chicago O’Hare International Airport less than a mile away, the adult movie business has transformed totally.
The porn industry as I knew it is dead. And it appears a new industry has arisen.
***
Xaq Fixx is a former Air Force cryptologist and precision-guided munitions specialist. He wears glasses, has a significant scar on his forehead of undetermined origin, and sports a Lenin-esque beard and mustache, the ends of which he twirls into curls.
Fixx is the market research manager for the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, an online adult company that bills itself on its website as “THE #1 ADULT VIDEO ON DEMAND THEATER IN THE WORLD!” Among other properties, AEBN owns PornoTube, an X-rated YouTube, and xPeeps, an adult webcam site that encourages users to “xpose yourself.” It also produces the product Fixx is hawking.
I stick my finger into the rubbery, flesh-colored slit on the side of a plastic grey peanut the size of a very large loaf of bread. This is RealTouch, an “award-winning male masturbator” designed by a former NASA engineer that syncs with adult movies to simulate sex for the male with which it is interacting through your computer’s USB port. The device retails for $325, and the package includes 120 RealTouch VOD minutes, anti-bacterial cleaner, and a 90-day limited warranty.
More recently, the company has begun marketing the RealTouch JoyStick, the lingam to the RealTouch’s yoni, which is to say it looks like a dildo. Available only to adult webcam models at this time, the joystick serves as a remote control for the RealTouch device, enabling users in remote locations to have “True Internet Sex™!”
Per Fixx’s instruction, Savannah Steele, a busty blonde porn star in a lab coat, moves the joystick, and the mechanism tightens around my finger and increases speed.
“It feels like having sex with a robot,” I announce. I extract my finger and wipe it off with a wet wipe from the box on the table.
I ask Fixx if he’s used the device. He hasn’t. “I’m a Linux guy, and it’s a Windows-only device,” he explains.
Fixx calls over Steve Papp, AEBN’s logistics manager. Papp uses the device regularly.
“I was a bit skeptical,” Papp says, but now he thinks, “It’s the coolest thing ever.” Sometimes, when his wife isn’t in the mood, she’ll tell him, “’Oh, honey, why don’t you…’’’ And off Papp goes to find intimacy with his peanut-shaped lover.
“As a step on the path, this is a major leap forward,” Fixx tells me. The way he foresees it, one day we will live in a world William Gibson may as well have created wherein “you can create virtual realities that are indistinguishable from the real world.”
If this is future sex, I decide, we are not there yet.
***
The name of the panel is “Everything You Want to Know About Porn.”
Nine porn stars are on the stage. Perhaps 50 onlookers are ogling the spectacle, occasionally raising their phones or cameras to take photos.
An audience member asks what their favorite sex positions are.
“It depends on my mood,” Tori Black, who I last saw having sex with James Deen on a porn set in 2009, offers.
“I’ve always wanted to hang upside down from an elevator,” another girl chirps.
“I’m exactly where I want to be,” yet another starlet answers to a question I miss.
Shortly thereafter, the panel ends, and the girls file off the stage, disappearing behind the curtain.
***
Mr. Pete is not a nobody. He is a somebody.
You might think Mr. Pete is a nobody because no one is waiting in line and asking him to autograph a glossy photo of himself like the porn starlets on either side of him, but that’s because Mr. Pete is a male porn star, and when it comes to porn, the female porn star is queen.
Mr. Pete has been an adult performer for over a decade. I ask him how many movies he’s made, and he estimates somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000.
Originally, he’s from Vegas. “Kind of a womanizing guy” is how he describes himself. After he started working in an adult video store, becoming a professional woodsman was practically his professional destiny.
I ask Mr. Pete how business is.
“Business is great,” Mr. Pete says. “The Internet’s the future and the present.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Pete says, it’s harder for new guys who want to get up, get in, and get off for a living to break into the business in this down economy.
“The doors are closing,” Mr. Pete warns.
I ask Mr. Pete what it takes to do what he does.
He shrugs, surveying the crowd. “As long as you have a functioning organ, things will always work out.”
***
“We don’t believe God created pornography, but we believe He loves the people in it,” opines Rachel Collins, a pastor with XXXchurch.com who’s standing in front of a banner that reads “Jesus Loves Porn Stars” when I ask her if the Devil created porn.
Collins has a halo of golden curls, a cherubic face, and a habit of standing very close to the person with whom she is speaking. I assume Rachel loves God and porn stars because her mission with the church is to stop porn addiction and save porn stars from porn.
“Porn is the oldest business,” Collins says, and I want to correct her, to point out, no, prostitution is the oldest business, but perhaps I am splitting hairs.
More troublingly for Collins, porn is “morphing into something else.”
What is it? Whatever it is, it isn’t good.
“It’s becoming more dangerous,” she tells me, looking worried for humanity. “It sells us something that doesn’t even exist.”
I press on through the thickening crowd. There are gangs of men leering at porn stars showing off surgically-enhanced cleavage threatening to escape the confines of low-neck prisons, couples holding hands and inspecting rows of paddles, ball gags, and chocolate lollipops in the shapes of male and female genitalia, and I count four men in wheelchairs whizzing along the floor on missions to meet the sex stars of their dreams.
Two scantily clad girls ride a seesaw, and it takes me a minute to realize the handles are dildos. A dancer in over-sized hot pink nerd glasses, a black bob wig, and a pink star on her exposed butt cheek grinds away on a platform. At the concession stand, nachos are $4. The air shakes with the dull thud of heavy bass emanating from the customized car show with which the event is sharing space.
A man tries to sell bottles of “male enhancement” pills he swears will make you “longer and harder.” An Asian girl with guns tattooed on her hips sells T-shirts emblazoned with her face.
A blonde in a sparkly sailor suit and a Playboy bunny logo for a tramp stamp tries to get passersby to sign up for a lingerie cruise. A shirtless, baby-faced male stripper sits in a chair, waiting for something to happen, a giant “Magic Mike” poster behind him.
In the “Dungeon Experience” corner, a man secures a woman to a chair, a strap across her forehead, her wrists and ankles bound, her male date watching. Porn star Stormy Daniels is selling a “hands-free lube dispenser,” and the man at the table shows me how it works by pretending to pump lube out with one hand and waving his other hand in the opposite direction as if engaging in sex with the Invisible Woman.
I take notes in a booth selling sex toys, and “Making a wish list?” the proprietor inquires. A brunette struggles to stay on a giant pink mechanical ride before a crowd of appreciative men. Near the restrooms, a black man working a shoeshine booth gives up and takes a seat on a stool. In the bathroom, it smells like porn stars and strippers: peaches and apricots, sticky body glitter and platform heels with slits for tips, humping unicorns and money shot stardust.
***
Walking around the place, you can almost see the fork in the road. The point at which things split. The exact place where one group of pornographers went one way, one group of pornographers went another way, and things were never the same.
“Everyone will have to evolve or die,” Fixx told me, and he was right.
“We’re in the Now Generation,” asserts Shirley Lara, the “all-around person, so COO,” of Chaturbate, an adult webcam site.
According to Lara, 21st century porn is all about control. The porn consumer no longer wants canned movies shot on video a lifetime ago, directed by someone else, and featuring sex that follows a script.
The new porn consumer wants to pick the girl, they want to control what happens, and they want to develop an intimate relationship with her, no matter how fleeting.
Jenna Jameson’s unattainability, her Barbie-on-a-pedestal unknowability, has been replaced by an independent contractor who works from home and is paying off her college debt with your virtual tips by having virtual sex with you.
She’s a bombshell or the girl next door, the naughty teacher or the punk rocker, the MILF or whatever it is that your wife isn’t, that you don’t have, that you can’t get, that brought you right here, right now, rather than watching some stale free clip on an X-rated tube site that stole their content from a porn producer who is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy in a Chatsworth office park, thanks to you.
***
“What happened? The Internet came around,” Butts said. “That changed the game. Nobody imagined these tube sites would pop up, giving away this content we fought so hard to create.”
A few feet away, his porn star girlfriend signed another autograph.
“Will recorded sex ever go away?” Butts asked rhetorically. “No. It’s for the collector out there.”
In theory, the porn dilemma is the same as the printed-on-paper book dilemma. Some people like the feel of the pages, the smell when they open a book for the first time. Some people like the new new thing, their porn digital and interactive.
Truth be told, nobody is sure where things are heading. The sexual appetite is a tricky thing to predict, and everyone here believes whomever gets it right will be raking in the dollars.
***
Raylene [pictured] used to be a porn star. Then she left the porn business. She became a wife, a mom, a real estate agent. Until the housing market tanked. Then she came back to porn. Porn took her in with welcoming arms because that’s how porn is. It takes all comers.
Nowadays, she’s shooting eight scenes a month, and it’s a hustle.
“I’m a little bit older, being a porn star at 35,” Raylene tells me near a line of men longing for her to return their attention to them. “In dog years, I’m, like, 100,” she laughs.
Raylene has long brown hair and big brown eyes. She’s smart, articulate, and self-aware. She’s a businesswoman, and she has adjusted to the new market. Her rate for a boy-girl scene is $1,500 – but that’s negotiable. Her rate for a girl-girl scene is $800 – but that’s negotiable, too.
“I wish it was like it used to be for the financial aspects,” Raylene says wistfully. “Porn will never go away, but the money isn’t there anymore. There’s nothing left.”
***
On my way out, I stop and talk to J. Handy, the director of Exxxotica, which, as it turns out, isn’t really a porn convention, per se.
It’s “the largest event in the country dedicated to love and sex,” Handy explains, with stops in Chicago, New Jersey, and Miami. They tried doing it in Los Angeles, but there was too much porn there already, and the show was a bust.
Handy started the event at 26 as “something fun to do” with his friends. This weekend, he’s expecting around 15,000 people to show up and check out the porn, the paddles, and the penis ride. The bulk of the event’s revenue comes from ticket sales, and they make money from sponsors and exhibitors.
“You put a couple porn stars in there and call it whatever you want to, and guys will show up,” Handy confides, more and more people spilling through the doors.
***
I take the escalator to the ground level. Outside, it’s hot. Police officers are directing traffic. Two girls in skintight dresses and sky-high heels trot across the street, heading for the show inside where sex is for sale, and everyone’s trying to figure out what you want so they can make another dollar off it.