from www.thestar.com – For four days every January, about 250,000 people swarm the halls of a Las Vegas convention centre to check out the latest in X-rated videos, sex toys, naughty underthings and other unmentionables on display at the Adult Entertainment Expo. Semi-naked show babes roam the floor and throngs of young men stand in line in hot anticipation of getting an autograph from their favourite porn stars – some of whom are clad in leather bustiers demonstrating vibrators for the crowd.

Despite the theme, though, there’s still plenty of variety to be found. At last year’s show, which attracted about 250 exhibitors, a booth for a swingers’ resort in southern Florida shared an aisle with a Japanese company showing off its cybersex doll. Down a bit was Bubba’s House of Ass, the focus of which was entirely posterior. And nestled somewhere in there was the booth belonging to Samantha Linton (a.k.a. Mimi Balfour), a 42-year-old Toronto mother of three boys and award-winning television producer, who was launching Man of My Dreams, her first sensual DVD for women.

As unlikely an exhibitor as Linton may have seemed – she was in Las Vegas with her husband and infant son and is a freelance mainstream television executive – she was clearly onto something. Now, a year since the launch, she boasts worldwide distribution though the Sinclair Institute, a U.S. sex-education company which manufactures and distributes products to pretty much every sex store in the world. Man of My Dreams – a series of eight fairly non-explicit dialogue-free soft-core scenarios (a quickie with a fireman, a playful romp with the dog-walker, a little hands-on with the handyman, and so on) – also has a following on various video-on-demand sites (including Rogers on Demand), as well as on a website devoted to female erotica.

“What’s been interesting for me is that it’s not for everybody,” says Linton, who attached her real name to Man Of My Dreams. “There are a lot of women out there who like the harder-core stuff, who like the gritty imagery. But I just really believe that women deserve to have choice. We can’t just present one type of sexy to the world’s women.”

Until recently there simply haven’t been that many options for women in search of female-friendly erotic content. “Unfortunately the industry is still under the control of men,” says Candida Royalle, a former porn star who now makes her own erotic movies for a female audience. Pornography was created to depict prostitutes “so that men could look at and get off on watching the things their good woman wasn’t doing,” she explains. But now, more women are presenting themselves as an audience. What caused the shift? A few factors, according to Royalle, not the least of which is boomers’ more liberal attitude toward sex (thanks, in part, to the early feminist movement’s belief in a woman’s right to a full, fulfilling sex life). But the clincher was the creation of home videos, which meant women didn’t have to go into sleazy theatres if they were in the mood for titillation. “All of these forces came together and a phenomenon began to happen that the mainstream adult industry didn’t recognize, didn’t want to recognize,” Royalle says. In a 1994 issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, Dr. Ellen Laan, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, reported the results of research that looked at how a group of 47 women responded, physically and emotionally, to excerpts of both man-made male-centric porn and woman-made female-initiated erotica. Both clips showed explicit heterosexual sex: the male porn was set in a “brothel-like environment” and involved no foreplay; the female-made excerpt was set in an elevator and involved four minutes of flirting, kissing and fondling.

Participants’ physical responses were measured and they self-assessed their subjective arousal. Physiologically, the women responded enthusiastically and equally to both types of pornography. But subjectively, they used words like “banal,” “ludicrous,” and “obscene” to describe the man-made porn. They responded well – using words like “arousing,” “sensual,” “beautiful” and “real” – to the woman-made clip. The conclusion: women respond physically to sexual cues the same as men but their desire is determined by additional forces – environment, emotional involvement, and so on.

Dr. Meredith Chivers, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University, came to similar conclusions in her research. “Where the difficulty comes is appealing to women’s emotional sense of being turned on,” says Chivers. “There is a lot more variation to women’s preferences than what we typically see with men. Some women don’t want to see graphic depictions; others enjoy it. Some women say they’re more aroused by a narrative structure; that’s not interesting to others.”

Before making Man Of My Dreams, Linton got about 10 women age 25 to 45 together to watch a cross-section of videos – everything “from the goofy 1970s pizza-man-shows-up-at-the-front-door-`Oh, I don’t have my wallet’ to the man in the clinical white lab coat telling you where to find your G spot and everything that was in between,” she recalls.

The focus group hated the classic-porn cheesy dialogue – Linton’s scenarios have a musical soundtrack but no words – and yearned for great love scenes with plenty of sexual charge but not necessarily explicit action.

Even so Royalle, a pioneer in this field, felt strongly that her films should be explicit. “I felt it could be done in a sensual, beautiful way that could make you feel good about your body,” she explains. “Hiding it conveyed that it was dirty and shameful.” The important thing, Royalle adds, is that women viewers are able to relate to the woman onscreen.

Both Royalle and Linton see a younger generation of women more comfortable with making and viewing pornography and erotica. But that’s not who Linton made Man of My Dreams for.

“I’m aiming my product at moms in their 30s and 40s who are maybe curious about dipping their toes into the adult entertainment waters but who have been put off previously by some of the choices out there,” she says. “I’m providing them with a safe way in.”