Porn Valley- What is the 21st-century Pornopolis?

It’s “My Bare Lady,” a Fox reality television show that will send female porn stars to London this year, where they will “act” in theater.

It’s the “Next American Sex Star,” an “Apprentice”-like production on the Playboy Channel, in which striving starlets vie to be part of Jenna Jameson’s stable of entertainers.

It’s nude celebrities brooding on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine in February.

It’s even the disturbing images from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, broadcast for all the world to see in 2004.

It’s publishing houses like Harlequin and HarperCollins starting lines of even steamier romance novels.

It’s even the word “porn,” which now is used to describe a variety of relationships consumers have with compelling things. The Canadian province of Quebec, for instance, promoted itself with the tag “Food Porn” in a recent advertising campaign. A Slate.com writer referred to The New York Times’ “Vows” column as “bridal porn.”

It’s Paris Hilton vaulting from unknown socialite to hot celebrity after the release of a pornographic sex tape involving her and an ex-boyfriend.

It’s porn star Jenna Jameson becoming a mainstream “brand,” complete with books, television shows, movie appearances and a flourishing media schedule.

It’s nearly everybody having seen hard-core pornography, and many spending a lot of time flirting with it: Teenagers wearing thongs, men at bars popping Viagra like mints to keep them as energetic as the men in porn, and sex toys trumpeted by porn stars getting sold at suburban house parties.

The Pornopolis celebrates sex and sexuality. It encourages everyone, everywhere, to join the party and get nasty. Tupperware parties are ancient. Now suburban women nationwide host sex-toy sleepovers instead. The newest of these “home party networks,” Jenna’s Playthings, is based in Denver and owned by Jameson’s lawyer, who lives in the metro area.

In the Pornopolis, the hyper-orgasmic, Olympian carnal performances of porn stars get confused with what really does, or at least realistically can, go on in the bedroom.

“There are a lot of younger men in particular who are really struggling with what sex is,” says celebrity sex-educator and counselor Laura Berman, who now is filming a reality TV show with Showtime Network about real couples and their sex lives.

“Before, most men saw National Geographic or a Playboy, but learned about what sex was through being with women. Now they are learning about what sex is through porn, which is not a realistic depiction of what women look like, what sex is, and what pleasures women.”

It remains an open question whether exposure to pornography influenced CU Boulder senior Brian Beverly’s understanding of sex and sexuality.

But there’s no doubt the 20-year-old physics major from Lakewood has seen plenty of it.

Where a rite of passage for earlier generations was finding dad’s stack of Playboys, for Beverly it was gathering at the house in the neighborhood with the first broadband connection and watching hard-core pornography movies.

“Playboy now is nothing,” he says.

“A naked girl – it’s nothing exciting.

People are so used to hard-core images.”

Beverly sat in the student union cafeteria with Olivia Gass, 20, a studio arts major from Rico, their table strewn with books and reading materials.

Gass says pornography doesn’t bother her, and she has no problem with people who elect to become actors in the industry. “I don’t think of porn as glamorous,” she says, “but I can see how someone would.”

Indeed, it’s not the raw sex-on-camera that has captivated the nation but a glamorized idea of pornography, says CU Denver English professor Bradford Mudge, who has invested a chunk of his academic career in examining the history of pornography.

What could be called pornography first appeared in the 18th century and evolved over time.

Pornography, he says, “has exploded into every conceivable corner and niche of capitalism, but in a bizarre way … The pornography part of the porno culture has disappeared.

“The content of pornography has disappeared in American culture. It’s not about sex at all, it’s about advertising and glamour and selling products and fill-in-the-blank. It’s not about sex, because we can’t talk about sex.”

What we see, however, is different from a generation ago.

In the porn world now, Playboy verges on downright Disney, and Playboy’s profits have suffered, down from $14.5 million in 2004 to $4.6 million last year.

Last month, Playboy Enterprises bought Club Jenna Inc., a hard-core adult film studio, from porn star Jenna Jameson, suddenly giving Playboy a prominent place in a raunchier adult world than that of gentlemen and rabbit-eared “bunnies” frolicking at a mansion.

Penthouse still has an edge – although much dulled – and Hustler has maintained its raunch, although now it’s just one package of hard-core images in an expanding ocean of equally and much more coarse material.

Nothing illustrates the cultural shift better than the transformation of pornography starlet Jenna Jameson into an iconic business personality, like Martha Stewart or Donald Trump, complete with her own bestselling book, “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,” and a growing line of products.

Women crowded the aisles at the adult industry’s annual “trade show” in Las Vegas this year – really, more of a sex circus than a corporate cavalcade – and many of them came to see Jameson.

“I wanted to see her because she used her brain and capitalized on the industry,” says Angela Drovin, 23, dressed in the explicitly revealing manner of many of the porn stars.

Fans say Jenna Jameson revolutionized the porn industry.

“I think she’s sort of raising the bar, so men don’t mind having their wives and girlfriends watching it with them,” says Jennifer Butterworth, 26, of Broomfield, an avowed pornography fanatic. “All of my friends, they all like to watch porn.”

The reasons are manifold. Include Jameson among them, says Wheelock College professor Gail Dines.

“The story of this culture has to have her front and center,” she says. “Prior to Jenna Jameson, there was no such thing as a porn star. They were seedy, they couldn’t cut it in pop culture.

“She is the first real porn star to truly break into pop culture. She is an image to young women of what you can be. Before, you’d never look at a porn star and say, ‘I want to be her.’ ”

It’s not just Jameson who has muscled into mainstream American culture, however.

Rapper Snoop Dogg financed a porno movie, and his film-production company’s first movie revolves around the life of a pimp. Porn actors are regulars on music videos and on Howard Stern’s radio show, and they are creeping into mainstream Hollywood fare.

Even politics. Mary Carey, who has performed in more than 60 adult movies, attended the United to Victory dinner in Washington in March, a fundraising event for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

As celebrities increasingly welcome adult actors into their worlds, even more everyday folk are identifying not with a favorite singer or movie star but with an adult entertainer.

Lee Anne Borger, 40, traveled from from Lorraine, Ohio, to the Adult Entertainment Expo this year, just as she has done for the past 11 years with her husband. She’s a veteran porn fan.

But porn has gone too mainstream for Borger. At this year’s show, “It’s bigger, there’s more product, there’s more vendors, there’s a lot more fans,” she says. “This is ridiculous. You’re shoulder-to-shoulder.”

Porn stars strolled down a long red carpet through the casino to a banquet hall, flanked by walls of people, mostly men, on either side, beckoning them to stop for pictures. Then – just like the Oscars – they stopped in a press corral and chatted-up reporters.

The event’s grandeur, if that’s what it was, didn’t rub off on the Sex and So Much More Show, a traveling sex circus that rolled into the Colorado Convention Center in February. If the Adult Entertainment Expo felt like Hollywood writ small, the Sex and So Much More Show had the air of a middle-school theater production about it.

Still, more than 15,000 people packed the convention center for the weekend, to commune with sex toys and strippers, to get their books signed by Jenna Jameson and take a tour of the “dungeon,” with its dominatrixes and whips.

Event coordinator Kari Calder says the Sex and So Much More show will definitely return to Denver next year.