(NOTE: Today's installment concerns a topic some readers might find completely icky. Reader discretion is advised.)
THE NATION RECENTLY RAN a fairly long piece by Marc Cromer about the LA corporate-porn video industry and a new set of guidelines issued by some of its biggest producers, discouraging or banning images or situations that could be perceived as violent or excessively kinky.
Cromer's premise: Nobody knows yet how much more censorous a good-old-boy Republican president will be than a good-old-boy Democratic president. But just in case, the biggest porn makers are reining in their directors, sacrificing freedom of expression on the altar of political expediency.
That's not quite what's going on.
The adult entertainment business has always been a business first, tailoring its offerings to what it believes the market, as well as the political climate, will bear.
Certainly, the thousands of lo-budget, lo-creativity XXX videos churned out by the industry's majors (some 200 different titles every week) don't attest to sexual or directorial imaginativeness but to assembly-line production, rote formulas, and ever more narrowly-defined market niches.
(Any real couple whose sex life was as unvarying (or as loveless) as the couples in LA porn would be a good candidate for counseling.)
Under corporate porn's new self-imposed rules, the formula will get (and has already gotten) even duller.
But politics isn't the chief reason for the new rules.
What happenned was a new set of distribution channels, which have made hardcore product more widely available but, at the same time, have obligated that product's makers to adjust their content accordingly.
This story begins with the Spice Channel, a cable network owned by some big LA porn-video people. It ran their wares with all phallic and hardcore shots edited out. Then it began Spice Hot, which left in some things but not everything. Playboy bought Spice but not Spice Hot, which became the Hot Network and now appears as a pay-per-view option on assorted cable systems and in thousands of hotel rooms.
It soon became a major new revenue stream for the big LA porn producers. So much so that they started shaping their output to meet the perceived tastes of this more mainstream market.
"Money shot" ejaculation scenes could easily be cut for Hot Network showings but retained for home video. Other types of material, though, had to be rethought from the ground up, lest there be too little Hot Network-appropriate footage in a production to warrant a full pay-per-view retail price.
Hence, the new list of verboten topics Cromer recounts in his story, ranging from wax-dripping and food fetishism to black men with white women.
It doesn't mean you can't see these in porn videos anymore. It just means you won't see them in the videos from the big LA porn factories with contracts to supply shows to the Hot Network. These big companies put out so many darned titles as part of a strategy to crowd smaller producers off the store shelves. The smaller smutmongers, with a whole range of material now theirs alone, might have just been given a new lease on fiscal life.
Unless, of course, there really is a renewed political censorship scare.
IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.
NEXT: Handicapping the Seattle mayoral race at this early date.
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