Obscene Profits

Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age

Frederick Lane, Frederick S. Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9781135115708
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Sex sells. Already a ten-billion dollar business-and growing-most sex businesses require relatively low start-up costs and minimal equipment. No wonder retired porn stars, homemakers, college students, and entrepreneurs of every stripe are eager to jump on the smut band wagon. Following the money trail, or in this case, the telecom routes, the author reveals how some big phone companies are cashing in too. Obscene Profits offers a startling and entertaining new look at this very old business, and shows why pornography, in all of its variations--videos, magazines, phone-sex, spy cameras, etc.-- is one of the most profitable and popular new careers to come out of the electronic age.

1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PORNOGRAPHY AND TECHNOLOGY

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
and that which is done is that which shall be done;
and there is no new thing under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

On August 7, 1908, archaeologist Josef Szombathy discovered a small limestone figurine lying deep in the mud of the Danube River outside the town of Willendorf, Austria.¹ Carbon dating of the sedimentary layer in which the figurine, nicknamed the “Venus of Willendorf,” was found put the object's age at somewhere between 24,000 and 22,000 B.C.E., making it one of the earliest depictions of the human form ever discovered.

Even with the passage of more than 240 centuries, there can be no doubt that the figurine Szombathy discovered is a depiction of a human female. Although seven long braids encircle the figurine's head and obscure the face, the body's chief distinguishing characteristics—an upright torso, large pendulous breasts, and prominent mons pubis with a distinctly rendered vulva—are unmistakably human and unequivocally female. The rest of the figurine is no less remarkable: thin, almost nonexistent arms draped across the breasts; round and well-padded buttocks; an ample stomach; rolls of fat along her sides; and corpulent thighs, pressed together but not obscuring her genitals.

On the basis of age and craftsmanship alone, the Venus was a remarkable discovery. It is one of the earliest examples of humanity's ability to create images in three dimensions, and it was executed with compelling skill and attention to detail. Its diminutive size and final resting place, in soil far from the oolitic limestone from which it was carved, suggests that it was intended as a piece of portable art. Perhaps most compellingly of all, the figurine was clearly designed to highlight and accentuate female sexual characteristics.

Over the last 150 years, approximately 200 similar figurines have been found in locations ranging from France and Spain in the west to the Urals in the east. Vast amounts of research grant dollars have been spent and small forests have been leveled in the debate by archaeologists and anthropologists over the significance of these figurines.² Scholars debate their possible significance as religious or cult icons, fertility totems, rites of passage, realistic or stylized portraits, and tribal identifiers. Some even suggest that they are little more than prehistoric Barbie dolls. Given the skill and artistic detail with which the Venus of Willendorf was executed, it is tempting to surmise that a skilled pre-historic sculptor might have profitably traded figurines for food, fire, shelter, and other necessities. The lack of a written historical record, however, makes it unlikely that definitive answers to these questions will ever be found.

As is often the case, the labeling and description of these figurines reveals far more about contemporary attitudes toward sexual imagery than those of their creators.

The nickname “Venus,” for instance, was first used to describe a prehistoric figurine by a French archaeologist, the Marquis de Vibraye, who discovered a similar statuette at Abri de Laugerie-Basse in 1864. By the turn of the century, the term had become standard archaeological shorthand for each new female Paleolithic figurine.³ Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, a professor of archaeology at Sweet Briar College, explains that:

To identify the Willendorf figurine as “Venus,” then, was a rich male joke that neatly linked the primitive and the female with the uncivilized and at the same time, through implicit contrast with the Classical Venus, served as a reassuring example to patriarchal culture of the extent to which the female and female sexuality had been overcome and women effectively subjugated by the male-dominated civilizing process.⁴

When the figurines weren't being mocked for their depiction of the female form, they were being effectively censored for the explicitness of their renderings. Despite the obvious historical and artistic importance of the Venus of Willendorf, for instance, the nudity and unequivocal sexuality of the figurine kept it out of beginning art textbooks for nearly 60 years. While the ostensible reason for the figurine's omission was the belief that it was not typical of its period,⁵ the primary (albeit unspoken) objection was to the carving's explicitness and thinly veiled eroticism.

As the sexual revolution swept the nation in the late 1960s, easing attitudes toward the depiction of sexual imagery, the Venus of Willendorf not only gained her rightful place in entry-level art texts but also became something of a cultural phenomenon. The figurine was adopted by many as a symbol of the Mother or Earth Goddess, a concatenation of multiple prehistoric female deities carrying heavy overtones of fertility fetish and erotic charm.

Thanks in large part to Jean Auel's popular Earth's Children series, best known for its first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear, the Venus as Goddess is now probably the most widely accepted explanation for the figurines.⁶ In the second book of the series, for instance, Auel's hero Jondolar carries a Venus figurine with him on a ritual journey with his brother:

As he spoke, Jondalar unconsciously reached into the pouch attached to his belt and felt for the small stone figurine of an obese female. He felt the familiar huge breasts, her large protruding stomach, and her more than ample buttocks and thighs. The arms and legs were insignificant, it was the Mother aspects that were important, and the limbs on the stone figure were only suggested. The head was a knob with a suggestion of hair that carried across the face, with no features.

No one could look on the awesome face of Doni, the Great Earth Mother, Ancient Ancestress, First Mother, Creator and Sustainor of all life, She who blessed all women with Her power to create and bring forth life. And none of the small images of Her that carried Her spirit, the donii, ever dared to suggest Her face.

Jondalar absentmindedly caressed the pendulous stone breasts of the donii in his pouch, wishing for luck as he thought about their Journey.⁷

Today, the Venus of Willendorf's role is more commercial than spiritual. With her image having passed into the public domain centuries ago, more than 200 hundred sites on the World Wide Web alone display the image of the Venus of Willendorf or offer Venus-adorned products for sale. The Venus can now be found, for instance, on jewelry of every description (brass, pewter, gold), on T-shirts, posters, postcards, and paper dolls, and even molded into glycerine soap. Even prehistoric sex, it appears, sells.

THE GREEKS AND THE ROMANS

The commercial use of sexual images in Western civilization reached its height in Greek and Roman culture. By the time they consolidated their political and military control over the Aegean peninsula circa 800 B.C.E., the Greeks had already established widespread trade in goods and services.

Thanks to extensive archaeological excavations over the last century, numerous ancient Greek household and decorative items have been uncovered. Even a cursory examination of these ordinary objects makes clear that sex was a commonplace theme. Sexual imagery adorns wine coolers, dinnerware, and even children's drinking bowls and plates.⁸ The Greeks also carved sexual images and fertility symbols into stone statuettes and figurines, beat them into bronze bowls and mirror covers, and molded them into clay lamps. Sexual activity or symbols were not the only subject depicted on vases and other household objects, of course—Greek artists also depicted scenes from everyday life, famous battles, and myths and legends—but sex was clearly a common and unremarkable theme.⁹

With the destruction of Corinth in 146 B.C.E., the territories of Ancient Greece came under the control of Rome, which quickly established itself as the preeminent military and economic power in the Mediterranean. Aided by a superb system of roads stretching thousands of miles, an efficient postal system, the Roman legions, a common currency, and low tariffs, Roman businesses traded goods from one end of the empire to the other and with many of the neighboring civilizations. As with the Greeks before them, the Romans showed little reluctance to produce artistic works containing often frank descriptions of sexual activity. The poems of Roman writers such as Catullus, Martial, and Juvenal, for instance, have inspired schoolboy snickers for generations, and have stretched the editorial abilities of classical scholars. Among Catullus's least scabrous lines, for example, are the following:

I entreat you, my sweet Ipsitilla,

my darling, my charmer,

bid me come and spend the afternoon with you.

And if you do bid me, grant me this kindness too,

that no one may bar the panel of your threshold,

nor you yourself have a fancy to go away,

but stay at home and have ready for me

nine consecutive copulations.

And bid me come at once if you are going to at all:

for I'm on my bed after lunch, thrusting through tunic and cloak.¹⁰

In addition, many of the objects produced by Roman artists and businesses were sexual in nature or adorned with explicit sexual images. The fertility cult of Priapus was important to the Romans, and artisans worked the cult's chief symbol (an erect or semierect penis) into wax votive candles, jewelry, wall carvings, hanging lamps, ornaments, mosaics, and even belt buckles.¹¹ And as the excavations at Pompeii clearly reveal, Roman sexual imagery was not limited to household items but also adorned household walls in the form of paintings, murals, and frescoes. A strenuous argument was made that such images appeared only on the walls of Roman brothels, a view poignantly captured by poet James Dickey in his poem “In the Lupanar at Pompeii”:

As tourist, but mostly as lecher,

I seek out the dwelling of women

Who all expect me, still, because

They expect anybody who comes.

I am ready to pay, and I do,

And then go in among them

Where on the dark walls of their home

They hold their eternal postures,

Doing badly drawn, exacting,

Too-willing, wild-eyed things

With dry-eyed art.¹²

When that argument was conclusively rejected, the fallback position was that sexually explicit materials appeared only in rooms that were used exclusively by adults (and preferably just by men and prostitutes). However, further research has made it clear that erotic images took their place with less explicit works of art throughout the home. The discoverers and custodians of Pompeii could do little about the unfortunate artistic choices of the long-dead Romans, but they did their best to shield modern sensibilities. As late as 1964, the rooms adorned with sexually explicit frescoes and paintings were still roped off to most visitors, although men could usually gain entrance by plying the site custodian with a small gratuity.¹³

Given the profound impact that Greek and Roman culture and thought have had on virtually every other aspect of Western civilization, it is noteworthy that the commercial use of sexual imagery in the U.S. has still not matched those ancient cultures in its scope or frankness. A number of powerful factors—the birth of a ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Brief History of Pornography and Technology
• 2 Voyeur Viewing Pleasure
• 3 The Thin Blue Line
• 4 The Risky Business of Online Pornography
• 5 Phone Sex: The First National Pornography Network
• 6 The Search for Satisfaction
• 7 Honey, Is That Really You?
• 8 All the Web’s a Stage
• 9 The Future of Online Sexual Entrepreneurship
• Index