AMONG THE PORNOGRAPHERS

This odd assemblage has gathered for a four-day World Pornography Conference, August 6-9, in the Universal Sheraton, amid the strip-mall sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, porn-production capital of the world. The meeting is sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge — a sort of Left Coast Kinsey Institute.

Over 500 academics — sociologists, anthropologists, sexologists, film and gender-studies teachers, and interdisciplinary seekers from across the country — are attending under the guise of studying “Eroticism and the First Amendment.” But the real aim is simpler: to celebrate pornography. As center founder and professor emeritus of history Vern Bullough says, speaking for the 12-year-old in all of us, “We hope to get more [pornography] deposits from the industry — so we’ll have the biggest porn collection in the country!”

The profs are hardly alone in their enthusiasm. Despite unmerited accusations of bluenosery from more thoroughly debauched Europeans, the fact is, Americans love porn. We spend $ 8 billion a year on it, more than on hot dogs or country music. Last year the industry released 7,970 porno flicks — 35 times the number of mainstream Hollywood features. With the ’90s resurgence of Quiana-draped, ’70s-era porn chic (Boogie Nights, Larry Flynt’s deification, etc.), gone is the stigma that once forced smut enthusiasts to slink away to red-light strokehouses. Porn’s pervasiveness on VHS and AOL and DVD and pay-per-view allows any midwestern pharmaceutical salesman on expense account to access Sorority Slumber Sluts in La Quinta Inn, queen-sized solitude.

It is small surprise, then, that the same state system of higher education that harbored Mario Savio’s Free Speech Movement and brought us Angela Davis’s appointment as “professor of the history of consciousness” has seen fit to confer scholarly legitimacy on this once-closeted form of entertainment. Cal State Northridge has conducted other sex conferences — in 1995, the First International Congress on Gender, Cross Dressing, and Sex Issues; in 1997, the International Conference on Prostitution — on the principle that they enhance “the university’s service to the community.” As media attractions, these spectacles tend to garner more coverage than discussions of the epidemiology of gonococcal infections.

But porn plenaries make for unorthodox encounters. Riding up to the opening session in a packed elevator, I watch fellow journalist Luke Ford come eyeball to areola with a porn producer’s statuesque companion. “I look at your wife with the utmost respect, a coequal partner in the search for truth,” Luke booms in his Aussie accent.

Luke is from Cooranbong, outside Sydney. He’s a kind of shaggy-haired, acid-washed Brad Pitt, the 32- year-old son of a former Seventh Day Adventist evangelist. After a bout with atheism in his twenties, he converted to Judaism on hearing Dennis Prager, the Jewish radio theologian. Luke moved to Los Angeles and decided to write a book on either ethical living or pornography. He settled on porn, and his A History of X will be published next year. In the meantime, he serves as the industry’s Matt Drudge, operating a porn-news Web site, where profiles of Wendy Whoppers and Max Hardcore are garnished with Torah references and discussion of whether Jewish porners keep kosher.

Loathed in the porn industry for aggressively reporting stories such as an HIV epidemic that has seen five stars test positive since January, Luke is forced to cadge a Sydney Morning Herald press pass to gain admittance to the conference. I ask him why he stays on this beat, and after feeble protestations about being the only critical observer in a racket filled with industry shills, he finally shrugs: “Good question — it’s something I talk about weekly with my shrink. She’s an orthodox Jew.”

Like everyone else here, Luke discounts claims by feminists and fundamentalists that pornography leads to violence against women. But unlike anyone else here, he seems perplexed about porn, offering eloquent disquisitions on its corrosive effect and tendency to desensitize. Once able to abstain from watching the stuff, he has developed a taste for the roughest hardcore.

Luke breaks with the academics and porners who’ve adopted a chipper Rousseauian view of things: No impulse should be subjugated; porn is nothing but natural man expressing himself in the most natural of ways. He regards pornography as “inherently wild, nasty, and vicious.” “The male animal is very bad news,” he says, “and pornography exemplifies that. These people are divorced from the foundations of our civilization.” As Luke sees it, “the best arguments against pornography are religious ones: that sex should be sacred, that the human being contains the image of God, that we should not act like animals but live in a more moral, elevated sense. I buy that,” he says, “even if I don’t live up to it.”

Despite his inner conflict, Luke serves as my Sacajawea, guiding me through the alien biosphere that is this convocation, pointing out people I should meet. Because his name is recognized and reviled by industry regulars, Luke intermittently uses an alias, and I join in for sport. We introduce ourselves to potential sources as retired gay porn stars Dick Dundee and Jack Hammer.

My first introduction is to Ed Powers, whose soft-leather boots and head-to-toe black make him look like a Riviera pimp. The brains behind the ever-popular Dirty Debutantes series, Ed considers himself a true “innovator” and thinks the scholarly attention afforded by the organizers of this conference has been “a long time in coming — excuse the pun.” Rare is the speaker who does not make at least one “no pun intended” or “so to speak” aside.

Luke points out Vanessa Del Rio, who once sucked milk out of a cow’s udders on a magazine shoot. She’s here to pick up a lifetime achievement award from the Free Speech Coalition, the conference co-sponsor and porn-industry trade association which has made a major bid for respectability. The coalition provides “talent” with health insurance, peer counseling, AIDS tests, and diagnostic information on scabies, syphilis, and venereal warts (the porner’s carpal-tunnel syndrome). It also sends articulate porn stars like Juli Ashton out to lobby against sin taxes and zoning ordinances and to “educate” the world at large to see that “we’re just normal, nice, moral people.” (Juli has sex with a pair of circus clowns in New Wave Hookers 4.)

The opening ceremony will take place in a panoramic rooftop conference room. In the crowd milling around the cash bar, we run into a truly extraordinary apparition: Dr. Susan Block, who looks like Little Bo Peep on leave from a French bordello, in her layers of ruffled chiffon, peek-a-boo garters, and barely contained decolletage. Dr. Block graduated magna cum laude from Yale and earned her doctorate in philosophy at San Francisco State University. A sex therapist and bestselling author (The 10 Commandments of Pleasure), she hosts a syndicated cable talk show, where she dispenses advice on matters coital. After the show, which is broadcast from her home-studio “pleasure palace” in Beverly Hills, the guests and onlookers often dog-pile in some sort of living-room bacchanal.

Like many of the academics at this conference, Block has constructed her own discipline. She calls herself an “ethical hedonist.” As we talk, she pulls me and Luke and a Canadian documentary film crew into the ladies’ room, along with her lovely assistant LaVonne.

Unprompted, she removes a rubber phallus from her purse and hikes up LaVonne’s dress, baring her derriere. Block paddles it and kisses it while LaVonne coos. Before she can return to explaining her philosophy, Block is seized by inspiration: “Wanna hear me tinkle?” The Canadian boom-mike operator eagerly nods.

Not much of a hedonist, I rejoin the scholars, now taking their seats in front of the stage for the first evening’s proceedings. The profs are gawking, cotton- mouthed, at the bounty of stilettoed vixens; they burrow clammy hands in snug chinos pockets like nervous ethnographers dropped into an Amazon tribe of sexpot savages.

The entertainment, dubbed “Pornocopia, Our Body of Work,” doesn’t disappoint. Performance artist Annie Sprinkle, porn’s Yoko Ono, asks the crowd how many of them have made pornography. Nearly half the people in the room raise their hands (including Luke, who sheepishly admits that he recently completed a pseudo-documentary, What Women Want). Sprinkle, so named for her practice of urinating on stage, slogs through a tortuously blue monologue, which elicits belly-laughs from the hundreds of profs intent on proving they’re in on the joke.

The headliner, though, is porn veteran Nina Hartley. She starred in the mainstream Boogie Nights, once lectured at Harvard, and is highly regarded for her script-memorizing ability and educational fare like Woodworking 101: Nina’s Guide to Better Fellatio.

Nina dances topless and virtually bottomless while lipsynching an old Alberta Hunter tune until her glutei glisten like the haunches of a slightly dimpled Clydesdale. When she finishes, Nina barely has time to slip into her floral dress before being stormed by inquisitive academics, including a white-whiskered educational psychologist who wants to talk about developing a program where porn stars work with the handicapped.

He wishes to remain anonymous since he’s affiliated with Los Angeles public schools. But I ask the good doctor what he has in mind. “I don’t know, we haven’t sat down and talked,” he says, still glassy-eyed from Nina’s performance. “This isn’t the place. But I have lots of ideas, so does Nina. This whole world is new to me. I’m just exploring and seeing what I can do that’s instructive. . . . There’s a lot more I need to learn.”

“About what?” I ask.

“About sex!” he says, exasperated.

Of course, many of us have been operating under the illusion that sex is a fairly straightforward proposition. Not so the academics. These professors have tripped upon a glorious discovery. It all started when the old canon was torched in the late ’60s in favor of spot-scholarship on any given researcher’s own personal interests, manias, viewing habits, and turn-ons.

This led to the proliferation of victim studies and human-sexuality courses and, more important, to the advent of pop-culture departments, whose prototype hatched at Ohio’s Bowling Green University in the early ’70s. As Ray Browne, architect of that department, once noted, academics found respite from neuroscience and deepest Descartes to rejuvenate themselves at these “intellectual fat farms.” Some took up tenured residence there and are bingeing still on post-modernist sweetmeats: All things are worthy of study. Any nugatory pastime should be seen as a “text,” to be decoded by liberal-arts gnostics. In this way are new disciplines erected (“LesBiGayTrans Film Studies”), a new lingo created (“patriarchal hegemony”). Papers are presented at conferences with titles like “Body Slam: Professional Wrestling as Greek Tragedy” and “1960s Spy Films as the Locus of Heteronormative Masculinity.”

By now, “porn studies” is featured at several universities (the State University of New York-New Paltz, for example, and the University of California campuses at Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and Berkeley), though the courses may hide under headings like “community studies.” Getting paid for teaching porn is “a good gig if you can get it,” says porn star Sharon Mitchell, who like Nina Hartley occasionally lectures in these classes (when not pursuing her goal of a Ph.D. in child development).

The porners, of course, love their new academic cachet. Most thought they were merely escaping lives rolling gorditas on Taco Bell assembly lines when they took up rutting strangers for money in badly acted films with poor production values. Only now are they realizing that what they do is worthy of study. The Cal State types have even taken to calling porners “adult entertainers,” much as they call prostitutes “sex workers.” As Luke loudly proclaims in the hotel lobby, aiming to reduce the toxic levels of pretension, “These are not whores and pimps and mafiosi! These are actors, directors, producers, and technicians, and journalists, and professors. We’re not just wankers!”

They’re all these things, and feminists as well. Not your classic, fang-baring Andrea-Dworkin, Catherine-MacKinnon, all-sex-is-rape feminist theoreticians incensed by pornography and harassment, but “sex-positive feminists,” as Nina calls them. This is no less than a sea change. In the past, feminist politics — not conventional morality — has stood as the chief impediment to the open acceptance of pornography on campus: Pornography, preached the old feminists, objectifies women within oppressive power hierarchies.

But over the last decade, a spate of Nina Hartley types have given voice to the noble savage. Hartley is a brainy red-diaper baby and socialist who contributes essays like “Frustrations of a Feminist Porn Star” to turgid anthologies, tossing off references to Newtonian and Einsteinian physics and correctly deploying words like “etiology.” She talks about promoting “worker control of the means of production” to reclaim porn as the embodiment of female empowerment and sexual expression as originally envisioned by our foremothers during the sexual revolution.

Though MacKinnon and Dworkin — or “MacDworkin” as the sex-positivists pejoratively call them — would have us believe that the women of the porn industry are victims of patriarchal hegemony, Hartley and company claim to do what they do for profit and pleasure. This is an egalitarian argument — and it can truly be said that porn women are just as autonomous, as morally bereft, and as capable of making bad decisions as porn men.

There’s a certain seductive bonhomie among the positivists, as I learn traveling with Hartley and Sharon Mitchell to a $ 65-a-head porn-industry benefit to combat racism (an event not linked to the conference). I am riding in Nina’s stretch limo, drinking Nina’s bourbon, listening to Nina prattle on about the need for increased interaction between porners and profs and how, were she not so exhibitionistic, she’d like nothing better than “to retreat happily to the study of sex and books in a life of contemplation.” Nina says all this while receiving a foot-rub from Sharon, whose gazelle legs gape apart as she sits in the low-slung seat across from me. Sharon is wearing gold shoulder glitter and a stitch of a dress with nothing under it.

It is hard to imagine riding in a limo drinking bourbon with an underclad MacDworkin. Harder still to imagine wanting to — and probably unnecessary, since MacDworkinism is increasingly marginalized by sane people everywhere. Even on campuses, the porn-positive feminists sunny-up the business enough to lend it cover and discourage scrutiny of its bothersome aspects (AIDS, rampant drug use and suicide, miscellaneous violence — Sharon Mitchell was nearly killed by a fan who broke her larynx while biting her all over her body). Once the sex-positivists gain the advantage, political unanimity prevails — everybody at the conference is a staunch libertarian — and the only remaining issue is esthetic. No one here would dream of asking the question, What do we become by watching porn? Instead, the question is, What kind of porn should we watch?

Sociology professor James Elias, the conference host and director of the Cal State Northridge sex-research center, says he tried to find someone to represent a countervailing view but was unsuccessful. MacDworkinites typically will not debate the merits of pornography. As for porn critics whose objection is religious, Elias says that “to take an evangelical person [and] put them up against one of the top defense attorneys in the country to debate — it would be an embarrassment for everyone.”

He’s referring to the American Civil Liberties Union’s Nadine Strossen, who has come to the conference to defend the proposition, as the ACLU has for years, that engaging in all modes of depravity is a cherished and absolute American right. She told a roomful of porners “how essential” are their efforts to overcome “our puritanical heritage” and applauded their “vital contribution to First Amendment freedoms,” adding, “Keep it up! So to speak!” One would think, listening to Strossen and her ilk, that Anthony Comstock were still screening our mail. The truth, as reported by the Adult Video News, is that there has been no better time in American history to be a pornographer. Obscenity prosecutions have slowed to near-extinction under the Clinton administration, and adult-industry output has doubled in the last five years. While autograph seekers congregate around Strossen, Al Goldstein, the corpulent vulgarian who is the editor of Screw magazine, stands next to her signing programs.

“Oy vey,” says Luke. “Proverbs says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This conference will show you how incredibly stupid people get when they don’t have a fear of God.”

He’s speaking of the professors, who slither through the halls ogling passing porn actresses and purchasing wares like the “Fleshlight — Man’s New Best Friend,” a lifelike molded-gel insert made from “Real Feel Super Skin (TM)” and used for — well, for educational purposes. Also available is an array of catalogs from which to order classroom materials. Porn is now so mainstream that there are even blooper videos: Watch “P.J. break up her co-stars by passing a little gas.”

When one views one’s perversions with scholarly detachment, it seems, all things become permissible. The only genre denounced at the conference is child pornography — except at the child-pornography panel. There, Harris Mirkin, a political scientist from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, asserts there is no real evidence that children are harmed by being photographed naked.

Meanwhile, David Sonenschein, formerly of the Kinsey Institute, illustrates the supposed ludicrousness of child-pornography restrictions by showing us a photograph once forced out of an exhibition. In the picture, a cherubic, naked two-year-old grabs and explores the penis of the photographer, who is reclining naked on a bed.

I ask Vern Bullough, the center’s founder, whether he is bothered by such a display, especially since the photographer wasn’t the child’s father. “I think it’s one of those gray areas,” Bullough says, adding that it is “very educational. . . . We ought to [let children] explore. When I had children, they explored me in the shower.”

I ask Bullough whether anyone else’s children explored him in the shower. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate question,” interjects the conference’s eavesdropping legal counsel. “People’s relations have never been an issue at this conference. It is all based on the material we presented in a professional and scholarly manner.”

Except, it turns out, at the “Night of the Stars,” the Free Speech Coalition’s awards dinner, which serves as something of a porn-star prom night and is held during the conference at the same hotel. Luke can’t attend, as he has to keep the Sabbath holy. Needing a new guide, I turn to Jena, an attractive 25-year-old just off the bus from Orlando. She entered the business three weeks ago and has already starred in seven films — Fresh Flesh and six others she can’t quite remember. Jena is fairly finicky by porn-actress standards: There are varieties of sex she won’t engage in on screen, including interracial — that is, until Mr. Marcus saunters up behind her.

Mr. Marcus, who looks like a tightly coiled anaconda with elephantiasis of the deltoids, is fresh from starring in the World’s Luckiest Black Man, so titled because Mr. Marcus couples with 101 co-stars. He says the shoot took one day, though industry sources snit that it actually took three. Still, that’s 33.6 women a day, and nobody’s questioning his work ethic.

Though Jena has promised to take me to an after-party at a place called the Rubber Room, she disappears with Mr. Marcus. Ten minutes later, I find her in a meeting room where stragglers are eagerly congregating. She is on her knees pleasuring Mr. Marcus for the benefit of 20 or so onlookers. In the same room over the next hour, various awards-night attendees and industry shutterbugs view other impromptu live-sex shows.

Two starlets lie on a table, engaging in sexual activity as matter-of-factly as if they were exchanging business cards. Another barely coherent platinum-haired actress in a silver-sequined cocktail dress spreads her hands against the wall to gain her balance. All hard bones and hollow eye-sockets, her head involuntarily bobbing side to side like a spring-necked dashboard ornament, she lowers herself onto an empty Bud Light bottle. She is met with cheers from her carny-barker escort and from the sweaty spectators who have pressed around her like punters at a Balinese cockfight. As she sits sprawled on the floor, emitting alcohol-induced giggles, souvenirseekers take turns cozying up behind her to have their pictures taken.

Jena tells me such exhibitions are good for business. Only later do I learn that she has a husband who knows nothing of her extracurricular networking (her six-year-old daughter doesn’t even know of her “acting” career). She begs me not to write about it, until I remind her that she fellated Mr. Marcus in front of a roomful of photographers. “All right,” she relents, “go ahead.”

Most of the panels, however, present no vexing dilemmas: Porn is good. Pants-suited porn starlets wax self-analytic at a session headlined “Victims or Visionaries?” Verdict: Visionaries! Against this consensus, panels explore the particulars of porn’s artistic merits and cultural significance, harvesting insights so minute as to be barely detectable. At the “Role of Fetishism” panel, philosophy professor David Austin of North Carolina State University has determined through rigorous Internet study that the number of “necro[philia] enthusiasts is about three times that of [menstrual] period enthusiasts.” The next speaker, Midori, a “FetishDiva” squeezed into a black rubber Emma Peel catsuit with six-inch stiletto boots, shows us slides of 19th-century Austrian pumps that “render the wearer immobile and thrust the foot forward like an offering.”

Over in “Cum Shots: History, Theory, and Research,” Dr. Peter Sandor Gardos, a San Francisco clinical sexologist, explains his research on the ejaculatory “money shot,” the genre’s most sacred convention. Gardos recruits college sophomores to view porn-movie clips of actors ejaculating on their female counterparts, then gauges whether they find the images degrading. His data have led him to conclude that “no pornographic image is interpretable outside of its historical and social context. Harm or degradation does not reside in the image itself.” Bill Margold, who has starred in over 400 films, begs to differ, asserting that such shots represent “vicarious revenge exacted upon the cheerleader by X-number of men who could not get that cheerleader.”

Another panel deconstructs Ed Powers’s Dirty Debutantes oeuvre. Peter Lehman, a University of Arizona professor and Blake Edwards scholar, reads from a laborious treatise laced with allusions to Godard, Lumiere, and Melies. Powers’s contribution: He displaces “the monotonous emphasis on the meat shot” and constructs instead “a comic Woody Allen-like Jewish persona for himself, acknowledging insecurities such as worrying about his penis size.” Lehman concedes to me that he and his colleagues “are legitimizing [porners] within the culture,” but only in a way “that I think they deserve.”

Academics, it seems, are the only people who can de-eroticize sex more completely than pornographers. The most striking instance comes when U of Cal Irvine’s Jay Lorenz delivers his presentation on the “gonzo” films of John Stagliano, a.k.a. Buttman, one of Porn’s top directors, a Cato Institute benefactor, and an unapologetic gluteus enthusiast.

Citing Stagliano’s voyeuristic verite travelogues, which begin as interviews and culminate in sex in public places, a straight-faced Lorenz launches a lengthy exegesis comparing Stagliano’s persona to the late-19th-century flaneur as described by Baudelaire. He illustrates with clips of Buttman in Barcelona. Lorenz’s purpose? To expatiate on the “binary collapse” and “epistemological flippage” brought about by “the erosion of the once-secure border distinction between the private and public spheres.”

Himself a panelist, Stagliano looks slightly embarrassed by the attention. “All I wanted to do was make videos that really turned me on,” he mumbles, his shirt unbuttoned to mid-sternum. “Another idea I had was to make a video about, uh, my obsession, uh, with female butts.”

Nobody laughs. But if anyone entertains lingering doubts about what fuels Stagliano’s artistic vision, he need only walk to the back of the room, past the beard-tugging academics, past the beaded water pitchers, to the table that contains an advertisement for Stagliano’s Buttman magazine. There, beneath a letter from the editor entitled “From the Crack,” is a picture of Stagliano: Auteur, Libertarian Champion, Toast of the Academy, Harbinger of Tomorrow’s Canon. At least it looks like Stagliano. It’s difficult to tell. His face is buried in some girl’s fleshy keister.

EDITOR-NOTE:

Editor’s note: Because of the subject matter, some material in this article is sexually explicit and may offend some readers.

Matt Labash is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.