One thing I like about the porn industry (and there are plenty I don’t) is the sick sense of humor often on display. Everyone enjoys bad taste and taboo-flouting to some degree, and my “that’s not funny” boundary is way out there.
But sometimes bad taste is just … in bad taste.
Two months ago, pornstar Steve Driver went berserk with a prop samurai sword at a porn studio and killed fellow pornstar Tom Dong. (Those are their screen names.) After a four-day manhunt, Driver fell off a cliff while surrounded by police.
This week Robert Hill Releasing, which owns the rights to much of Driver’s and Dong’s screen work, issued a compilation DVD called Porno Samurai Killer. The company’s owner explains in a press release, “This movie is in honor of Steve Driver and Tom Dong (let them rest in peace) for their dedication and hard work for the adult business. There is no business without all the actors and actresses.”
Lest anyone take this “pour one for my homies” rhetoric at face value, here is the DVD box cover.
Porno Samurai Killer with Steve Driver & Tom Dong
Wow. Just wow. I’m pretty difficult to offend, but that did the trick.
(The Steve Driver image is taken from his 2010 role in Tea Bagging Party, a political porn parody in which he donned a Ronald Reagan mask.)
In June 2009, Australian police raided the offices of G Media, the company that runs Abby Winters and other pornsites. In December, authorities charged owner Garion Hall with 50+ counts of “making objectionable films for gain and possessing a commercial quantity of objectionable films”.
Here’s the latest news:
In June 2010, the company accepted a plea bargain, pled guilty to two counts and paid a small fine. Garion Hall wrote on the abbywinters.com member forum, “We have always believed the law to be gray in this area, and the law had not been properly tested in this regard. We could have spent many thousands of dollars in attempting to define the laws but this would have involved additional time and resources that the company could ill afford, therefore, the company plead guilty to the two charges.”
The company has also decided to close its Australian business and relocate to Amsterdam. They stopped shooting content in Australia in May, and they hope to start posting new European-shot content by September.
Meanwhile Abby Winters is feuding with anti-porn journalists and disgruntled ex-models over the removal of past content. During the legal fight, a G Media lawyer told a judge that company policy allows models to request their photos and videos be taken off the website. Several former models then requested their old content be removed immediately, which the company declined to do. The Melbourne-based Herald Sun accuses G Media of reneging on its promise. The company insists it weighs removal requests by committee on a case-by-case basis.
Luther Campbell, yeah that Luther Campbell from 2 Live Crew, has a regular column at the alt-weekly Miami New Times, where he “gets as nasty as he wants to be” with the full support of the editorial board.
This week he writes about sex in strip club champagne rooms, which has become more common and cheaper due to tough economic times.
The price of sex has gone down to $50 at local strip clubs. In fact, so many girls are screwing customers that the holdouts are losing money. [...]
ATL has worked at all the big strip clubs, such as Coco’s, King of Diamonds, and Tootsie’s Cabaret. There was a day when ATL would get on the top stage at any one of those titty bars and make $300 or $400 dancing to one song. Now she’s lucky to collect $10. More and more, girls are dancing less and just having sex.
And even girls who play the game have to worry about club managers and pimps gouging them.
Jesse Bering at Scientific American looks at one quality that makes the human species “special and unique”: masturbation.
This conjuring ability to create fantasy scenes in our heads that literally bring us to orgasm when conveniently paired with our dexterous appendages is an evolutionary magic trick that I suspect is uniquely human. It requires a cognitive capacity called mental representation (an internal “re-presentation” of a previously experienced image or some other sensory input) that many evolutionary theorists believe is a relatively recent hominid innovation.
He cites a research study by evolutionary biologists which argued that frequent masturbation makes evolutionary sense:
because there is a “shelf-life” for sperm cells – they remain viable for only 5-7 days after production – and because adult human males manufacture a whopping 3 million sperm per day, masturbation is an evolved strategy for shedding old sperm while making room for new, fitter sperm.
Makes sense to me.
Vanity Fair has a great interview with Penn Jillette, one of my personal heroes.
The interviewer spends much of his mental energy trying to figure out Jillette’s libertarian worldview. Jillette summarizes, “if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it’s straight ahead”. Amen, brother.
Until yesterday, Hustler had several dozen promo trailers for their DVD releases on YouTube. The account is named “bighustlerfan911“, but it seemed to be the authorized YouTube channel where Hustler uploaded its trailers.
The films advertised were all hardcore porn, but Hustler edited the trailers to remove nudity and meet YouTube’s standards. Many porn studios use this strategy, which allows them to generate buzz in mainstream venues.
As of this morning, however, all but one of the videos uploaded to the bighustlerfan911 channel have been removed. Trying to watch embedded YouTube trailers for This Ain’t Glee XXX or This Ain’t Dirty Jobs XXX or This Ain’t Curb Your Enthusiasm XXX brings up the message “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”
Strangely, the only uploaded video left at bighustlerfan911 is a trailer for the Danielle Staub sex tape.
Did YouTube ban Hustler trailers en masse? Did Hustler withdraw its content for some reason? Is this the beginning of a YouTube porn trailer purge? Many other porn companies with comparable content remain on YouTube; Hustler seems to be the only company affected for now.
