Word: porn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although emotional mother-son scenes are still rare in the porn industry, the conflation of mainstream entertainment and hard-core films is not. As porn-video rentals and sales have steadily grown into a $4.2 billion-a-year business (nearly 14% of all video transactions and more than a quarter of the home-video industry's revenue), the mainstream media have started to cash in on the growing celebrity of hard-core performers. Howard Stern, Jerry Springer and the E! channel regularly feature porn stars as guests on their TV shows, while film directors like Spike Lee and John Frankenheimer...
...major players in the porn industry are so confident of their growing acceptability that they seemed unfazed when New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani padlocked sex shops this month in Times Square. That's because most of the industry's money is made in suburban video stores. Almost as much is earned on cable-TV systems that make sexually explicit films available on pay-per-view and adult channels. Steve Hirsch, president of Los Angeles-based Vivid Video, the world's largest producer of adult films, dismisses the loss of Times Square: "We're not going to lose any customers...
...retail, the selling of porn has become less lurid. Vivid is happy to peddle videotapes in a more Main Street manner through the Adam & Eve catalog, which is mailed to 2.5 million people a month, and Tower and Virgin record stores, where the "Vivid girls" have done signings. Castle Superstores, a chain of eight Wal-Mart-size outlets in the West, is trying to bring a sense of class to the business. By getting rid of peep shows and strippers, the Castle stores have been able to attract a clientele that is nearly 50% couples, much higher than...
...larger audience partly because young adults grew up with VCRs, cable TV and the Internet and thus have been exposed to more adult material. And the AIDS epidemic has prompted a turn to voyeurism as a prudent alternative to sex. But an equally big factor, say the porn manufacturers, is that since Bill Clinton took office, the Justice Department hasn't prosecuted any new interstate transportation of obscenity cases...
From the evidence, it would seem that society is downright masochistic. Pamela Anderson's and Tommy Lee's homemade video of their lovemaking became the best-selling porn tape of all time, with more than 200,000 copies sold. After the success of Boogie Nights and The People vs. Larry Flynt, a rash of producers--even Ron Howard--tried to put together movies about the porn industry. Next month Orgazmo, a porn-industry spoof by South Park co-creator Trey Parker, will be released, with a sizable part for fat, hirsute porn star Ron Jeremy. Jeremy, easily the most recognizable...