The highest profile federal obscenity case of the last few years was unceremoniously thrown out of court this week. The intrepid Susannah Breslin has the details, including a prosecutorial team from so far down the depth chart that they couldn’t get a CD to play. Farce begets farce, even in court.
The days of porn being illegal seem to be basically over. Now the porn industry has to face something much more daunting: the days of porn being boring. If the globe spanning fame of “2 Girls, 1 Cup” proved anything, it’s that while you can still shock, you can’t produce any kind of meaningfully profitable outrage anymore. And so, as plenty of people have pointed out before, porn is in the same position as music, movies and other – ahem – “content” industries. It’s just another group of people trying to turn a buck by getting consumers to pay attention, and maybe pay some money to do so.
But in a world where everything that’s recorded can be both a) easily copied and b) played back at the consumer’s discretion, how do you do that? How do you create something that can resist at least one of those pressures? The movie industry has the built in advantage of giving people a place to go. Whether it’s teenagers who want to escape from their families, parents who want to subdue younger kids for a brief respite, or people who just want to get out of the house and do something, movie theaters offer an experience that’s beyond just the movie. In a similar vein, the music industry increasingly relies on live performances to generate its revenue, to the benefit of the musicians and the detriment of middlemen.
Television can’t easily do live performances and is, almost by definition, viewed in the home. But television has an ace up its sleeve in the form of events that cannot be easily enjoyed on TiVo. Primarily, that means live sports and other live events. In those cases, the speed of modern communication is a helper in that it makes watching things live a much different experience than watching them recorded. If all of your friends, websites and other always-on media are talking about it as its happening, live becomes valuable.
Porn, it would seem, will need to hack together some combination of television and music’s solution to making money in the modern world. The crowd that quietly jerks off and goes about its day is all but lost. There is simply too much for free for anyone to be forced into paying for recorded content. But the world is not about to run out of lonely men with disposable income.
One of the most prominent themes of Breslin’s previous projects “Letters from Working Girls” and “Letters from Johns” was how often sex work is more about companionship than it is about orgasms. Whether that means more live webcams or personalizing porn (would someone pay a few hundred bucks to have an actress scream out his name during a scene?), investing porn with a human touch has the potential to make it specialized enough to be worth paying for. The market now is the men in the world who want something more than a quick, self induced release.
Of course, there’s a flipside to that coin, the bullies and assholes who watch to see girls chewed up and put in their place. But even then, there’s likely a lucrative live market waiting to be exploited. Live tonight, Actress X will do Crazy Shit Y with Object/Actor Z! One night only, no one knows what will happen! The allure and immediacy of “live” is a powerful thing, and dickheads who are into using porn to feel superior would probably lap up the “danger” of knowing it was happening right now. Making money off the crueler parts of human sexuality is an ancient art, one that seems unlikely to go under on account of a few, piffling technological revolutions.
Whatever happens, we can be absolutely sure of two things. One, the internet will continue to barf up weird and freaky shit that is unpleasant to the overwhelming majority of people but that is unlikely to be prosecutable. And two, people (mostly women) will make a living by taking off their clothes in front of a camera.
