MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE: ON

SEX, PRIVACY, AND

PORNOGRAPHY
"THEY SAY WE GET THE PORN WE DESERVE"

February 23, 2018

By Saskia Vogel

An older pornographer calls me after a decade of silence. It is

midnight in Berlin, summertime. When I see his number on the
display, I think there can only be one reason he’s calling. He’s
dying. I pick up, already in tears.
In September, Hugh Hefner dies. The sorrow I feel is much
the same as for my pornographer. I turn to Twitter for some sort
of comfort, but all I see is vitriol. Even my mother makes a point
of telling me, “Good riddance.” The unity of opinion surprises me.
Have I spent so long working with pornography that I can’t see
straight anymore? (I know it’s made me slow to pick up on
innuendo; I’m used to things being clear.) The articles that look
to Hef’s contributions to civil and women’s rights activism, the
story in the New Republic that explores how “his greatest
achievement was the brilliant criticism he provoked from
women,” have not yet rolled in to provide a counterpoint. But
even they don’t capture what I’m feeling.
What is this sadness? I carry it with me on the day of Hef’s
death, the same day my agent tells me I have an offer on my
debut novel. I carry it with me through the breaking of the
Harvey Weinstein scandal. Not scandal: abomination, though no
one can pretend to be shocked. I listen to the audio of Weinstein
trying to get Ambra Battilana Gutierrez into his hotel room. “I’m
telling you right now, get in here,” he begins.
And then it hits me, a discomfiting mixture of nostalgia and
self-interest. I’m not mourning these men. I’m feeling the loss of
something inside myself. And I’m wondering, what will happen
to women like me when all these men of a certain age die? I will,
most likely, outlive them all.

* * *

After the Weinstein story breaks, among the first people on my

social feeds to reflect on the ways in which they too may have
engaged in misconduct are members of the American kink
community. Of course. They’ve always been good people. That
community’s willingness to establish consent and recalibrate
assumptions about romantic and sexual mores is what drew me
to the scene in the first place. They are radical in their belief that
we must respect personal integrity and take responsibility for our
actions, no matter how permissive the environment. It’s what
put me on a path that I sometimes describe as “a life in sex.”
I’ve always preferred the company of people who navigate
by the stars of their desires, unafraid to identify and pursue what
they want, willing to question what they’ve inherited and are
offered. Borrowing from Camille Paglia, let’s call these people
pornographers; to be alive to the sexual energy all around us is
a kind of pornographic vision. Seeing the world through this lens
makes clear just how fraught our society’s relationship to sex is.
The pornographic lens—and with it pornography—chronicles a
society’s sexual dreams and anxieties. Our relationship to
pornographic material today speaks to how little we value lust as
a force for creativity, knowledge and insight. They say we get
the porn we deserve.
This “pornographic lens” is one of the reasons I liked
working as an editor at a trade magazine covering the adult film
industry. At its best, the business is filled with First Amendment
crusaders, wary of governmental overreach, who spend their
lives challenging sexual norms. There are stars who offer an
alternative to mainstream porn such as Stoya, Madison Young,
Shine Louise Houston and Jiz Lee; they control the means of
production and are working to bring little-seen desires to the
screen and opening up spaces for erotic discourse and queerness
in the wider world.
In ways that are invisible to most, the adult industry is
doing the hard work of trying to disassemble laws that only apply
to most of us if the authorities get a bee in their bonnet. Laws
such as 18 U.S.C. §2257, a statute intended to keep minors out
of porn that “requires anyone who films sexual [content of actual
human beings] to maintain and keep detailed records and IDs of
the persons depicted in the film, cross-referenced in files, with
dates of production, nicknames and copies of the movies. [ . . .
] Likewise, anyone who incorporates that imagery—a clip from a
video posted on a website, a still from a movie on a box cover—
must also maintain these records. And every sexually explicit
image must bear a label identifying the address where the
required records can be found.”
This law, first passed in 1988, is meant to supplement
existing obscenity and child pornography laws, matters close to
the heart of the Free Speech Coalition (the industry’s trade
association) and the Association of Sites Advocating Child
Protection. But in practice the law doesn’t seem to be good for
much. The industry consensus, especially since the under-age
performers who’ve entered the porn industry have done so using
fraudulent government-issued IDs, is that 2257 is most effective
as a tool to surveil and harass adult producers. (Misfiled papers
can lead to five years in prison.) Only in 2015 was it ruled that
requiring these records to be made available without a warrant
violated a producer’s Fourth Amendment rights.
But let’s go back to the word “anyone,” and let’s not be coy.
It’s not uncommon to have and share sexually explicit content of
ourselves and others. Think of all those porn gifs on Tumblr. If
you’ve ever reblogged one, dig into 2257, and you might
discover that you could be considered a primary or secondary
producer. Revenge porn is not exempt; neither was Kim
Kardashian and Ray J’s sex tape.
Members of the adult industry have turned to First
Amendment activism because they know what it’s like when the
government wants to infringe on your rights just because they
don’t like what you’re doing. People of a certain age in this
industry remember this struggle, and many entered the business
because they believed in protecting the sexual freedom of
consenting adults. In 2012 adult performer Nina Hartley told
the Huffington Post that her nearly forty-year-long career is part
of a larger project to help heal a sexually sick society. With The
People v. Harold Freeman, a porn producer and director,
effectively legalized the making of hardcore pornography in
California in 1988. It also spelled out the difference between
prostitution and hiring actors for sexually explicit, non-obscene
performances. Vanessa del Rio, who began performing in 1974,
describes her colleagues at that time as “sexual rebels.” In a
2008 interview with AVN, she added: “the people in [porn] were
on the fringes of society and daring to do as they pleased.”
Being a sexual rebel, or even a sexual outlaw, is of course
not limited to those involved in adult entertainment. Consider
Lawrence v. Texas (2003), when the Supreme Court finally
struck down sodomy laws, making it no longer a Class C
misdemeanor or “deviate” for a man to have anal sex with
another man in any US state and territory. Imagine the police
busting into your house and arresting you for what you do in bed.
Oral sex, owning sex toys, sleeping in the nude: there have been
or are laws about each of these things in the United States. For
what purpose? How have they been enforced? Such matters are
an area of concern for many pornographers. But most of us will
never care about these things unless the law comes crashing
through our door.
Society loves to hate porn, but not as much as it quietly
loves to love it. We know this already. This love, the money
offered to express this love, allowed Hugh Hefner’s Playboyto
rise above the pack of girlie mags, men’s adventure magazines,
and pulp fiction of the 1950s to become an empire. An empire
built in part around a problematic brand of objectification.
Nevertheless, the money and demand that flooded in is a
testament to the power of bringing to light our repressed lust, of
attempting to reconcile the private body with the public heart
and mind. In Playboy, readers were shown a world in which sex
was part of a wider cultural conversation; readers saw they were
not alone in their desires and that feeling desire was not
shameful in and of itself. And they couldn’t get enough.
The problem with Playboy is that it is a monolith, built by
one man’s vision. A singular sexual dream.

* * *

What did Hugh Hefner want? Reflecting on the magazine’s early

days, Gay Talese in Thy Neighbor’s Wife (1980) writes
“[Hefner’s] sexual appetite, long frustrated, was now insatiable.
He dreamt of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age. In a video interview
with the New York Times, Hefner said he had a thing for Busby
Berkeley’s blond showgirls—those geometrical arrangements of
women dancing in unison, forming dazzling patterns of limbs,
sequins and hair. And so a lot of the Playmates were refractions
of those smiling women from the 1930s.
 Talese suggests that Hefner—a boy with a cold mother, a
man with a Catholic wife whose affair during their courtship
seemed to ruin the relationship for him entirely, an “unattractive
and shy” cartoonist who built up enough confidence to believe
that women might desire him—became a man who “wanted not
only to have the nude pictures [of Playboy models] but also to
possess the women who had posed for him.” And in this, he was
rather successful. Reading Talese and statements from Hefner
and ex-girlfriends Holly Madison and Kendra Wilkinson, the story
of Hef’s ability to have the women who posed for him is one of
coercion, transaction, and/or fun and attraction.
You can say his Playboy philosophy—the cultured man who
listened to jazz, read books, liked a stiff martini with a twist of
bombshell blonde—was a half-baked, self-serving sham, but in
doing so we forget an essential part of the story. Hugh Hefner
back in 1953, in the wake of Dr. Kinsey’s report on Sexual
Behavior in the Human Female (1953) was asking important
questions about the state of sex and romance in America.
In Hugh Hefner’s review of the Kinsey report
in Shaft magazine, he wrote, “This study makes obvious the lack
of understanding and realistic thinking that have gone into the
formation of sex standards and laws. Our moral pretenses, our
hypocrisy on matters of sex have led to incalculable frustration,
delinquency and unhappiness.” Through Playboy, Hefner asked
if the way we were doing things was working. Does it have to be
this way? Can it be different? Do we need to update our social
and moral codes?
This is why I mourn Hugh Hefner. There are not many
among us who ask the hard questions about how we live our
lives, and there are fewer still who succeed in asking them in a
way that makes any impact. Perhaps it is too much to expect of
one person to ask these questions and to overcome the lack
inside him. His frustrated sexuality. His partner’s early infidelity.
I’m speculating.
 * * *

Let’s return to my pornographer.

On the phone, he tells me that when he was child, he got
his hands on a copy of Playboythat advertised Playboy-branded
cufflinks. He wanted them more than anything. From the
magazine he understood that there was another valid way to
grow into an American man. Not just John Wayne, the man in
the gray flannel suit or a soldier. Playboy showed him that the
fact that he liked books and art didn’t mean he was a poindexter,
an object of ridicule, not a man. With childhood slipping into the
rearview mirror, he saw the road leading to a new kind of
masculinity. My pornographer wanted those cufflinks bad. It
didn’t matter that he didn’t have a button-down shirt, he had
pajamas. Just like Hef.
When I talk to my pornographer after all these years, we
end up in old patterns of conversation. We talk about our careers,
sex, and relationships. He uses the word “millennial” like a curse.
I say: Millennials are doing some hard work on behalf of society
by questioning romantic and erotic norms. They have found a
way to subvert the dominant white, middle-class, male gaze.
Millennials, like my pornographer and Hefner before them, get
some things wrong, but they’re laying the groundwork for
change. We haven’t figured it out. But we are evolving, I say,
feeling like a bridge between them and him. I hope one day we
will be civilized enough to tell the difference between a person
who happens to be in the same room and a person inviting sexual
advances.
Unlike many men, my pornographer never made
assumptions about what kind of person I was or how easy I
would be to get in bed because I was a woman working with
porn. We were both pornographers. We had no use for innuendo.
I felt relaxed with him, appreciated and free. And the fact that I
felt like he saw the parts of me I valued most, reminded me that
others would, too.
 My pornographer was not calling to tell me he was dying.
He just thought that too much time had passed. I agreed. I’d
been missing him, too. It was a relief to speak again. My life has
spun off in a different direction since my time at the trade
magazine. In my new community, men like my pornographer are
a relic. I mourn the part of myself that is also becoming a relic
with time, out of place in my everyday—this part of me that’s
calibrated to the norms of a society shaped by men of a certain
age. But when my pornographer and I talk, that relic part of me
has a place, and I find a glimmer of understanding for the women
who refuse to fight for change: the comfort of the familiar. Who
am I without these strategies and inherited ways of being? At
times I feel unmoored.
More than a generation removed from my pornographer, I
am the product of the world people like him and Hefner helped
shape. I’ve grown up with the aftermath of the sexual revolution,
the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. I’ve grown
up thinking that a nude centerfold, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John
Updike aren’t out of place side-by-side. When all those men of a
certain age die, it falls to us to remember what it took to get
from the birth of Playboy to #metoo.

* * *

In the meantime, pornography as we know it is dying. As in the

music industry, the demise of porn can be attributed to digital
piracy and changing consumer behavior—wanting a song or a
sex scene and not a full album or movie. Pornographers have
always been early adopters of new technology. Developments in
technology—from the printing press to home video systems to
VGA graphics that made it possible for images to be shared
between networked personal computers before the worldwide
web—gave consumers better access to what they wanted. Porn,
yes, but also the possibility of consuming said porn in
increasingly private and discreet ways. In 1995 Time magazine
reported that 83.5% of the content in shared libraries on the
Usenet bulletin board system was porn. Savvy systems operators
charged for access to their content, and people were happy to
pay. With the advent of the Internet, innovation in online
payment and marketing, video streaming and more, a multitude
of pornographers large and small, home-grown and corporate,
created an industry online. You could say this was a Golden Age,
or a gold-rush.
In 2006, about a year after YouTube launched, tube sites
for porn appeared online, and free porn began to take over the
market. Who actually uploads this content is a point of
contention: who is culpable for this large-scale copyright
infringement? The issue is murky and complex. In short, tube
sites claim their users upload the content, while adult film
professionals assert that the tube sites are doing it themselves.
If the latter is true, why?
MindGeek is an expansive organization that dominates the
adult entertainment market. Built up by tech entrepreneur
Fabian Thylmann and founded in 2004, the company is perhaps
best known for the PornHub Network of websites and their
portfolio of adult production studios, such as Brazzers and Digital
Playground. In 2014, Slate reported that MindGeek owns “nearly
a hundred websites that in total consume more bandwidth than
Twitter, Amazon, or Facebook.” They even manage parts of the
Playboy empire. Playboy, which in 1993 won a $500,000 dollar
copyright infringement lawsuit against one of the biggest Bulletin
Board Systems for sharing digital scans of copyrighted images.
As a result of this shift of control in production and distribution
avenues, pornographers of yesteryear are closing shop. Fees are
low, profits are down, and even porn cannot escape the
Uberization of work. The people who run MindGeek aren’t
pornographers; they call the company “a leader in IT, web
development and SEO.” Their main commodity seems to be
traffic.
The free porn on tube sites is doing more damage to the
porn industry than anti-pornography laws and campaigners
combined. Feminist journalist and ex-porn performer Ovidie’s
documentary Pornocracy: The New Sex Multinationals paints a
grim picture of the mainstream porn industry after MindGeek’s
ascension. In a panel discussion at pornfilmfest Berlin on October
28, 2017, Ovidie said that the most tragic part of making the
documentary was meeting female performers who were in the
industry for such a short time they could not or did not want to
formulate an opinion about their labor conditions and their
exploitation. They wanted to get in, get the money, and get out.
In this environment, it’s easy to lose sight of the humanity of the
people involved. Instead of performers with distinct identities
and personal integrity, we are being asked to accept a seemingly
endless supply of disposable bodies navigable by keyword:
blonde, big tits, old/young.
Like MindGeek, post-Hefner the Playboy empire seems to
be abdicating the responsibility that generations of
pornographers have taken in stride: that by creating
pornographic materials, they open themselves up to criticism for
how their work impacts society. Playboy kicked off 2018 by
announcing that they’re considering shutting the magazine
down. They want to move away from the media business and
focus on brand management. What vision will Playboy-branded
cufflinks stand for then?
At least Hefner’s Playboy encouraged us to know the
names, predilections, and occupations of the Playboy Bunnies,
marketing them as sexually liberated girls-next-door with full
lives who posed nude as a lark. One might begin to dream of a
Golden Age, of the comparative innocence of a figure like Hugh
Hefner in 1953. But there is no Golden Age. Like Playboy before
it, MindGeek is a monolith shaping the tastes of a generation.
Here we are again, being offered one man’s singular sexual
dream. We deserve better. And so, with body, heart, and mind,
we must begin to dream together.
Saskia Vogel, a Los Angeles native, is a writer and Swedish-
to-English translator. Her debut novel is forthcoming in 2019
from Coach House Books (North America), Dialogue Books (UK),
Mondial (Sweden) and the "Héroes Modernos" collection at Alpha
Decay (Spain). She is part of the collective that organizes
Helsinki’s Viva Erotica film festival. In 2017, she received an
Honorable Mention from the Pushcart Prize for her story “Sluts”
and an English PEN Award for the forthcoming translation of Lina
Wolff’s August-Prize-winning novel The Polyglot Lovers.