January 13, 2000
REVIEW
How the Web Changed the Smut Business
OBSCENE PROFITS: THE
ENTREPRENEURS OF
PORNOGRAPHY IN THE
CYBER AGE
By Frederick S. Lane III
(Routledge; $27.50.)
By BRUCE HEADLAM
t may have started as an academic exercise, but the Internet most days looks more like the top
shelf of a corner-store magazine
rack. From search results clogged
with sex sites to e-mail boxes that
fill up with ""XXX"" subject lines to
innocent-looking links that lead to
red-light sites, pornography seems
inescapable online. And, to the dismay of most parents, the Internet
does not come wrapped in plain
brown paper.
Have centerfolds simply migrated
to the Web, or has there been a more
profound shift in the nature and the
influence of pornography? In ""Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of
Pornography in the Cyber Age,""
Frederick S. Lane III argues the
latter.
Modern technology, from deregulated phone services to the Internet,
changed the pornography business
and has enabled pornography to
make an impressive advance into
the mainstream. For the cost of a
server and a Web cam, anyone can
become an online pornographer.
A new wave of entrepreneurs, including, Mr. Lane tells us, many
women, is threatening the hegemony
of old-style men's publications like
Playboy and Penthouse with not only
the sheer amount of online images
but also their explicitness.
""It's a nightmare out there,""
Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, told Forbes magazine in 1996.
""This has to be affecting revenues of
people like myself.""
If Mr. Flynt is having nightmares,
maybe we should all be scared. Mr.
Lane estimates that there are between 30,000 and 60,000 sex-oriented
Web sites and innumerable phone-sex lines, chat rooms and video mail-order services. The pornography industry is ""an increasingly significant sector of the economy,"" he
writes, grossing at least $10 billion a
year in this country. That is more,
the book says, than Americans spend
on sports events and live music combined.
Mr. Lane, a lawyer with more than
a touch of the moralist, will get a
sympathetic reading from most casual Web surfers. One reason sex on
the Web seems increasingly alarming is aesthetic. Online pornography
isn't simply Playboy for people who
think that staples ruin the mood.
With its raunchy home-grown fare
and pixelated images, the Net takes
the velvet smoking jacket off pornography and replaces it with the technological crudity of an 8-millimeter
film. Even ""soft porn"" images on the
Web appear to have what Simone de
Beauvoir called the ""intention to defile."" They not only look dirty; they
feel dirty.
Depressing as all that may be, the
ubiquity of sex sites does not mean
that pornography has entered the
cultural or financial mainstream, as
Mr. Lane suggests. In fact, much of
the evidence in his book suggests the
opposite: that although pornography
occupies the same niche on the Internet as in the rest of society, it is
neither as prevalent nor as profitable as critics might think.
Let's start with the money. Pornographers may profit from obscenity, but the profits themselves aren't
all that obscene. Although $10 billion
may seem like a lot of money, compared with national vices like tobacco ($45 billion) or gambling ($50
billion), it is small potatoes.
Some of
the entrepreneurs Mr. Lane interviews make, at best, a reasonable
living. Jane Duvall, who runs the
popular Jane's 'Net Sex Guide site,
said that she made more money at
her previous job, handling advertising accounts at a newspaper.
The Playboy sites, which are
among the most popular sex-related
destinations on the Web, have yet to
turn a profit. Internet Entertainment
Group is probably the best known of
the new class of pornography companies, thanks to its lucrative Club
Love site and its nude pictures of B-list celebrities. Its founder, Seth Warshavsky, is often regarded in the
press as a technological wunderkind,
but his company has been continually frustrated in its attempts to go
public on a Wall Street where the
gold standard is just about anything
followed by the dot-com suffix.
Other pornographic video and Internet companies that have gone
public have hardly set the market on
fire, so although investors may like
the novelty of a stock certificate
showing naked women, they would
be better off buying bonds.
The problem with Mr. Lane's book
is that it is long on history but short
on historical perspective. Pornography has tried -- and failed -- to gain
mainstream acceptance before, usually by attaching itself to another
social current. Hugh Hefner built
Playboy in the corporate image of
1950's Madison Avenue. In the early
70's, the sex-film business rose and
fell in the wake of the sexual revolution. Today, as Mr. Lane's subtitle
suggests, pornography attaches to
the preoccupation with entrepreneurs, particularly online entrepreneurs.
But entrepreneurship, even in the
digital age, has limits. Until recently,
sex sites had been operating with
limited opposition from the courts,
aiming at a group that was demographically and psychographically
handpicked for pornography (young,
male, maladjusted) at a time when
very few sites were making money.
Now, competition is squeezing
profits, and Mr. Lane notes that pornographic sites that once charged
$29.95 for monthly access are now
hard-pressed to charge $10. And pornographic sites are facing more
competition from the Web as a
whole. As the online world continues
to grow, pornography will probably
occupy a smaller place in it.
Perhaps a more interesting question is what the social effects of the
technology migration of pornography might be. To buy or see dirty
pictures 15 years ago, you needed
money, adult identification and no
sense of shame.
Today, all you need
is a modem and a credit card. That
means that marginal tastes, including dangerous ones like pedophilia,
are more easily satisfied. But it
could also mean that pornography's
public blight -- the sex shops and
peep shows -- will be reduced.
For both social conservatives who
wanted Times Square cleaned up and
for liberals concerned with the First
Amendment, that would seem like a
partial victory. Maybe that is why
nobody seems happy.