By 2005, her company, ClubJenna, had an annual revenue of thirty million dollars. Jameson quickly achieved her ambition, becoming the industry’s biggest star and most reliable brand. It had distributors and advertisers, production teams and industry magazines, shoots requiring permits, agents who sold the talent and trade associations who represented them.
But by the time Jameson arrived on the scene the industry had become an efficient star-making machine. In the mid-eighties, the revelation that Traci Lords had been underage in her most famous films led to the prosecution of producers, agents, and distributors under child-pornography statutes, and new legislation resulted in stricter age-verification requirements for porn actors. Linda Lovelace’s performance in “Deep Throat,” in 1972, made porn mainstream later, her denunciation of the movie, which she characterized as filmed rape, made the idea of the porn star as victim mainstream, too. There had, of course, been stars before her. Jameson and Wicked found each other at the right time. I’m going to be a star with or without you.” “So you can either sign me or I can go to another company and take them to the top. “The most important thing to me right now is to become the biggest star the industry has ever seen,” she told him. In her memoir, “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” (2004), she recalled meeting the studio’s founder in a rickety corrugated-steel office in an industrial park. She was twenty, ambitious, and already making a name for herself. In 1995, the porn actress Jenna Jameson signed her first contract with a new porn studio called Wicked Pictures. Even to suspend judgment may be to take sides. The atmosphere of controversy makes it hard to avoid moral positions. Since the “porn wars” of the seventies and eighties, when feminists campaigned against the expanding pornography industry (and other feminists sided with Hustler to defend it), talking about pornography in terms of mere facts has seemed impossible. In “The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford), Shira Tarrant explains how that industry works in the new age of Internet porn, and sets out to provide neutral, “even-handed” information about its production and consumption.
Since then, the industry has been based in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, where its professional norms and regulations have mimicked its more respectable Hollywood neighbors. Freeman (1989), that filmed sex did not count as prostitution. But those who work in porn in the United States tend to draw a firm line between the “amateur” porn that now proliferates online and the legal adult-film industry that took shape after the California Supreme Court ruled, in California v. The millions of people using these sites probably don’t care much about who produces their content. until recently was a German named Fabian Thylmann, who earned a reported annual income of a hundred million dollars he sold the company while being investigated for tax evasion. The majority of the world’s tube sites are effectively a monopoly-owned by a company called MindGeek, whose bandwidth use exceeds that of Amazon or Facebook.
The twenty-first-century porn kings aren’t flamboyant magazine owners like Larry Flynt, whose taboo-breaking Hustler first published labial “pink shots,” in the mid-seventies, but faceless tech executives. Some porn sites get more traffic than news sites like CNN, and less only than platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and PayPal. Among the most popular search terms in 2015 were “anal,” “amateur,” “teen,” and-one that would surely have made Freud smile-“mom and son.” Viewing figures are on a scale that golden-age moguls never dreamed of: in 2014, Pornhub alone had seventy-eight billion page views, and XVideos is the fifty-sixth most popular Web site in the world. Today’s films are often short and nearly always hard-core that is, they show penetrative sex. drove down production quality, in the eighties. Pornography has changed unrecognizably from its so-called golden age-the period, in the sixties and seventies, when adult movies had theatrical releases and seemed in step with the wider moment of sexual liberation, and before V.H.S. A new study of the porn industry tries to sidestep ideological battles, with a neutral, fact-driven approach.