Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (50 page)

Nevada Public Affairs Review
2 (1983): 43–47; Helen Reynolds,
The
Economics of Prostitution
, Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas, 1986; Guy Rocha,
Brothel Prostitution in Nevada: A Unique American Cultural
Phenomenon
, Master’s thesis, San Diego State University, 1975.

3. Rocha,
Brothel Prostitution
; Richard Symanski, “Prostitution in Nevada,”

Annals of the Association of American Geographers
65 (1974): 357–377; Reynolds,
Economics of Prostitution
.

4. Galliher and Cross,
Morals Legislation
.

5. Wells Emergency Ordinance No. 24, cited in Symanski, “Prostitution in Nevada.”

6. Symanski, “Prostitution in Nevada,” pp. 363, 355.

7. Gabriel Vogliotti,
The Girls of Nevada
, Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1975; Rocha,
Brothel Prostitution
; Symanski, “Prostitution in Nevada”; Doug McMillan, “Nevada’s Sex-for-Sale Dilemma,”
Reno Gazette-Journal,
November 9, 1986.

8. Mike Sion, “Conforte Changed the Face of Nevada Bordellos,”
Reno
Gazette-Journal,
January 20, 1995.

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KATHRYN HAUSBECK AND BARBARA G. BRENTS

9. Sion, “Conforte”; Authors interview with George Flint, Nevada Brothel Association, December 12, 1997; Vogliotti,
Girls of Nevada
.

10. Sion, “Conforte”; Pillard, “Legal Prostitution: Is It Just?”; Ellen Pillard,

“Rethinking Prostitution: A Case for Uniform Regulation,”
Nevada
Public Affairs Review
(1991): 1: 45–49.

11. Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck, “Violence and Legalized Brothel Prostitution in Nevada: Examining Safety, Risk, and Prostitution Policy,”
Journal of Interpersonal Violence
20 (2005): 270–295.

12.
U.S. Census Bureau: State and County Quick Facts
. http://quickfacts.census.

gov/qfd/states/32000.html, last revised Friday, July 25, 2008.

13. The Nevada Brothel Association estimated that this figure was down at least 20% from the previous year due to the 2008 economic recession.

14. Authors interview with George Flint, Nevada Brothel Association, January 14, 2009.

15. Rural Policy Research Institute, “Nevada Demographic and Economic Profile,” Truman School of Public Affairs, University of Missouri-Columbia, May 2006. http://www.rupri.org.

16. Reibsame,
Atlas of the New West
, p. 112.

17. Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck, “Marketing Sex: U.S. Legal Brothels and Late Capitalist Consumption,”
Sexualities
10 (2007): 425–439.

18. Viviana Zelizer,
The Purchase of Intimacy
, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

19. Brents and Hausbeck, “Violence and Legalized Brothel Prostitution.”

20. Kathleen Hennessey, “Nevada Brothels Want to Be Good Neighbors, Pay Tax,”
Associated Press
, May 10, 2005; Larry Henry, “Brothel Tour Off,”

Las Vegas Sun,
April 17, 1997.

21. For further detail on brothel regulations, see Barbara G. Brents and Kathryn Hausbeck, “State Sanctioned Sex: Negotiating Formal and Informal Regulatory Practices in Nevada’s Legal Brothels,”
Sociological
Perspectives
44 (2001): 307–332.

22. Pillard, “Legal Prostitution,” p. 45.

23. Male prostitution does not exist in any of Nevada’s legal brothels.

Outside these three counties, however, men are sometimes employed as managers or bartenders within brothels.

24. Pillard, “Legal Prostitution,” p. 45.

25. Erin Neff, “Legalized Prostitution: Vegas Brothels Suggested,”
Las Vegas
Review-Journal
, October 24, 2003; Sam Skolnick, “Mayor Keeps Prostitution Legalization Debate Going,”
Las Vegas Sun
, January 23, 2009.

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NEVADA’S LEGAL BROTHELS

26. Geoff Schumacher, “Goodman’s Brothel Views Aren’t Irresponsible,”
Las
Vegas Review-Journal
, September 9, 2007.

27. Brents and Hausbeck, “Violence and Legalized Brothel Prostitution.”

28. Authors interview with George Flint, December 12, 1997.

29. Brents and Hausbeck, “Marketing Sex.”

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12

REMAKING THE SEX INDUSTRY:

THE ADULT EXPO AS A MICROCOSM

Lynn Comella

Every January the Adult Video News (AVN) Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE) rolls into town and sets up shop at the Sands Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas, transforming it into one of the world’s largest adult playgrounds. An intoxicating mix of big business, public relations, flesh on parade, and celebrity gawking, the AEE is a crowded, bustling scene peppered with images of brightly colored dildos and vibrators, scantily clad porn starlets striking suggestive poses for star struck fans, and elaborate “mega-booths”

designed to increase the visibility and brand identity of industry heavy hitters like Hustler, Wicked, and Vivid Video. The 4-day event attracts roughly 300 exhibitors and 30,000 attendees—adult retailers, manufacturers, porn producers, industry talent, fans, public relations experts, and members of the media—all of whom descend on Las Vegas to experience the colorful panorama of an industry that continues to grow, diversify its offerings, and strives to garner mainstream acceptance.

The size and popularity of the adult entertainment industry in the United States is hard to ignore. Although exact figures are difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint, it is estimated that the sex industry—which includes everything from print, DVD, and Internet pornography to pay-per-view channels, video on demand, strip clubs, and adult novelties—generates between $10 to $14 billion dollars annually, making it an extremely lucrative segment of U.S.

consumer culture.1 From television shows like
Sex and the City
and the Canadian import
Talk Sex
with Sue Johanson, to films such as
Inside Deep Throat
and
Zack
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LYNN COMELLA

and Miri make a Porno
, the American cultural landscape is increasingly rife with references to sex toys, strippers, call girls, porn stars and porn producers—

lending further support to the claim that what was once considered risqué and culturally taboo is increasingly commonplace and mainstream.

The rise of the Internet and the success of e-commerce businesses have also extended the reach and cultural visibility of an industry that for many decades existed almost entirely on the margins of society. Technological advances, combined with the growth of the women’s market and the mainstreaming of adult novelties, have created new opportunities for entrepreneurs hoping to capitalize on consumers’ seemingly endless fascination with sex and the desire for bigger and better orgasms.

The AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, which is one of many such trade shows that take place each year, both within and outside the U.S., is a microcosm of the sex industry and thus offers a sociologically rich window into the marketing and mainstreaming of sex in American society, even as such mainstreaming is resisted by some sectors of society. It also provides an opportunity to assess the challenges confronting the industry as it struggles to address issues of piracy, declining DVD sales, and the availability of free Internet porn—all of which are taking a bite of out its profits. Indeed, the myth that the sex industry is recession proof, and able to make money hand over fist without trying, was effectively put to rest with the global economic downturn of 2008–2009. Many adult businesses are now working harder than ever to keep their competitive edge and, in some instances, stay afloat in tough economic times.

Today, the figure of the male consumer, which continues to drive much of the output of the adult industry, exists alongside a newly idealized version of the female shopper who is willing to spend $175 on a vibrator at an upscale sexual boutique. Longstanding industry bigwigs like Larry Flynt and his Hustler Empire share the stage with feminist sex toy businesses and upstart sex toy manufacturers interested in bringing the concept of “lifestyle branding” to the adult industry. It is an interesting mix of old guard and new, convention and innovation, as the adult industry seeks to be both responsive to change and profitable.

This chapter examines how the adult industry is transforming, indeed
re-branding
, itself in response to an evolving and rapidly changing marketplace, one that is no longer defined exclusively by images of “sleazy” men in trench coats surreptitiously slinking into dimly lit and dank porno shops. How is a new age of sexual entrepreneurs attempting to “makeover” the adult industry—turning

“crass” into “class”—through their orchestrated appeals to new kinds of sexual consumers and their creation of new sexual tastes and experiences?

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REMAKING THE SEX INDUSTRY: THE ADULT EXPO AS A MICROCOSM

STU DYI N G TH E S E X I N D U STRY

I have spent the past decade studying what is commonly referred to as the

“women’s market” for sex toys and pornography, with an explicit focus on the history and retail culture of women-owned and -operated sex toy businesses.2

In the course of researching this market—a highly gendered subset of the sex industry—I have learned a great deal about the mainstream adult industry. The reason for this is simple: the women’s market exists in constant dialogue, and occasional friction, with the broader adult industry. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the cultural specificity of women-oriented sex toy stores, and the women’s market for sex toys and pornography, without understanding how these cultural forms have been purposefully
re-gendered
and recoded by sex-positive feminist entrepreneurs in ways that distinguish them from their more traditional, male-oriented, and stereotypically “lowbrow” counterparts.

My research on the women’s market can be situated within the broader tradition of ethnographic studies of cultural production. According to communication scholar Lisa Henderson, research on cultural production has historically “sought to make concrete the universe in which designated

‘cultural producers’ (TV writers, broadcast journalists, filmmakers, etc.) do what they do.”3 Scholars working in this tradition have analyzed the making of television talk shows,4 consumer markets,5 and feminist organizations.6

These studies map “the particular power relations, the context, within which both the identity and the effects of any particular practices are determined.”7

In the field of sexuality studies, there is a growing body of research that draws on these traditions in order to better understand how sexual consumer culture is
made
—by whom and under what conditions.

A great deal of research and social commentary about sexual consumer culture continues to suffer from three major shortcomings: essentialism, moral revulsion, and the “fallacy of misplaced scale,” Gayle Rubin’s term for the tendency to imbue sexuality with an overstated sense of cultural significance.8

These deficiencies have significantly limited the kinds of cultural knowledge we have about a very popular, and extremely diverse, sector of American consumer culture. In recent years, there has been an uptick in research on sexual consumer culture that seeks to replace moral outrage with empirical analysis; overgeneralizations with nuance; and universal narratives with multiplicity.9 This growing body of empirical research demonstrates that there is no “one size fits all” analysis of the sexual marketplace—despite repeated assertions to the contrary, a point I will return to later in the chapter.

I employ multiple methods of data collection, including in-depth interviews, participant observation fieldwork, and archival research. I have
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LYNN COMELLA

conducted over 70 in-depth interviews with sex-positive retailers, sales staff, marketers, sex toy manufacturers, and pornographers from across the country.

I also spent 6 months in 2001 working on the sales floor at Babeland, a feminist-owned, women-oriented sex toy business in New York City. During this time, I assisted customers, rang up sales, attended staff, marketing, and management meetings, and had the opportunity to both observe and participate in interviews for the hiring of new staff. I also visited a number of women-run sex toy businesses across the country, from Chicago and Madison to Boston and Albuquerque. In addition, I attended three adult industry trade shows, the 2008 and 2009 AEE and the 2008 International Lingerie Show, all which took place in Las Vegas.10 There, I talked to numerous industry professionals and attended various trade events and seminars, the latter of which were tape recorded and subsequently transcribed. I also reviewed popular press coverage of adult industry trade shows in order to see how these events were represented by both the mainstream and alternative media, including bloggers.

A D U LT E XP O C U LTU R E

The year 2009 marked the 11th anniversary of the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, an event described by one industry professional as the “Super Bowl of the adult industry.”11 According to a blogger writing for
Adult Entertainment
Today
: “In the past, AEE was the one event you could not miss. If you wanted to be a major player in the business, you had to bite the bullet. Attending AEE

was merely part of the cost of doing business.”12 For many years, a version of the Expo existed as an offshoot of the Consumer Electronic Show (CES), an annual electronics trade show that also takes place in Vegas. According to Paul Fishbein, President of AVN Media Network, the adult industry felt marginalized by CES.13 “They took the money but didn’t promote the adult event and the adult vendors were all over at the Sahara [instead of the Sands, where the CES was located]. Some companies came to us and asked us to do a stand-alone event. So it was definitely time [for our own show].”14

Home Entertainment Events, the company that organizes the Expo and oversees its vast logistics, estimates that of the roughly 30,000 attendees that visit the show each year, approximately 12,000 are industry professionals, 17,000 are fans, and 1000 are members of the press. The Expo strives therefore to be different things to different groups of people, all of whom have a role to play in ensuring the show’s success.