Pornographers feel economic droop

The sex industry, according to conventional wisdom, is recession-proof. It is certainly big business, generating $US13 billion (NZ$19.9b) in the United States last year. According to satellite television business news channel CNBC,  US$3075 is spent every second on pornography.

It is those sorts of numbers that must have prompted New Zealand Olympic taekwondo aspirant Logan Campbell to open a brothel or, as he calls it, a gentlemen's club. Campbell's aim is to raise $300,000 to fund his tilt at the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Good luck to him, but it doesn't seem the best of times to open a new business, and apparently these days that applies to the world's oldest profession. Campbell will find the sex industry is just as vulnerable to an economic downturn.

Take Steve Crow, the one-time mayoral candidate whose pornography businesses Vixen Direct and Erotica Expo collapsed in May owing creditors more than $400,000. Crow blames parallel importing and illegal downloads for the demise of Vixen, which imports and wholesales adult DVDs, while poor attendance at events  in Christchurch and Wellington doomed the expo business.

In the US, sales and rentals of adult DVDs are down 50 per cent on a year ago. Even porn titan Hugh Hefner, head of the Playboy Enterprises empire, has been hit by hard times. Playgirl magazine has folded, its chief executive, and Hefner's daughter, Christie Hefner has left, sales for Playboy magazine have plummeted and the leaderless title is seeking a buyer.

The problem facing pornographers is the same that besets all publishers: why pay for content that you can see for free on the internet? As self-styled ''porntrepreneur'' Joanna Angel (porn model, pornographic actress, director, writer and former exotic dancer) told cultural blog Flavourwire: ''In a bad economy, when someone is trying to budget their money, porn is going to be one of the first things to go.

''[Porn] is a form of entertainment,'' Angel continues, ''and so are escorts.''

Brian Le Gros, owner and manager of Auckland's The White House, a strip and prostitution club, agrees, saying the recession-proof theory is ''crap''. The sex industry is seasonal, with custom falling away when the temperature drops and the footie season starts. Even so, times today are hard. Business is down by about one-third compared with last year.

Le Gros used to run a Wellington operation during the sharemarket crash of 1987 and, if anything, the drop  in business is worse this time: ''A lot of the big boys who came in and spent two grand, five grand  completely stupid money  that went; the cream went.''

Not only is the recession reducing demand, Angel reports, but increasing numbers of professional women are applying to be models on her various websites. It is, she says, a reflection of how hard it is for many women to get work.

Le Gros is sceptical, saying the ''good girl gone bad'' narrative is largely media fiction.

The recession is, however, driving some  freelance operators out of business and back into the arms of mainstream operators such as Le Gros because city-based establishments attract more punters, he says. He also believes pornography in general is more socially acceptable, particularly to women.

Angel touches on this change when she remarks that part of the reason she is getting more applications from professional women is ''porn has got a lot more mainstream now''.

University of Pennsylvania Law School associate professor Bridget Crawford explores this change in mainstream attitudes in her paper, Toward a Third-Wave Feminist Legal Theory: Young Women, Pornography and the Praxis of Pleasure.

For third-wave feminists, Crawford says, pornography is a valid form of sexual expression and ''a healthy part of an over-all sex-positive agenda''.

She points to Donna Minkowitz, whose 1995 essay, Giving It Up: Orgasm, Fear and Femaleness, expands on 1970s icon Nancy Friday's then shocking exploration of feminine sexual fantasy, My Secret Garden. Minkowitz rejects traditional feminist theory linking consumption of porn with violence. It is, she says, the harmless exercising of sexual imagination.

The fact that many women enjoy pornography is sufficient argument against the condemnation of sex books, photography and film, say Kegan Doyle and Dany Lacombe, authors of Porn Power: Sex, Violence and the Meaning of Images in 1980s Feminism. Employing a relativist position on the subject, they say pornography can be demeaning to women, if a woman sees it that way. For them, pornography has only the meaning the consumer supplies.

A third interpretation sees pornography as merely another form of exploitation and not necessarily pernicious. In this context, better a trick turned than the minimum wage.

Third-wave writer Melissa Klein posits that pornography is the medium by which a woman ''exacts maximum financial benefit from men by constructing herself as men want her to be''. Crawford: ''Third-wave feminists do not dismiss sex-work categorically, but they recognise it as multi-faceted  problematic yet profitable to some women.''

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poopboy   #1   07:01 pm Jul 23 2009

Porn - yawn. Only good for funny names - Seymore Butts etc. Perhaps the industry needs to differentiate between sleezy product and art. Doesn't art do well in a recession? Or does everything require its own viagra?

Tim   #2   04:28 am Jul 26 2009

I've been in the fine arts for at least 20 years, worked with all sorts of artists and galleries from small to top galleries in NY. I never met anyone who disagrees with what and older, established artist told me. That is, whenever the economy turns down, the arts are first to be hit, and when things turn around for everyone else, the arts are the last to recover. It's every gallery, and yeah, they're going out of business, too. Doesn't even matter if you're famous or not, work isn't selling. I keep being told "it's everybody" whether I speak to artists or dealers. I have no idea how or where a concept that art does well in a recession could originate.

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