Adventures in the skin trade

Whether you love porn or think it's an abomination, "The Other Hollywood" will shake up everything you think you know about the sex film industry.

By Priya Jain

Mar 12, 2005 | About three-quarters of the way through "The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry," Nina Hartley vents her frustration with the Meese Commission, President Reagan's attempt to stamp out pornography, and its unholy alliance with the radical feminist group Women Against Pornography. "What really irritated me about the Meese Commission and the radical right-wing feminists were the cries of 'Women and Children! Women and Children!'" Hartley says. "As an adult female, I didn't appreciate somebody infantilizing me and portraying me as someone who needs protection from the big, bad phallus -- or my own fantasies."

It's a good point, and one that stands as a sort of mantra for pro-porn feminists everywhere. If I want to have sex on camera, who are you to stop me? My body, my choice, damn it! And as several of the other porn stars throughout this book proudly declare, no one has forced them into it. "In all my years in this business, I have never seen coercion," insists Gloria Leonard, another porn star and the pioneer of 976 phone sex. "Ever, ever, ever. You always had the right to say, 'No, I don't want to do this.'"

And yet, pages after Leonard's quote, and just before Hartley's, Kristin Steen belies them both with the gut-wrenching story of her first porn film, when she was hired to act in what she was told would be a short, clothed scene. The other actor undoes the top buttons of Steen's blouse, and she slaps his hand away as scripted, but instead of stopping there, he forces her clothes off and rapes her while the crew watches in complicity: "He's on me, and he's in me, and he's ... And I'm crying and screaming -- and they're filming this, right?"

How do we reconcile this horrible story with Hartley's and Leonard's experiences? All of these women are apparently telling the truth. So what does it mean that the first two quotes make me want to run to my local video store, rent a bunch of porn and sit at home screaming "Yeah! You go, girl!" at the television, while the last makes me want to start a crusade to eradicate the entire industry?

Such is the conflict that has characterized any discussion of porn for decades, whether in the form of external fights like that between the Meese Commission and the porn film industry, or internal ones of our own consciences. Does pornography empower or degrade women who appear in it? Porn stars like Hartley profess to have made a conscious choice, but are all of them credible?

To these questions, "The Other Hollywood" offers no easy answers, and in fact, it offers no answers at all. But it does provide a couple of worthy lessons. First: Everyone involved has a story, and no one story is entirely reliable. At the very least, no single story can stand for a larger history, and the truth probably lies somewhere within the contradictions. Second: The porn film industry isn't all good or all bad. It's both, and whether you defend it or think it's an abomination, "The Other Hollywood" will test your beliefs and likely nudge you toward ambivalence. If for no other reason than that, everyone who has an opinion about porn, and I think that takes in everyone at least tangentially involved in our current culture wars, ought to read this book.

I confess that I approached the book hoping that it would exonerate the porn industry, proving that feminism really can embrace the naked arts. After reading it, I still believe that porn is not immoral per se, and that it has the right to exist -- but I also have to recognize that the horror stories like Steen's are part of the culture of the industry, not anomalies that we can casually dismiss.

The men involved in porn seem almost compelled to assert that the women are having as much fun as they are. But the book makes it quite clear that many of them aren't. Steen is the only woman to allege that she was raped on a set, but "The Other Hollywood" does not paint the porn industry as a happy, harmless hedonistic culture. There are some men and women in porn who are healthy and fulfilled, but there are also lots of opportunistic, sleazy men and vulnerable, gullible women.

For all we now talk about the mainstreaming of porn, it is still a fringe industry, resilient but never quite free from attack. Despite that still pesky problem of terrorism, Alberto Gonzales' first decision as attorney general this February was to go after a porn film company, and he has declared a commitment to investigating porn addiction. And the Federal Communications Commission's psychotic persecution of nipples and buttocks can't mean anything good for an industry that makes billions showing us a lot more. Whether you believe porn should be eradicated or not, "The Other Hollywood" definitively proves that it can't be, and trying to eradicate it is just as harmful as defending it uncritically.

The book tracks the porn film industry from its beginnings in the now innocent-seeming "nudie-cutie" films of the 1950s to the near present of the late '90s. Along the way, it takes in the seminal films "Deep Throat" and "Behind the Green Door," the involvement of organized crime, the various unsuccessful and semisuccessful attempts by the government to crack down on porn, the cocaine craze that nearly destroyed everyone in the business, AIDS, the advent of video and, briefly, the Internet.

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