T H E_.H O T_.S P O T Is it sex, or is it art? By Janelle Brown In Austria, right-wingers take aim at a Net arts group for peddling porn (08/06/98) ___________________ Satisfy all your intellectual urges at barnesandnoble.com! ___________________   R E C E N T L Y The gentlemanly art of spanking By Carson Fitzgerald When women turn the other cheek, what are they asking for? (01/07/99) Two concepts of sexual hysteria By Linda R. Hirshman and Jane E. Larson The Democrats offer "Boogie Nights," the Republicans "The Crucible." Can we change the channel? (12/24/98) The shipping nudes By David Steinberg Why have certain postal services decided to become arbiters of obscenity? (12/10/98) Sade off By Molly Weatherfield The man who became history's most notorious pervert was no picnic to live with, either (11/19/98) - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Urge archives - - - - - - - - - -		BONFIRE OF THE PORN QUEENS | PAGE 1, 2, 3 - - - - - - - - - - What compelled me to drive 270 miles across the desert to stand around with a mob of slobbering creeps, watching scantily clad women with state-of-the-art bodies parade down this hall? In 1998, I reviewed approximately 300 porn tapes for AVN under the pen name Leopold Loeb. At the end of the year I voted along with 30 other AVN writers, editors and industry people on the porn professionals I'd spent so much time watching. Since the moment a Playboy arrived in my dad's mailbox, I'd been a distant enthusiast of porn. And when I turned 18 I went straight to the Pussycat Theatre in Hollywood. Watching the occasional porn tape is one thing, but when you increase the yearly allotment by 2,000 percent, as I did by having to watch and write about as many as 11 porn tapes a day, you enter into spooky territory. When the year ended I quit this addictive, but ultimately unsettling line of work. It wasn't good for the senses, I decided. It made me drowsy, and turned me into a recluse. When such an overdose of porn enters your brain all else seems trivial. As you walk to the grocery store you cannot understand why pedestrians are not peeling their clothes off and feeding off each other genitals. I went to the awards to "say goodbye to all that," as they say, and root for my favorite new starlet. The strategy behind AVN's awards ceremony is a shrewd one. Unlike the Oscars or the Emmys, which only choose a handful of nominees for a relatively small assortment of categories, AVN opens the floodgates by nominating up to 15 performers or titles for any given category, and allowing a host of curiously similar categories. From best all-girl sex scene to best couples sex scene to best group and best anal, all awards are split into both film and video categories, which effectively doubles their number despite the fact that the public doesn't know or care whether their jerk-off material is shot on videotape or tin foil. Practically every porn star in existence is in attendance because nearly all of them are nominated for something. To avoid nomination you have to be an ultra rookie, i.e., only a few days of work under your proverbial belt, or fuck with your eyes closed and snore. If this "everyone's-a-winner" spirit makes the event feel a bit like the Special Olympics, there's also another strain of optimism that has snuck into the proud glowing faces of the AVN royalty. Long gone are the days of a drugged Linda Lovelace coerced into scenes with Harry Reams in "Deep Throat," which still remains the "Citizen Kane" of porn. Adult Video has been reinventing itself steadily for the last 10 years and with movies "Boogie Nights" and "The People vs. Larry Flynt" inching pornography closer to the mainstream, many pornographers and porn stars have lost interest in pursuing Hollywood. N E X T+P A G E | Porn is nothing to be ashamed about