Porn conventions are decadent and depraved (and also very mainstream)
Porn conventions are decadent and depraved (and also very mainstream)
A former porn journalist returns to the scene of the crime
Hello situation normies! I’m really excited to share a new aspect of my writing with you. Today’s post is from an adult entertainment convention in Las Vegas. I went to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo to research a sequel to Not Safe for Work, the first book in my Porn Valley Mystery series.
If there’s an operating theory to my writing, it’s this: truth is stranger than fiction, and the truth is usually a lot more interesting. That’s why my novels, like my Situation Normal stories, are rooted in real life experiences.
For example, I really was a reporter at porn’s second best trade publication, just like my novel’s protagonist, although I never solved any crimes. Like my protagonist, I firmly believe that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Also, and I’m not proud of this, the real life me and the fictional version of me were both chased through the Angeles National Forest by a butt-naked man in a werewolf mask. But I’m getting WAY ahead of the narrative.
Sorry.
This year, I’m working on the second book in my Porn Valley Mystery series! To fuel my research (and promote the hell out of these kickass novels) I’m revisiting my old profession by writing about the current state of adult entertainment. You’ll find that writing in a new section of my Substack I’m calling Smutty.
You don’t have to do anything to receive Smutty, but if you prefer to receive Situation Normal without Smutty, or to receive Smutty without Situation Normal, you can unsubscribe from one without unsubscribing from both. (Same deal as Situation Bali, if you were around for those stories). Personally, I think you’ll love both newsletters, but I’m biased.
Like everything I do with Situation Normal, the internet’s 57th best humor newsletter, my goal with Smutty is to bring a smile to your face and (maybe) broaden your perspective. I know that’s a tall order, but I’ve got a step ladder, so let’s go!
An idiot once told me that porn would go mainstream. Back in 2007, that idiot was my employer.
(To protect the guilty, I’ll refer to my former employer as Oz, the nom de porn I gave to the publisher of The Daily Pornographer, my novel’s fictional trade publication.)
Oz—as in The Wizard of Oz— fancied himself as the man pulling the strings behind the curtain. The way Oz saw it, porn, which he called “adult entertainment,” or simply “adult,” was on the cusp of going mainstream, thanks to the internet’s power to democratize culture and an untapped well of freak flags just waiting to rise up from the analog ashes of late 20th century moral majoritarian America.
In order to work for Oz, you needed to produce clean copy, demonstrate unsound news judgement, and most of all, believe in Oz’s vision of mainstream porndom. I was a believer, not because I thought Oz was right, but because I knew my paycheck depended on my fealty to Oz’s idiotic claim. Like Upton Sinclair once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Back in 2007, I thought I understood the porn industry. On the one hand, there were the old school producers and porn stars—the Boogie Nights crowd. They mostly operated out of the San Fernando Valley, where they produced movies that were distributed via shady and convoluted distribution channels that brought porn to the local video store, and from there, into the homes of anyone with a DVD player. On the other hand, there were the disruptors—quiet tech geeks with loud online personas who staked out prime online real estate, pioneered digital payments, and christened themselves “webmasters” of an ever-expanding network of adult websites that catered to every imaginable niche.
Just like the disruptors who moved fast and broke the record industry, the news business, and most other sectors of the analog economy, the geeks who moved fast and broke Porn Valley had little regard for the old order. In fact, many of adult’s early online empires were built on foundations of pirated content. But that was before my time.
My time in Porn Valley coincided with the rise of the so-called tube sites. On the surface, the tubes were YouTube knockoffs—porn’s answer to Web 2.0. But the revolution that ushered in user-generated content and social media platforms brought armageddon to Porn Valley in the form of unlimited free content.
As a trade reporter, I thought I was chronicling porn’s death rattle. Sure, porn was more popular than ever, but for webmasters and old school pornographers alike, unlimited free porn—as opposed to promo content like picture galleries and 30-second clips—spelled disaster for the industry. Right before my eyes, the profit was being sucked out of the industry, as legions of budget-conscious wankers discovered that the tubes were loaded with full-length, high-quality videos that could be streamed with the click of a button.
To me, it was obvious that free porn was a sign of the end. How can you have an industry when the product is free, I wondered? But to Oz, free porn was creative destruction—a cleansing fire that would purge the industry of its dinosaurs and usher in new innovators.
Who would those innovators be? According to Oz, anyone and everyone would join the porn industry.
“Your mom does porn,” Oz liked to say.
But Oz wasn’t making a momma joke. He was laying out his vision for an internet where every adult produced, marketed, and consumed porn—an ouroboros of smut that swallowed the ancient distinctions between porn star and fan, between industry and consumer, between mainstream and adult.
“Porn is going mainstream,” Oz told me. “It’s going to happen faster than you think. In a decade, maybe two, the President will be a porn star, but it won’t be a big deal. It’ll be so normal it probably won’t be worth mentioning.”
To me, Oz’s vision for the future sounded like something out of the Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, which is why I thought Oz was an idiot. But then a funny thing happened.
First, Idiocracy fans, myself included, noticed that with each passing year, Judge’s satire seemed to be inching eerily, uncomfortably, toward something prescient. Humanity wasn’t facing famine because we had suddenly decided to water crops with Gatorade (yet), but dang it, things really were getting dumb and dumber out there. Still, I had a hard time believing Americans would elect someone like Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, a former wrestler and porn star, to the Presidency.
Then came 2016.
America elected a WWE celebrity hall of fame inductee who banged a porn star, then ordered his dipshit lawyer to pay her off with money borrowed against the dipshit lawyer’s condo. As that stormy saga played out over the next few years, I worried that maybe I was the idiot and my former employer was a visionary. There’s a very fine line between idiot and visionary, after all, and only time can truly tell the two camps apart.
Maybe that’s why Christina and I went to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. I wanted to see how porn had changed, and if, as my former employer had predicted, an industry that was built by outlaws armed with fake boobs and fake names, was moving toward the mainstream?
Here’s what we found at this year’s AVN Adult Entertainment Expo.
Civilians are cheap, fans are gold
As I walked from the Resort World parking lot to the hotel & casino, I struck up a conversation with a couple from Cincinnati. They were dressed like they were headed for a night out at Buffalo Wild Wings, and since they weren’t wearing credentials, I figured they were civilians (industry slang for outsiders). I didn’t get their names, so I used one of those porn name generators. From here on out, the husband will be known as Kurt Packer, and his wife as Margarita St. McStuffin.
“We just came to see the hotel,” Kurt Packer said. “My wife is a travel agent, so we’re checking out the hotel, because it’s new, and we thought maybe we’d get something to eat.”
“We had no idea there was a porno convention going on,” said Margarita St. McStuffin.
Me thought Margarita doth protest too much. Also, I didn’t like the way she said porno, like the people who made pornos were somehow beneath her. They weren’t being forced to go to this hotel, and they weren’t being shamed for their curiosity, yet they felt the need to act like they weren’t the sort of people who would do this sort of thing. Whatever.
“Are you attending, or exhibiting?” Kurt Packer asked me.
“Neither. I’m press.”
My answer took Kurt Packer by surprise. But Margarita St. McStuffin put two and two together.
“I guess it’s just like a regular industry, huh?”
It’s more like an irregular industry, but I didn’t want to get into the weeds with these two. Instead, I told them to buy a ticket and take the ride.
“How much are tickets?” Kurt Packer asked.
“I think they start around eighty bucks. It’s more if you want to go to the awards show on Saturday.”
“Awards show?” asked Margarita St. McStuffin.
“It’s like the Oscars of porn.”
Kurt Packer started to make a joke about the award for best orgy, but then he remembered that he was from Cincinnati, where flying your freak flag is frowned upon, I guess.
“Eighty bucks seems high,” he said.
There it was, I thought, the free porn monster. Obviously, Kurt Packer and Margarita St. McStuffin watch porn, but after two decades of the digital revolution, they had been trained to believe that they’re entitled to get their jollies for free. Now, here they were, faces pressed up against the peep show glass, their hands unwilling to reach for the quarters in their pockets.
“There’s one! A porno star!”
Margarita St. McStuffin pointed to a lingerie-clad model waiting in line at the Randy’s Donuts located in the Resort World lobby.
“Wow, that’s crazy,” Kurt Packer said. “Will you look at her?”
I looked at her, but I didn’t see anything crazy. I saw a woman dressed in lingerie, waiting in line for a donut. Maybe that’s a wild sight in Cincinnati, but in Vegas, it looked like Thursday to me.
I said farewell to Kurt Packer and Margarita St. McStuffin, but I doubt they heard me. They were too busy gawking, even though there’s probably more skin at their local pool in Cincinnati. Just saying.
Inside the convention, it was a different story. There were thousands of fans who had happily paid the ticket price. There were plenty of industry people there too, but fans easily outnumbered industry professionals by an unofficial count of sixty-nine to one.
Most of the fans were dudes—shocker! But I saw a lot of couples and single women too. At first glance, the crowd looked like the crowds that attended the conventions I covered in the early aughts. Upon closer inspection, however, I detected a slight vibe shift. Dudes still dominated the space, but the dude energy had mellowed quite a bit. To me, it felt like Comic-Con, but with less IP and more sex toys.
There’s a code of conduct and a dress code. For real!
At the risk of sounding like an old man, porn conventions didn’t have codes of conduct in my day.
For the record, a code of conduct is a good thing! But a code of conduct is also a sign of an industry that’s determined to abide by social conventions. That might describe adult entertainment in 2023, but it’s not an accurate description of the industry I covered in the aughts. Back then, pornographers proudly thumbed their noses at society’s conventions because that was the best way to promote their products to a culture that was still capable of being shocked by something lewd, crude, or transgressive. Also, most of the pornographers I covered wore labels like “lewd,” “crude,” or “transgressive” as badges of honor.
Of course, most mainstream conventions in the early aughts probably didn’t have codes of conduct either. But the point isn’t that porn, or society more broadly, has changed for the better. The point is that on the issues of safety and accountability, porn and the mainstream are converging.
To enter, the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, attendees must sign a code of conduct acknowledging that the following behaviors are prohibited:
Physical assault
Stalking
Unwelcome physical contact
Harassing photography (cameras are allowed, but no means no if an individual declines to pose)
Photographs or recordings that violate privacy (e.g., upskirt shots, shooting in non-public spaces)
Offensive verbal assaults, including but not limited to negative comments based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity/presentation
Harassment in public restrooms (guests at the AVN Show are welcome to use the restrooms that match their gender presentation or identity)
In addition to the code of conduct, there’s a dress code posted at the entrance to the show. While “sexy attire is expected,” the X-rated crowd is supposed to keep it R-rated. Or, maybe PG-13. I dunno, I never really understood the MPAA ratings, which seem to penalize bad words and boobs far more than they punish violence, but that’s another story altogether.
Cams, Cams & more Cams
I’m using the terms “porn” and “adult” interchangeably, but I probably shouldn’t do that. One reason is that some people in the adult entertainment industry dislike the word porn. To them, porn is a pejorative, although that view, while valid, probably dates them to a time when adult content had an uncertain legal status.
But even if you think porn is a positive word, the descriptor is a limiting one. The adult entertainment industry is a catchall for a range of commerce, from sex toys, to exotic dancing, to sex work, to, well, just about anything that floats someone’s boat, sexually speaking.
But if even we’re focused on content, porn really only describes filmed scenes and movies. Porn content is produced for paid member sites, tube platforms, hotel pay-per-view operators, and yes, DVDs. The performers in these videos are porn stars, although not every porn star achieves actual stardom.
Cams—short for webcam—are a different content play. As a segment, cams are bigger than porn and they’re growing faster, although it’s important to note that data on adult entertainment is notoriously unreliable. Nevertheless, you can tell cams are the main event by the amount of convention floor space cam companies and models command. Cams were everywhere at AVN, and while the models were there to meet their fans IRL, they were also there to livestream from the show floor to audiences all over the world.
Cams were around when I covered adult in the aughts, but unfortunately, we called the performers “cam girls.” Today, it’s more common to call performers “cam models,” which is a big improvement! Models, after all, is more accurate, respectful, and inclusive.
If you’re alive, and you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of OnlyFans. The platform shot to fame during the pandemic, when Bella Thorne and Cardi B launched their OnlyFans accounts.1 But while OnlyFans is a household name, the reality is that there are scores of cam platforms.
“How can there be so many cam platforms?” Christina asked.
“How can there be so many streamers?” I asked.
“OK, but how do these platforms differentiate themselves? What’s their value proposition?”
Another man might’ve teased his wife for asking business questions at a porn convention, but when I was a trade journalist, this was precisely what I would’ve been trying to understand.
“They compete on model payouts,” I said. “They also compete, to some extent, on price for customers. Some platforms are known for serving a particular niche. Other platforms have better tech, or UI, or they do a better job of navigating the laws of a particular country.”
“How do you know this kind of stuff?” Christina asked.
I held up my press pass.
“I talk to people.”
The first cam model I chatted with was a transgender woman called Trinity.
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