Excerpt from "Among the Pornographers," Matt Labash's coverage of the 1998 World Pornography Conference for The Weekly Standard
Just look at them sitting together, luxuriating in one another's gazes like fat hounds in the sun: Over there, the First Amendment lawyers, with their chalkstripes and barrel cuffs and owlish widow's peaks. There's the professoriat, suited up in seat-cleaving Dockers and itchy tweeds or camouflaging guts in frowzy guayaberas. And here are the belles of the ball — the porn stars and starlets, in all manner of neoprene saris, split-to-the-cervix gowns, do-me pumps, reptile tattoos, and black banded shirts fastened with onyx studs like the ones favored by soft jazz saxophonists and effeminate magicians.
This odd assemblage has gathered for a four-day World Pornography Conference, August 6-9, in the Universal Sheraton, amid the strip-mall sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, porn-production capital of the world. The meeting is sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge — a sort of Left Coast Kinsey Institute.
Over 500 academics — sociologists, anthropologists, sexologists, film and gender-studies teachers, and interdisciplinary seekers from across the country — are attending under the guise of studying "Eroticism and the First Amendment." But the real aim is simpler: to celebrate pornography. As center founder and professor emeritus of history Vern Bullough says, speaking for the 12-year-old in all of us, "We hope to get more [pornography] deposits from the industry — so we'll have the biggest porn collection in the country!" . . .
Most of the panels [at the conference] present no vexing dilemmas: Porn is good. Pants-suited porn starlets wax self-analytic at a session headlined "Victims or Visionaries?" Verdict: Visionaries! Against this consensus, panels explore the particulars of porn's artistic merits and cultural significance, harvesting insights so minute as to be barely detectable. At the "Role of Fetishism" panel, philosophy professor David Austin of North Carolina State University has determined through rigorous Internet study that the number of "necro[philia] enthusiasts is about three times that of [menstrual] period enthusiasts." The next speaker, Midori, a "FetishDiva" squeezed into a black rubber Emma Peel catsuit with six-inch stiletto boots, shows us slides of 19th-century Austrian pumps that "render the wearer immobile and thrust the foot forward like an offering."
Over in "Cum Shots: History, Theory, and Research," Dr. Peter Sandor Gardos, a San Francisco clinical sexologist, explains his research on the ejaculatory "money shot," the genre's most sacred convention. Gardos recruits college sophomores to view porn-movie clips of actors ejaculating on their female counterparts, then gauges whether they find the images degrading. His data have led him to conclude that "no pornographic image is interpretable outside of its historical and social context. Harm or degradation does not reside in the image itself." Bill Margold, who has starred in over 400 films, begs to differ, asserting that such shots represent "vicarious revenge exacted upon the cheerleader by X-number of men who could not get that cheerleader."
Another panel deconstructs Ed Powers's Dirty Debutantes oeuvre. Peter Lehman, a University of Arizona professor and Blake Edwards scholar, reads from a laborious treatise laced with allusions to Godard, Lumiere, and Melies. Powers's contribution: He displaces "the monotonous emphasis on the meat shot" and constructs instead "a comic Woody Allen-like Jewish persona for himself, acknowledging insecurities such as worrying about his penis size." Lehman concedes to me that he and his colleagues "are legitimizing [porners] within the culture," but only in a way "that I think they deserve."
Academics, it seems, are the only people who can de-eroticize sex more completely than pornographers. The most striking instance comes when U of Cal Irvine's Jay Lorenz delivers his presentation on the "gonzo" films of John Stagliano, a.k.a. Buttman, one of porn's top directors, a Cato Institute benefactor, and an unapologetic gluteus enthusiast.
Citing Stagliano's voyeuristic verite travelogues, which begin as interviews and culminate in sex in public places, a straight-faced Lorenz launches a lengthy exegesis comparing Stagliano's persona to the late-19th-century flaneur as described by Baudelaire. He illustrates with clips of Buttman in Barcelona. Lorenz's purpose? To expatiate on the "binary collapse" and "epistemological flippage" brought about by "the erosion of the once-secure border distinction between the private and public spheres."
Himself a panelist, Stagliano looks slightly embarrassed by the attention. "All I wanted to do was make videos that really turned me on," he mumbles, his shirt unbuttoned to mid-sternum. "Another idea I had was to make a video about, uh, my obsession, uh, with female butts."
Nobody laughs. But if anyone entertains lingering doubts about what fuels Stagliano's artistic vision, he need only walk to the back of the room, past the beard-tugging academics, past the beaded water pitchers, to the table that contains an advertisement for Stagliano's Buttman magazine. There, beneath a letter from the editor entitled "From the Crack," is a picture of Stagliano: Auteur, Libertarian Champion, Toast of the Academy, Harbinger of Tomorrow's Canon. At least it looks like Stagliano. It's difficult to tell. His face is buried in some girl's fleshy keister.