Gallery
What It’s Like to Report About the Porn Industry
There’s good reason why we think that way: It’s legal here. And in California, it’s explicitly legal. In 1988, the California Supreme Court ruled in that porn is protected by the First Amendment, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling when it was appealed. With porn protected in California, pornographers from around the world flocked to the San Fernando Valley outside of Hollywood — nicknamed “Porn Valley.” There, they took advantage of spillover from the mainstream film industry and began to dig in. “Thus, the porn industry in the U.S. is a highly visible, concentrated, identifiable one,” .
It didn’t take long for loops of 8mm and 16mm films from Scandinavia to be introduced to then-illegal peep show booths in sex shops across America, notably through , a naturalized Swede of Italian descent who became one of Europe’s most celebrated porn producers. Braun found a workaround for hardcore film loops’ unlawful status in America, by — reputedly — working with the Mafia. “He would basically provide the material for the jerk-off booths,” explains Paasonen. “It was a big, sort of underground industry.” And, in the way of things people want but aren’t supposed to have, adds Paasonen, “It was massive.”
Those sites in particular have fundamentally changed the relationship of consumers and producers to pornographic content. Porn is now, effectively, free to watch, and it’s being distributed by a whole new machine. As Sullivan says, “The tube model is a fundamentally different structuring of an industry, away from content and into transmission.”
Here at MEL, that’s what we’re aiming to explore over the remainder of 2017. Once a month, starting tomorrow, we’ll be globe-hopping from continent to continent, investigating how the people there are making and consuming their porn — and how it’s influencing the porn we make and consume here in the U.S. It begins with Africa, specifically Nigeria, the youngest porn industry in the world (est. the mid-2010s), which has been led in part by a 45-year-old woman named . The Nigerian press frequently refers to her to as the country’s first porn star, and her music videos and films have revamped cultural norms in an otherwise highly religious nation—split between Christians and Muslims—where producing porn is still a major taboo (though not technically illegal).
