Portfolio.com has a long article about the changing face of the porn industry, focusing particularly on YouPorn and the fact that it’s giving away free porn and not making any money, even though the owners want $20 million for it.
The article has a few paragraphs about the emergence of women as consumers of porn, and in the interests of posterity I’m just going to cut and paste them (the article is 7 pages long, I figured it would be easier to post it here).
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(Penthouse’s Kelly) Holland, a veteran in the growing ranks of female directors, believes women—and the men who want to watch with them—are customers she won’t lose to online viewing. “Women are more reliable, they are more loyal, and they spend more money,†she says. “For women, you have to make sure the girls have great manicures, great pedicures, and great lingerie—put them in La Perla or Agent Provocateur—and you can serve up some pretty explicit material.†Holland cites HBO’s new sexually explicit miniseries Tell Me You Love Me as evidence of just how mainstream pornography has become.
“It’s not just a man thing,†agrees Samantha Lewis, the C.E.O. of Digital Playground, who estimates that 45 percent of her Web-based sales (which include site subscriptions and DVDs sold online) are to women. “As each year goes by, we’re realizing, Oh my goodness. The percentages are climbing.â€
The porn industry has long wanted to expand its female audience, but some producers concede it will take more than fancy sets, gauzy lighting, and a story line. “Women are just as unpredictable as men, only more so,†says Phil Harvey, the 69-year-old Harvard grad who 35 years ago founded Adam & Eve, a $90 million adult-film producer and sex-toy retailer based in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Harvey is a pioneer in marketing toys and videos to women and couples, having instituted a “sex positive†approach to pornographic retailing in the late 1980s. But as important as women are to Adam & Eve’s business—Harvey says 40 percent of its Web customers are female—he cautions against overgeneralizing. “At least five times we’ve tried to produce a women’s catalog, with cuddling and coupling,†he says drily. “It didn’t work.â€
I have to laugh at Kelly Holland’s idea of what makes porn palatable to women: nice nails and lingerie. As if we’ll put up with all the usual misogynist shit just because the woman has French tips.
The other thing is that the people at Adam and Eve still don’t seem to understand the women’s market, and they’re the ones who distribute Candida Royalle’s films. “Cuddling and coupling” is great, but what about making movies that deviate from the standard porn cliches?