It's Official: TPoP and SPC Slide Show Violate 2257

So, by various subtrefuges and transparent rationalizations the creators of these "mocumentaries" have attempted to worm out from under the record keeping requirements to which all producers of sexually explicit materials are subject under federal statuate 18 U.S.C. 2257. They've babbled on about fair use and offered the extremely peculiar defense that the porn images stolen for their horror shows is presumed to be compliant because porn producers have financial incentives to obey the law and therefore whatever content is stolen from them and recycled to slander them is also compliant.

Well, the latest "clarification" of 2257, whle murky as ever on many points, is pretty clear when it comes to the so-called documentary use of sexually explicit images, and any exemptions from 2257 claimed as fair use or under whatever other guise.

Here's what the Department of Justice has to say on this particular subject, word for word:

"Several commenters ask the Department to exclude news and documentary programming from the definition of 'producer'," the DOJ reports. "The comments claim that producers of that programming use footage provided by others under the fair use doctrine. The comments posit that if a producer includes news and documentary producers, then such producers either will lose the ability to obtain footage depicting any adult sexual conduct, or will be forced to make payments to the original producer notwithstanding the fair use doctrine. The Department declines to adopt this comment. The First Amendment does not permit even a bona fide reporter to trade in child pornography in order to create a work of journalism."

Are you paying attention Professor Sun, Mr. Wosnitzer, Dr. Jensen and Dr. Dines? You better be, because that's you all the feds are talking about, and they're not buying your lame excuses for ducking 2257 compliance any more than I do. You better get those records, cut that footage, pull these products from distribution or be ready for a knock on the door at some point during regular business hours.

It's a rare day indeed when I agree with the D.O.J. but in this matter we're very much on the same page, and when the F.S.C.'s lawsuit is finally negotiated to a settlement, as I believe it will be in the first few months of the new administration, I'm quite sure we'll still be in accord on this particular topic.

His Vorpal Sword Rakes New 2257 Rules

In case you haven't heard (and you probably haven't due to all the fire being thrown over those OTHER set of regulations that the Bushies just released concerning the "conscience" rights of fundie health care workers to deny reproductive and sexual health services based upon their religious "objections"), the Bushies have also managed to release finally their revisions of the 2257 regulations regarding age notification of persons performing in sexually oriented media.

Needless to say, from a sexually progressive standpoint, these new rules are, if anything, worse than the original....and serve the basic purpose of essentually using paperwork to drive the porn industry out of existence.

I'm sure that there will be more info out on the reaction to these new rules (and I'm guessing that Ernest will have a word or ten thousand to say on this, too....but I discovered this morning an online essay posted to a blog called his vorpal sword that pretty much nails the motivations behind both the 2257 and the "medical conscience" regulations to the point: as the latest bomb in the antisex/morality wars.

It's such an awesome essay that to merely quote snippets would do it no justice...so I'll just offer the link and ask you to go there and read it for yourself.

his vorpal sword: Death-O-Rama, or, Porn Free

The essayist even mines the recent passing of the original "Deep Throat", the Linda Lovelace movie of the same name, Traci Lords, and the passing of Bettie Page, and some history of the Sex Wars. All in all, a complete and thorough dissection of the antisex morality.

Breaking Update: Louisa Turk/Crystal Gunns "Retires" From School Aide Position

A follow up to a previous story here:

Looks like the porn witch hunters have claimed another scalp. From X-Biz.com:

Crystal Gunns Resigns From Teaching Position

VINELAND, N.J. — Offering no more than a one-line resignation, Louisa Tuck, aka Crystal Gunns, has left her job as a teacher's aide at a New Jersey elementary school.

The 32-year-old Tuck wrote in her letter that she was leaving D'Ippolito Elementary School "in good standing," though she made no mention of the controversy that surrounded her "outing" as a former adult film performer.

After leaving the industry, Tuck took the teacher's aide job, working in the school's cafeteria and helping out on the playground. Vineland School spokesperson John Sbrana said that he found out about Tuck's past because of complaints from parents – parents who are apparently fans of Tuck's past work.

"This isn't the kind of information that you come across accidentally," Sbrana said. "You'd have to go quite out of your way to find out."

When word first broke about Tuck's work in adult, the school and school board took no action, because as Sbrana said, "She has not done anything wrong. She has not committed any crime. She's entitled to her privacy like anyone else. There is no action against her."

Vineland School District Superintendent Charles Ottinger agreed. In a statement released in November, he said, "It's one thing if it's an illegal activity, because that would come up in the check. There is no way for us to know if a person is involved in these types of activities."

But despite those sentiments from the school and school board, Tuck's story spread through hundreds of news outlets, even though Tuck limited her public statements on the matter. Tuck's attorney, Jeff DiLazzero, hasn't commented, either.

Tuck's resignation will not be official until the local board of education approves it. Their next meeting is set for Jan. 21. Until then, Tuck could still change her mind and keep her job, because no one has asked her to leave it.

Oh, but of course, there's no action against her...because the very idea is to so shame her for being such a evil slut and outing her publically for an activity that harms no one but just might challenge some people's ideas about women from....THAT profession. No, so much better to simply undercut her with rumors and misstatements about how she might infect the poor impressionable students with....her breasts?!?!?!

We might as well just have every former porn starlet just wear a scarlet "P" on their chests, then, shall we?? The better to keep them away from any position where they can corrupt impressionable children who might be strayed from the proper and prudish path.

Of course, the school will be without a capable teacher's aide who probably was loved and respected by children and staff alike....but 'ya gotta break some eggs, you know.

So much for the alleged "mainstreaming" of porn....

Update: "Free But Porn-Free" Wireless Internet Plan Stalled By FCC

Well, well, well....seems like it's not only pornhounds like us who are questioning that plan to offer free but censored wireless broadband Internet.

The proposal was scheduled to be debated and possibly approved by the FCC at a hearing on December 18th...but due to increased opposition, it's now been pushed back to after the inauguration, at least/

The story from the online Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON -- Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin on Friday evening canceled next week's meeting at which the commission was scheduled to vote on a free Internet plan, after receiving a letter from key U.S. lawmakers asking him to hold off.

Sen. John Rockefeller, (D-W.Va.), and Rep. Henry Waxman, (D-Calif.), who will chair the Senate and House committees overseeing the FCC next year, earlier Friday sent a letter to Mr. Martin asking him to cease actions on controversial policy proposals.

Mr. Martin had proposed that the FCC vote Dec. 18 on rules for a sale of valuable airwaves that would have required the winning bidders to offer free Internet access to 95% of the country.

That item is opposed by the White House. Bush administration officials disapprove of spectrum auctions that impose conditions on the owners. Other critics have raised questions about whether the plan will work, noting that only one business thus far, M2Z Networks Inc., has offered a business model that includes free Internet.

Under Mr. Martin's plan, the free Internet proposal would have been smut-free, including a filter for pornography. Adults over 18 would have been able to opt out. Civil rights groups had raised questions about that idea, worrying about whether it would interfere with users' privacy and free speech.

Mr. Martin also wanted the commission to vote next week on a plan opposed by the cable industry that would have strengthened TV networks in negotiations about how they are carried by cable providers.

Both of Mr. Martin's proposals, if approved by the full commission, almost certainly would have been challenged, either in court or through the FCC's internal review process.

"We received the letter from Senator Rockefeller and Congressman Waxman today and spoke with other offices," said FCC Spokesman Robert Kenny. "In light of the letter, it does not appear that there is consensus to move forward and the agenda meeting has been canceled."

Mr. Kenny added that noncontroversial items on the agenda could still be approved by the commissioners on the five-member body without a meeting. For example, Martin had included changes to emergency 911 call rules and satellite interference rules on the meeting agenda.

What is particularly interesting is the opposition from the Bush White House....one would think that the Religious Right faithful (aka "the Base" of the GOP) would love the idea of imposing a porn-free Internet on the poor and working stiffs (no pun intended)....but on the other hand, the more "libertarian" and capitalistic wing probably wouldn't be so fond of having a government sanctioned "free" spectrum directly competing with their proprietary companies.

The letter from Rep. Waxman and Sen. Rockefeller is just as interesting, since there was some interest in the original proposal from some prominent Democrats...but I guess that the combination of opposition from the major wireless providers and the civil libertarian groups was just too much.

Either way, I see it as a net gain...perhaps after Obama is sworn in, cooler heads will prevail and we can work on an alternative that offers increased and improved Internet access to those not currently affording it, but without the content restrictions imposed from above. (Filters and other means of addressing inappropriate and objectionable content imposed by end-users on their own computers and by parents on their own children, of course, get absolutely no opposition from me or any other fair-minded progressive.)

Passing of a Pornographic Priestess

Bettie Page (1923–2008)

Bettie Page Memorial site
LA Times obit
Susie Bright comments

And going back to one of the original questions of this blog – "Why pro-porn?"

Because sometimes, just sometimes, it creates icons like this, that's why.

Court Upholds "Porn is Not Prostitution" Principle

Via The Legal Satyricon, The Volokh Conspiracy, Polymorphous Perversity, and the Concord Monitor comes news of one of the few triumphs for the much-beseiged right of sexual expression. In this case, the legal principle distinguishing porn production from prostitution has once again been upheld in, of all places, New Hampshire. This legal principle is enshrined in the case of California v. Freeman and, although this case is not binding in any state other than California, the distinction it makes between paying somebody to have sex with you versus paying for a sexual performance has been largely upheld elsewhere in the US. It was most recently challenged in New Hampshire in the case of State v. Theriault, with the final result that New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the Freeman principle.

Who the hell makes porn in New Hampshire you might ask? In this case the old maxim about "hard cases make bad law" seems to have been reversed, with some good law being harvested out of a dodgy case. Apparently, the defendent, Robert Theriault, was a county court baliff who approached a couple (while still in uniform, apparently) who had just paid a traffic ticket and offered them money to make a "fuck flick". According to an earlier article, this was accompanied by a story about how he was "an investigator" testing different kinds of condoms, as well as the ability of different electric blankets to increase sperm count. (You can't make this stuff up.) The couple actually went through with a sexual performance for this guy, but later had a change of heart about the whole thing. Eventually, the incident was reported to the police and the fool was quite rightly releived of his job as baliff. However, he was also arrested and charged with soliciting prostitution, something he was successfully convicted of in lower courts.

Ultimately, the State Supreme Court did what it was supposed to do, and didn't allow the urge to punish one person's sketchy activities to impinge on everybody's rights. Its unfortunate the court in the Max Hardcore case wasn't operating on the same principle.

Anti-Sex Work Hysteria Hits Netherlands. Who's Next?

More lost ground in the E.U. More sex workers driven to the margins of what was once a society famed for its tolerance and pluralism.

And who do we suppose lobbied for this lovely change of policy? Three guesses on that one.

Anyway, here's the bad news from AP:

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Amsterdam unveiled plans Saturday to close up to half of the famed brothels and marijuana cafes in its ancient city center as part of a major cleanup operation.

The city says it wants to drive organized crime out of the district, and is targeting businesses that "generate criminality," including prostitution, gambling parlors, "smart shops" that sell herbal treatments, head shops and "coffee shops" where marijuana is sold openly.

"I think that the new reality will be more in line with our image as a tolerant and crazy place, rather than a free zone for criminals" said alderman Lodewijk Asscher, one of the main proponents of the plan.

The city said it would also reduce the number of business it sees as related to the "decay" of the center, including peep shows, sex theaters, sex shops, mini supermarkets, massage parlors and souvenir shops.

The city said there were too many of these and it believes some are used for money-laundering by drug dealers and the human traffickers who supply many of the city's prostitutes.

Asscher underlined that the city will remain true to its freewheeling reputation.

"It'll be a place with 200 windows (for prostitutes) and 30 coffee shops, which you can't find anywhere else in the world — very exciting, but also with cultural attractions and you won't have to be embarrassed to say you came," he said.

Under the plan announced Saturday, Amsterdam will spend euro30-euro40 million ($38-$51 million) to bring hotels, restaurants, art galleries and boutiques to the center. It will also build new underground parking areas for cars and bikes and may use some of the vacated buildings to ease a housing shortage.

Amsterdam already had plans to close many brothels and said last month it might close some coffee shops throughout the city, but the plans announced Saturday go much further.

Asscher said the city would use various techniques to reshape the area, including rezoning, buying out some businesses and offering others assistance in "upgrading" their stores. In the past, the city has shut a number of brothels and sex clubs, relying primarily on a law that allows the closure of businesses with bookkeeping irregularities.

He said the city will also offer help for prostitutes and coffee shop employees who lose their jobs as a result of the plan.

Prostitution, which has spread into several areas of the center, will be allowed only in two areas — notably De Wallen ("The Walls"), a web of streets and alleys around the city's medieval retaining dam walls. The area has been a center of prostitution since before the city's golden shipping age in the 1600s.

Prostitution was legalized in the Netherlands in 2000, formalizing a long-standing tolerance policy.

Marijuana is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but prosecutors won't press charges for possession of small amounts and the coffee shops are able to sell it openly.

WFF's Tracy Ryan Takes Down Huffpo Trafficking B.S.

Evidently, I wasn't the only one who found the recent Huffpo piece on human trafficking (aka sex slavery) a complete crock. Writer Tracy Ryan, affiliated with The Woodhull Freedom Foundation, had a look at the authors' numbers and spotted many of the same inconsistencies I saw, plus a few more I missed. She dismantles the whole thing very nicely, thus:

Taken point by point:

Claims that 27 million people are held in debt bondage or that 800,000 are trafficked are not supported by any evidence. There are probably 250,000 total sex workers in the US, (less than one per thousand population). This piece claims 300,000 new sex workers with an average age of 13 enter the industry annually. No professional outreach organization or law enforcement agency would agree with this exaggeration. If it were true within five years there would be 1.5 million underage girls in the US sex trade.

You’d think outreach workers and law enforcement folks would notice. You might also wonder where all the new johns were coming form to support a more than six-fold increase in prostitution in just five years. Their figures indicate Finland with a population of just 5 million would see 85 thousand new sex workers in five years. Another anti-trafficking group in California said the number trafficked into Finland was 80 thousand a year.

These people care nothing about the accuracy of their numbers. The US State Dept originally (2001 or thereabouts) estimated 50K trafficked into the US annually. This they later admitted was a number pulled out of thin air. After seven years and 100 million dollars of Federal anti-trafficking money spent about 1100 cases were identified nationally. Virtually all of them had to have some of their facts tweaked to meet the standard for being a trafficking crime.

The number quoted for Finland (population 5 million) of 17,000 is actually the number now quoted by the State Dept. for the US (population 300 million) after admitting the 50K was a wild exaggeration. The 17,000 is probably no better. Last year I asked the public relations guy with Honolulu County’s District Attorney’s office how many cases their office was aware of in Hawaii. He said ONE and that involved domestic servitude, not prostitution.

The average age of entry is not known by anyone. No valid study exists concerning this question. All of us are left with extrapolating conclusions based on our own contacts and knowledge. Since it is clear to anyone familiar with this industry that there is a large and growing segment of women who enter it at college age or thereabouts in order to have an average age of 13 there would need to be large amounts of children well younger than 13 to balance them out. Thirteen to fifteen may be a common age for streetwalkers to have entered the industry, but it is way too young to be considered an average.

Playing up the underage card is a tactic just as inflating the numbers is. In Melissa Farley’s recent book about prostitution in Nevada she reports that “prostitution of 13-17 year old children is rampant according to one police officer”. However arrest statistics for 2006 showed that of over 4500 arrests only 40 were for underage prostitutes. Of these 40 people 29 were 17 years old.

The article points out that much victimization results from teenagers running away. It illogically blames the sex industry for this victimization. A rational approach would be to first concern itself with what they were running away from. It would also take into consideration the lack of legal rights such runaways have and how this plus a lack of life experience almost certainly will lead them into abusive conditions. If the institution of prostitution were abolished, as is the stated desire of the writers of this piece, teenagers would still run away and still be victimized.

Simply stating that children face potentially abusive situation in an industry provides no logic for abolishing the industry. A hundred years ago small children worked long hours in mines and factories under often appalling conditions. No one argued for closing the coal mines or abolishing the steel industry.

The next point is that johns should be arrested for creating the demand for this industry. This is based on the false premise that all prostitutes are abused slaves who desperately need to be rescued. There is a mountain of evidence from prostitutes around the world that contradicts this. The “arrest the johns” mantra shifts blame from the people indicated as causing abuse (pimps and traffickers) to some third party who has not done anything other than agree to give a women some money that she wants form him in exchange for a sexual service he desires.

The arrest the johns argument makes as much sense as an argument to arrest people for wearing or using cotton during the time when black Americans were held in slavery. The growth of cotton has continued without slavery and harms done to young women in the sex industry can be addressed without arresting johns or abolishing prostitution. The 100 million dollars wasted by the Federal Government in its vain attempt to find trafficking victims could have been much better spent funding programs for teenage runaways.

> The next point merely states what the opinions are of some people in Sweden. It also repeats the lie about 17,000 trafficking victims entering Finland annually. There is no more reason to give credibility to the Swedish “experts” quoted here than to the writers of this whole piece; who clearly deserve none.

They go on to state that 70% of the 88,000 prostituted women in England and Wales are under the control of pimps and traffickers. This they argue is a reason to dump the burden of proof issue when convicting johns. This is similar to their efforts in the US Congress to eliminate the need to prove force in getting trafficking convictions. This drive to eliminate the basic rules of evidence in proving criminal cases was objected to by the US Attorney General’s office and others. The authors of this piece offer no evidence to support their claim of 70% . The number of street prostitutes is generally estimated at 10 to 15 %. Interestingly here they quote the number of prostitutes in Britain at about 88,000 Britain has a population ten times as great as Finland where these same people claimed there were17,000 trafficking victims every year.

Their statement about brothel closures in the Netherlands and other trends along those lines in Europe are falsely attributed to evidence of trafficking. This trend is political and follows the successful fear mongering campaign these advocates are pressing on the continent. It has no basis in good public policy.

Finally the quote about how Swedes consider prostitution inherently violent is an insult to women. It puts them in a position of
minors who are not capable of giving sexual consent. It ignores individuality in favor of defining people by membership in a class. In this regard prostitute, john, pimp, etc are all arch-types that hostile individuals get to define with no respect whatsoever for the obviously varying views of the people they wish to define. This is the opposite of “women’s liberation”.

Yes We Can....Smack Titty Bar Ads!!! Or...The More Things Change....

It's stories like this that makes me think that Ernest might have a point or fifty about how Democrats and "liberals" can be as loony when it comes to sex as the Bushite Right:

Taken from RawStory.com:

Dem councilman wants to stalk legal patrons of strip club

Early Obama backer seeks administration job

A New York City councilman who objects to the image of a scantily-clad woman which looms over a strip club in a residential neighborhood has decided to take the law into his own hands by photographing patrons of the club and posting the pictures online.

Councilman James Sanders Jr., a Queens Democrat, told the hosts of Fox & Friends on Friday, "We're going to creative civil disobedience to ensure that everybody who goes into that club has a picture taken, and if they are proud to go into the club, we are proud to put it on the web."

"The only problem is that legally, you may not be able to do that," commented host Gretchen Carlson.

The billboard above the club entrance, which depicts a woman whose full breasts are covered only by a narrow strip of cloth over the nipples, is no more revealing than many comic book and video game images. However, Fox News, which showed the full image in the first tease for the story, later pixelated over the breast area and cropped the bottom, creating the impression that the figure might be nude and making the image appear far more lurid.



"We have children," Councilman Sanders explained in justification of his actions. "And any time anyone puts a 25 foot tall display, that they call a sign, on a major intersection where our children have to go to school -- this insult to women, this insult to our community -- we're going to take action."

"We did a mass meeting and had more than 300 people there," Sanders added. "In fact, they wanted to take worse actions than I'm speaking about. We're going to keep this legal."

Fox's legal expert, Judge Andrew Napolitano, then came onto the set, saying, "I have been watching this, and unfortunately the first amendment has some things to say about it."

Sanders acknowledged that "the club is a legal establishment and they are obeying all of the zoning laws," but he continued to claim, "They can advertise, they just don't have to inflict pornography on us."

"Under New York State law," Napolitano explained, "it's not pornographic. ... And as repellant as the business is, it's a lawful business."

"There are community standards," Sanders insisted, "and in our community this is not part of the standards."

"If you want to argue that it violates the community standards, then you have to go to court and get a judge to agree," Napolitano stated. "In my opinion, it's not pornographic, because New York's law is very, very, very broad."

"Where have we come, if that's not pornographic?" Carlson asked. "It looks pretty pornographic to me."

Billboards which publicly push the grounds of good taste have recently raised protests in major cities from Cleveland to Toronto and have been the subject of campaigns by conservative religious groups. Actor turned born-again Christian Stephen Baldwin attracted attention in 2006 when he announced plans to photograph patrons of a sex shop outside Nyack, NY.

Sanders, described by the Daily News as "a former Marine with a maverick reputation," gained attention last spring by campaigning for Barack Obama while most New York City Democrats were supporting Hillary Clinton. The News reported at that time that Sanders was hoping for a job in Washington if Obama won -- and that contenders for his council seat might include both his ex-wife and his current wife, who is his former chief of staff.

Now, considering that our President-Elect has so much on his plate already with the economy and undoing all of Dubya's messes, I'm not so sure that he would take that much time off his busy schedule to reward a local New York City councilman...especially one with such a wingnutty form of attitude. But then again, Obama did go so far as to approach fundie Christian/anti-gay bigot Donnie McCracken in the campaign, and he did carry some mixed messages on Proposition (H)8...so he may yet be suspectible to the politics of "sex panic". If this fool does manage to seal a position in his administration, it wouldn't be a good sign.

And, as always is the case when it comes to sex themes, leave it to Fixed Noise to play both sides of the street: faux moral outrage at "CHILDREN!! SEEING!!! POOOOOORRRRRRNNNNNN!!!!!1111ONE1111!!", combined with enough pixellated titillation to attract the usual rating. I expect BillO to be doing a "Talking Points" segment of his TV show from right in front of the offending advert by this time next week.

The more things change, indeed.

Amazing But True - Positive Coverage from MSM

Unbelievable as it sounds, MSNBC's site has posted a genuinely balanced and basically constructive piece on women who work the business side of the porn industry. Our own Nina shows up in here, as do many other articulate professionals who speak honestly about both the frustrations and satisfactions of being female porn execs. Reading it, I kept waiting for the inevitable rebuttals from the predictable anti side, but they get little soapbox space for a change.

Overall, a pleasant read. Check it out:

Joy King: An inside look at a female porn executive’s life


--MSNBC

Joy King has enjoyed her 24 years in the X-rated movie business, but that’s not to say that it has always been an easy road, especially for her personal life.

She grew up in Riverside, Calif., across the street from a horse ranch. “I moved when I could turn the key in the car,” she said, laughing, “and went west.” While working for an auto parts company, a girlfriend told King about a job opening at an entertainment business.

“I was 19, 20 years old and that sounded pretty good.” King was hired by a video distribution company that marketed kids’ productions such as “GI Joe,” “Strawberry Shortcake,” “Gumby” and “Transformers.”

But the company also had an adult division and when the owners learned that King was not offended by the titles, they moved her there and she began marketing to the growing VHS adult market.

After becoming a single mother at 22, King realized she might face special challenges, not only financially but socially. Working in porn, even if off camera, was far less acceptable than it is today. She became especially vigilant to “keep work at work.”

When her son was about 11, “I told [him] that mommy works in a business that he is not allowed to be around,” King explained. I said, ‘We make adult movies only for adults. As you get older you will understand more.’”

For her son, it wasn’t the nature of the business that bothered him at first as much as it was King’s hectic travel schedule once she moved to Wicked Pictures, located in California’s Canoga Park. She is now the vice president of special projects at Wicked.

But even though she works in management rather than on camera, she’s felt the stigma of her work. Once, after King made an appearance on a talk show, the mother of her son’s best friend refused to allow King’s son to come to her home.

“That was very difficult for him. He was 13 at the time. People who meet me see that I am just a regular person. If you were to meet me at a grocery store, a restaurant and I were to say, ‘I promote porn, I make it — I’m not in it, but I make it,’ well, most people are surprised. So I went over to her home and spoke to her and we resolved it. My son and her son are still close.”

There is a certain irony to the story. When King was promoting Wicked’s actresses, they would sometimes stay at her home, for example, the night before an early morning plane flight. “So as a 14-, 15-, 16-year-old kid, my son had Jenna Jameson staying at my house, [actress] Sydney Steele coming over, [actress] Stephanie Swift staying over and you would think that would make him a little horndog who loves women.”

But King’s son, now 23, is gay. “If there was ever a situation that makes it clear [being gay] is not a choice but you are born that way, this is it!”

Her own love life has not been very successful she said, mainly because of the nature of her industry.

“Men are either fans, which is too much, or they are, well, maybe intimated by the industry. Some just don’t like it. So a certain portion of the population will not consider being in a relationship with me because of that.”

How about dating inside the industry?

“I am not interested in dating the talent. I did that for about a minute, I admit. But I had to take a step back and think about my reputation as an executive and how my customers would feel about it.”

One way the adult industry is like any other, she said, is in its double standard for behavior in the corporate suites. “If I am whoring around, I have no integrity. If a man does it, it is just what goes on. When women have done it, it is frowned upon. Nobody thinks twice if a man does it.”

King laughs at the stereotype of the porn king as a skeevy guy in gold neck chains, a paunch and the sunglasses Elliott Gould wore in “Ocean’s Eleven.”

“There is still this perception that [the porn industry] is all run by men, and not very nice men,” said King, who is vice president of special projects at major adult film company Wicked Pictures. “It is not widely known how many women executives there are in this industry.”

King, the woman who helped turn Jenna Jameson into a brand, proves her own point. For years she has been a leading figure in the world of “adult,” as it is commonly known, but hardly anyone outside that world has ever heard of her.

People have heard of Christie Hefner, of course, Hugh’s daughter who runs Playboy. But from the owner of the small adult store near you, to video directors, to promoters, to online porn purveyors, women have quietly become integral to the world of adult entertainment in ways that have nothing to do with wearing stripper heels and a big smile.

One of the earliest pioneers of Internet naughtiness was a woman named Danni Ashe who built her own small digital empire in the early ‘90s.

The co-owner of one of the nation’s top producers of X-rated movies, Digital Playground, is a woman who goes by the name Samantha Lewis. A mother, married to a Los Angeles television personality, Lewis used to work in real estate before investing in porn.

Susan Colvin, who trained for a career in public administration, owns one of the “Big Five” sex-toy makers, California Exotic Novelties.

Former performer Candida Royalle started and runs her own production company, Femme, to make X-rated movies for the “couples” market. She also endorses a line of sex toys.

Diane Duke, once an executive with Planned Parenthood, now runs the Free Speech Coalition, the public policy umbrella organization that advocates for the adult industry. Many other women work in upper and middle management. Some have struck out on their own to create Web sites, others have started porn’s version of “indie” movie outfits.

Having such women in charge might help lift the taboo that, as King says, “sort of lays like a mist over the adult industry,” but it is not likely to cool the fervor of anti-porn feminists. And, while female executives and owners say they hope to bring new perspectives to erotica so that performers receive better treatment, the product improves and there is less misogyny, they may be hindered by economics.

Surprisingly, many women who work in the business say they don’t like porn — at least not the porn that takes up most of the shelf space in adult stores or is downloaded from the Internet. They do not object for moral reasons, they just think it’s a crummy product and often far too misogynistic.

Even King, who likes and watches porn even when it’s not part of her job, finds a lot of “adult entertainment” neither very adult nor entertaining, especially the types like the “Girls Gone Wild” genre that, she says, takes advantage of drunken girls. She defends it on free speech grounds but that doesn’t mean she likes it.

Some women are trying to instill change using as leverage the fact that porn is one industry that can’t exist without females (which is why women performers almost always make more money than men and call their male counterparts “furniture”).

But good intentions and economic empowerment certainly do not mollify anti-porn feminists. “I think the nicest word they have ever used to describe me is ‘brainwashed,’” said veteran performer and business owner Nina Hartley. “Usually it’s more like ‘traitor.’”

An organization called Stop Porn Culture, a group of academics and activists who believe that “patriarchal, capitalist society” fosters porn, states that regardless of who is in charge, many female performers “are under a variety of constraints such as economic hardship and a perceived lack of options. … We are critical of the industry that exploits these women, not the women themselves.”

King finds this 30-year-old argument unconvincing. “If you look at a single mom trying to put herself through college, and she works at a strip club, is she a victim? She’s found a way to earn more than she could waiting tables, working three jobs. I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

University of California Santa Barbara film studies professor Constance Penley, who studies the adult industry, agreed. Name an industry that’s different, she said. Because porn involves sex it is subject to what Penley calls “exceptionalism.” It is not judged in the bigger cultural context. But it should be. “You have to ask: Does it have more drug abuse or more suicides, more incidents of girls being sexually abused as children, more cosmetic surgery than Hollywood, TV, the recording industry?” she said. The answer, she pointed out, is probably not. So why pick on sex movies?

Still, having more women signing the paychecks does not necessarily mean the industry as a whole is better for female performers. This is because there is no such thing as “the industry,” just as there is no such thing as “the media.” The sex business has become wildly diffuse thanks to digital technology, pirated downloads and the ease of distribution. There are probably more producers of porn who exist outside industry organizations that try to set standards and police the business than inside them.

“We’re competing with the guy with the camcorder who bought it for $993 at Circuit City, who’s got his girlfriend and somebody else and they’re gonna shoot it and have sex and put it on the Internet,” director Kelly Holland told a Women in Film forum last year.

There are literally tens of thousands of “productions” made each year in the U.S. alone, and most of these are not coming from the bigger companies like the ones Holland works for.

This matters because while more executives may be women, Penley said, “it is, first and foremost, a business.” At the moment, business is lousy. Profits have dropped under the onslaught of the same forces hurting newspapers, book publishers and music companies.

“It is worse than the last recession,” King said. “We have rising fuel costs, the price of DVD cases tripled and we cannot pass that on and we have a very competitive industry.” More important, the Internet is stuffed with free, often pirated, porn. Margins are now so bad that some companies have laid off workers or shut their doors.

That inescapable fact works against changes women have tried to make in the products they produce and sell. For example, several groups of women have tried to create explicit productions, whether for cable TV, online distribution or DVD purchase and rental that appeal specifically to a female sensibility. But aside from Candida Royalle’s Femme series, which gets a big boost by being distributed through mail order giant Adam and Eve, such efforts have been slow to take hold.

They may never take hold. Sensuality, seduction, plot, even good lighting can cost money. “The bulk of pornography is being produced for $17,000,” Holland told the forum. “My budgets are $60,000 for a day-and-a-half shoot. We do two movies in three days and each budget is approximately $60,000. That is astronomically high right now.”

So while more women are calling the shots, they have to respond to a market of primarily male consumers, many of whom find plots simply a waste of time.

Many producers have to crank out sex scenes and most non-star performers have to appear in a lot of them to make any money.

Just because Jenna Jameson got rich doesn’t mean others will. In fact, there will probably never be another Jenna.

“The average lifespan of a porn star now is anywhere from six months to three years, tops,” Sharon Mitchell, who runs the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, said in an interview with legal scholars for a 2006 article in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law. “Then they’ve got no money … they think the money’s not going to end, so they get a boob job and a Ferrari.”

Mitchell, herself a former actress, told the authors said that agents “are now recruiting people from, literally, the middle of the country [who] are 18 years old who haven’t remotely had any type of sex, let alone the type of sex they’re probably going to have tomorrow.” Too often, she said, “agents run them into the ground” signing them to make too many sex scenes, and that can lead to STDs.

Female directors, producers and owners know all this and say they work to fight it, partly by turning away young women they think are ill prepared. A few have suggested that producers should hire women who are at least 21, rather than 18.

“Do I like sleazy guys trying to take advantage of girls?” King said. “No. Nobody does.” But they argue that tarring the entire adult world with the actions of some is like judging the entire television business by a guy eating animal guts on “Fear Factor.”

When women are making the decisions, they say, things are often different. Performers at King’s Wicked Pictures can choose their male partners, demand condoms and command comparatively high salaries.

“We have been criticized by men in the business who say, ‘Oh, you baby the girls, you pamper them too much,” said Shoosh (who uses one name), co-owner of Triangle Films, a small producer of lesbian-themed erotica. “I never set out to baby or pamper. I am just a mothering kind of person.”

Others, such as Lewis of Digital Playground, insist they are careful to coach actresses about the potential pitfalls of the industry.

Wicked makes about one movie per week, King said, and she watches every one for content. “If I’m offended by it, I am certainly going to say something and try to have it taken out of the movie.”

Still, as business owner Hartley explained, having a woman run the show is no guarantee of a workers’ paradise or a different kind of product. Women, she said, can be jerks, men can be gems. “It’s not a question of gender. If being a feminist means anything at all it means judging the content of character not the gonads they possess.”