Babylon rides high-tech wave

The adult-entertainment industry is flooding the airwaves, Cyberspace and the video stores with pornographic material. Has this led to a coarsening of American society?

The billboard towers over Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard, featuring some of the biggest hips, lips, breasts and hair in the adult-film business. An advertisement for Vivid Video ("Video That Goes All the Way"), featuring the stable of pouty sex sirens that made it one of the nation's premier marketers of pornography, the wall of writhing torsos on Sunset also serves as an in-your-face announcement of the sex industry's coming of age. The era of the plain brown wrapper is over, and porn is just another pillar of the declining pop culture.

The signposts of a sexual revolution storming the ramparts of respectability are all around. Less than a mile from the Vivid billboard stands the gleaming glass headquarters of Flynt Publications, the house built by the sexual exploitation and raunch of Hustler magazine. Although in more wholesome times it was considered shocking, today the tasteless Flynt journal finds itself struggling to keep up with the explosion of graphic material available to average Americans through the VCR, telephone, cable television and the Internet. Nearby, the House of Hefner also is trying to keep pace with an escalating market for porn, showing explicit videos on its own cable channel to supplant the sagging demand for the pastel, airbrushed pictorials that Playboy made famous but which today seem, well, almost Victorian.

Workshops on sex toys, bondage and pedophiliac art now are taught at respected colleges, reports State University of New York trustee Candace de Russy in a recent issue of Women's Quarterly. And California State University-Northridge last month hosted a World Pornography Conference at which 750 sociologists, lawyers, porn producers and actors heard Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, deliver a rousing keynote address, "In Defense of Pornography." And coming soon to a tony Manhattan address is the Museum of Sex, or Mosex, a project backed by "pro-man" lesbian feminist and author Camille Paglia and the sometimes conservative columnist Arianna Huffington. Mosex reportedly will showcase highbrow erotica; take an academic, "interdisciplinary approach" to discussions of dildos; host a fund-raising film festival called Pornotopia, showing X-rated classics; and even house a cafe serving "aphrodisiac-oriented food"

A sex industry once relegated to America's back alleys is making a bid for acceptability on main street, finding avenues of approach in the mass media and new technologies. Switching on a personal computer, a child may find unsolicited e-mail invitations to visit one of the tens of thousands of porn sites crowding cyberspace. Turning on the car radio, one encounters shock-jock Howard Stern prompting a dominatrix to explain the fine art of caning, boot worship, psychodrama and long-nail torture. The corner video store stocks a variety of sex films from soft porn to hard core, which also can be found on cable TV or accessed in the finest hotels. Even the formerly stodgy news shows offer little respite from the barrage of sexual imagery and talk saturated with details about presidential fluids spilled in the Oval Office.

While many Americans recoil at these invasions and polls indicate that most support the antiporn efforts of such groups as Enough Is Enough, Morality in Media and the American Family Association, a good many evidently do not mind -- or welcome the porn. After all, someone out there is exploring the porn planets of cyberspace. And the 697 million X-rated movie rentals last year (up from 75 million in 1985) accounted for most of the $4.2 billion Americans spent on adult video sales or rentals. Demand for new and more titillating porn is such that the industry's 75 or 85 major production companies churned out nearly 8,000 new titles last year -- roughly 150 each week -- according to Adult Video News, or AVN. In all, Americans spend an estimated $10 billion annually on pornographic videos, peep shows, adult cable and cybersex.

"What's happening is that the majority of Americans are recognizing that certain leaders have been lying to them about the effects of watching people having sex" claims AVN features editor Mark Kernes, explaining today's "more liberal climate" toward X-rated materials. "At this point, most adult Americans have seen hard core and haven't gone out and become child molesters or rapists."

Bill Margold, in addition to being an advocate for the industry through the Free Speech Coalition, also runs a support service for porn performers in crisis and a club for fans of X-rated video. A proponent of the pressure-cooker argument about social uses of pornography, he says X-rated materials are beneficial, providing "masturbatory catharsis for the masses."

Enough Is Enough spokeswoman Shyla Welch strongly disagrees, arguing that the accessibility of porn on the Internet is whetting appetites that wouldn't ordinarily be there, and that its use by males, particularly adolescents, can severely warp perceptions and expectations about sex, with women suffering the demeaning consequences.