Mid Term Presentation

Pornography.

It is one of the bigger money making industries in all of show business, while also having a heavy hand in driving innovation and technology in the digital world. Accurate accountings of how much money the industry generates every year varies depending on whom you are talking to. Advocates of the industry as well as its most vocal critics will put the number around 14 billion dollars a year. Sober financial analysis based on overall 'legitmate' entertainment numbers would peg the porn industry closer to be worth four billion dollars a year. Even at that number, it is an industry that cannot be ignored. We have spent a lot of time talking about the media and how sex sells but we haven't spent any time talking about selling sex. Is there an honesty in the industry that no one outside of it is willing to admit? When did pornography become taboo? What makes a pictorial spread in a magazine like Playboy any different than a painting of a naked woman from the Renaissance.

There is no doubt that throughtout the history of its production, the women in porn are at the mercy of the industry. Many talk about how the light will go out in their eyes over time as they are desensitized to life and love through the work that they do. But there are women who have thrived in the business and make no apologies for the choices that they have made. Who is in the right? Are the supposed advocates of porn just trying to justify themselves as they make their way through a man's world or have they actually broken through and found their own form of acceptance. Is it possible for pornography to be accepted as an art form?

My goal with this project is to push the envelope. Not in taste but in perception. I would like to find out what people really think about porn and who is willing to own up to participating in the industry somehow. I plan to do a video, interviewing regular people and if possible, finding professionals on both sides of the argument. Obviously I would not us any graphic material in class.

some stats

History has a way of being painted in a narrow scope. Usually there is always some sort of nobility in the past. The truth is that those who write history can ignore the more uncomfortable facts of a time. Alongside Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, two other works made their way through Europe in the 16th century as a result of the printing press. Pietro Aretino's POSTURES and Rabelais GARGANTUA & PANTAGRUEL contained engravings and written depictions of sexual positions.

The following sonnett is part of Aretino's 'Lustful Poems'

He: Lets’ fottere, my love, let’s fottere,
Since all of us were born only to fottere.
You adore the cazzo and I the potta.
The world would be nthing without this act.

If it were proper to fottere after death,
I’d say let’s fottere outselves to death,
Then we could fottere Adam and Eve,
Who died such a dishonourable death.

She: Truly, if those truants haddn’t eaten
that treacherous apple in the garden,
Lovers would long ago have quenched their lust.

But let’s stop chatting. Stick your cazzo in
So that it reaches my heart, and crush the soul
That lives or dies issuing from he cazzo.

He: Don’t leave out my balls -
Take them inside the potta,
those witnesses of every extreme pleasure.

 They both serve as an example of the fact that graphic material is not explicitly a 20th century phenomenon

My question is, since clearly sex sells, who's buying and why?