A Tour Of Graceland Reveals Elvis Presley Was The King Of A Curious Domain

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in September 2017.

If you find yourself in Memphis, Tennessee, you pretty much have to tour Graceland, the nearly 14-acre pastoral estate once inhabited by Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll. The residence isn't far from downtown, and sits on a regular road. Across the street from the home, there's a massive complex devoted to all things Presley. But what's curious about taking a stroll around the grounds is that it's less like touring the opulent domain of a once glorified musician and more like taking a deep dive into the abode of a man obsessed with reflections and concealments. At a certain point, in Graceland itself, you might find yourself on a short flight of stairs descending to a basement, and you'll look around yourself to see mirrors have been mounted on the walls and the ceiling, and as you gaze at a vision of yourself reflected back at you, you'll wonder why a man who was adored by so many built a world of his own that was a literal funhouse hall of mirrors.

Before you make your way to Graceland proper and after you plunk down $57.50 (for $5 more, you can tour the airplanes—and how can you not tour the airplanes?), you enter Elvis Presley's Memphis, which is located across the street from Graceland. It is a sprawling complex of Stores That Sell Things Related to Elvis, Museums Devoted to Things Related to Elvis, and Restaurants That Sell Foods That Are Related to Elvis. But before you make your way through it, you are funneled into a room to watch a movie that celebrates The King. When that ends, you are shuttled into a shuttle that meanders and winds its way down and around and across the street to Graceland. There, you wait in line while groups of Elvis Fans and People Interested in Elvis line up to enter the Colonial Revival white and stone mansion. Finally, you enter The House Where Elvis Lived. At which point, you will likely turn to your right and see the peacocks.

This is the music room. Graceland consists of over 17,000 square feet of residence and contains 23 rooms, but the glowing gold of the peacock room is among the most impressive. Simply put, it is incredibly outrageous. Who would put massive stained glass peacocks in their front room? Elvis, that's who. From the start, it's clear that we're not in Kansas anymore, and Toto has left the room.

Being at Graceland makes one—or at least made this one—feel uneasy. Every room is decorated in some outrageous fashion. In the basement, there's a wall embedded with television sets. A retro surveillance camera lurks on a perch. Bizarrely, the billiards room is hung from walls to ceiling with a busily patterned pleated fabric. No one is allowed upstairs to the second floor, which purportedly remains untouched since Elvis died in an upstairs bathroom. In this stuck-in-time place, life is forever frozen, and it's unclear if you are the voyeur or under a microscope.

Arguably, the most outrageous room at Graceland is the den. It is known as "The Jungle Room." The green shag carpet is designed to resemble thick grass. The furniture is made of heavy wood and upholstered in what looks like fur. The red glowing wall where a fireplace would go in the average suburban home features a gently burbling waterfall. The effect is deeply 1970s Polynesian.

One doesn't typically associate Elvis with racquetball, yet if one stumbles from the disconcerting time capsule that is Graceland and strolls about behind the main house, one can peek inside a series of buildings, one of which contains the newly restored racquetball court. According to the Graceland website, one of Elvis's favorite past times was playing racquetball. The Memphis Flyer reveals that Elvis was part of a "racquetball mafia," and the King was no slouch at the game: "Elvis walloped the ball around the court like he was strumming a guitar for the fun of it."

Technically speaking, Elvis still resides at Graceland. He is buried, alongside several family members, in what's called the Meditation Garden. "He became a living legend in his own time, earning the respect and love of millions," his grave marker reads. "God saw that he needed some rest and called him home to be with Him." Tour takers stand nearby, taking pictures of the fallen king.

After touring Graceland, you will be shuttled back across the street. Behold Elvis's plane collection. It includes The Lisa Marie, a Convair 880 jet. "On April 17, 1975, Elvis bought a Convair 880 Jet, recently taken out of service by Delta Airlines, for the then-substantial sum of $250,000," Elvis Australia reports. "After refurbishing, the total exceeded $600,000."

This past March, Graceland opened Elvis Presley's Memphis at Graceland, a $45 million, 200,000-square-foot entertainment complex that includes the Elvis the Entertainer Career Museum, the Presley Motors Automobile Museum, and Elvis Discovery Exhibits. There are white bedazzled jumpsuits. There is a 1955 pink Cadillac Fleetwood. Down the street, Elvis Presley Enterprises spent $90 million to build The Guest House at Graceland to host a few of the 600,000 annual guests Graceland, including those who can afford up to $1,500 a night for a room.

At Gladys' Diner, I ordered the peanut butter and banana sandwich, which was, the sign said, fried in "bacon grease." Frankly, while I had been optimistic about the sandwich, it didn't look like much. I don't know if I spent too much time photographing the sandwich for Instagram, but by the time I bit into it, it wasn't very appetizing. This sandwich was a favorite of the King. It is known as "an Elvis sandwich" or "The Elvis."

By the time I left Graceland, the parking lot was filling, and the fans were funneling in for their turn at the Elvis experience. Personally, my Elvis experience left me feeling uneasy. What was the point of becoming so famous and so beloved if it prompted you to build a house in which most surfaces were reflective? In the end, the king stood alone, surrounded by his mirror image.

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The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries #7

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When Children Grow Up Online, They Lose Their Private Lives

The author at four

This past spring, I wrote an opinion essay about children and privacy. The essay was inspired by and informed by my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, in which I detailed how being a research subject from childhood to adulthood shaped me and changed the trajectory of my life. I submitted the essay to various outlets, but no one was interested in publishing it, so I’m publishing it here for the first time.

Today’s kids grow up online. From the first sonogram image posted to a parent’s Facebook profile to providing toddler content fodder for a mommy influencer’s TikTok account, Gen Z has never known what it is to have a private life. Without their knowledge or consent the most intimate moments of these children’s lives, embarrassing meltdowns and potty training scenes alike, have been shared, scrutinized, and commented upon by people they will never meet.

I know something of what it’s like to grow up without a sense of privacy. Not long after I was born, in the spring of 1968, my parents submitted an application for my enrollment in an exclusive “laboratory preschool” run by the University of California, Berkeley, where my father was a poetry professor. When I arrived at the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center for my first day of nursery school, I became one of over 100 Berkeley children in a groundbreaking, 30-year longitudinal study of personality that sought to answer a question: If you study a child, can you predict who that child will grow up to be?

Over three decades, my cohort and I were studied extensively. At the preschool, which had been designed for spying on children, researchers observed us from a hidden observation gallery overlooking the classroom and assessed us in testing rooms equipped with one-way mirrors and eavesdropping devices. After preschool, the cohort scattered to the winds, but our principal investigators continued following us. At Tolman Hall, a Brutalist building on the north side of campus that housed the Department of Psychology, we were evaluated at key development stages. Our school report cards were analyzed. Our parents were interviewed. We were studied at home and in an RV that had been turned into a mobile laboratory with a hidden compartment in the rear from which one researcher looked on as another researcher evaluated us.

In the early years, I didn’t know I was being studied. Eventually, I learned I was part of an important study. In the beginning, my parents consented for me. When I got older, I consented for myself. I liked being studied. At home, my English professor parents were preoccupied with work, and I spent a lot of time alone in my room entertaining myself. In an experiment room, I was the center of attention. My intellectual parents were emotionally distant. The close attention paid to me by a researcher sitting across the table from me felt a lot like love.

From its first chapter, my life was an open book. As I understood it, my private life was not my own but something to be offered up willingly to science in service of enlightening humanity. In my mind, being a human lab rat was my destiny. Over time, our lives would inform over 100 books and scientific papers. The study would shed new light on how people become who they are, report that adult political orientation can be predicted from toddlerhood, and prove that, to some degree, you can foresee who a child will grow up to be.

According to the observer effect, the act of observation changes that which is being observed. Without a doubt, being studied changed my life. It made me feel like I mattered when my parents didn’t; its researchers’ keen interest in my life story played a role in shaping me into the writer I would become. When I was in my early thirties, the study ended, and in hindsight I can see I felt a bit lost without it. Who was I without my overseers watching over me?

I think about my experiences as a research subject when I think about Gen Z, the pioneering generation that is coming of age publicly. They are unwitting research subjects in a global-scale psychological experiment, one in which they are human guinea pigs and the unanswered question is: How will growing up in the public eye shape their identities? After all, this generation’s overseers are not kindly researchers who want to understand human nature but Big Tech billionaires who have fine-tuned their algorithms to not simply study their youngest users but to guide their choices, mold their senses of self, steer their minds.

According to a 2023 Gallup survey, the average American teenager spends 4.8 hours a day on social media. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg engaged in senatorial theater, suggesting the company was undertaking steps to reduce the potential for harms caused by social media on teens. In his State of the Union Address in March, President Joe Biden made a brief reference to his goal to “Pass bipartisan privacy legislation to protect our children online.”

For kids, it may be too late to save what they’ve lost already: a private life.

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Only in L.A.

So awesome to have my story featured in “10 Locals Share Wild ‘Only in L.A.’ Stories” in The Los Angeles Times.

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Why Sex Doll Brothels Won't Replace Real Brothels Anytime Soon

This story was published on Forbes.com in July 2018.

Back in 2008, when people wrote blogs, I created an online project called—be forewarned, clicking on this link will expose you to graphic language—Letters from Johns. At the time, I was writing a popular blog named for a sex position and which was cited as one of 2008's best blogs by TIME.com. I'd created the Letters from Johns project because I was curious to know why men sought out sex workers, and the project had stemmed from my posting a request on my blogs for emails from men who had seen sex workers and inquiring as to why they had done so. I received my first reply within a matter of hours, asked the sender if I could post it with his name removed to a new blog dedicated to such letters, and Letters from Johns was spawned. Over the course of a year, I posted anonymous emails from over 50 johns, and their letters surprised me and the project's many readers. Not long after Letters from Johns was launched, then Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was caught up in a prostitution scandal, and the project was covered by media outlets ranging from Salon to CBC Radio. What I learned during that year is that sex is only one of the many reasons men hire sex workers. There are other reasons, too: because they are lonely, because they want to escape, because they long for someone to listen, because the only way they can get someone to touch them is to pay.

Back in January of this year, I wrote about a new kind of brothel that had opened in Paris, France. Its conceit was simple: Sex workers had been replaced with sex dolls. "France's First Sex Doll Brothel Opens For Business In Paris" outlined the new high-tech brothel strategic plan. In theory, sex dolls were easier to maintain than human beings, men would be attracted by either the novelty or the efficiency of having a transient relationship with someone who not only didn't want an emotional relationship but was constitutionally incapable of having one, and the money would roll in for its owners. For around $110, you could have a date with the doll of your choice, and virtual reality headsets were available for those who wanted to both be there and not there at the same time. As a business model, the promise was there, if there was a market for that sort of thing. But could it scale?

Apparently, it could. This spring what was purported to be Russia's first sex doll brothel opened in Moscow. Just in time for the World Cup, this high-tech brothel would be testing the Russian market for what had been tested, by that point, in Paris, Amsterdam, Dortmund, Barcelona, and elsewhere. This June, I reached out to Sergi Prieto, who described himself as "Co-Founder and CEO of LumiDolls Group," which had opened the Moscow sex doll brothel. I had questions, and Prieto had answers. For around $100 an hour, a customer could spend time with any number of the Moscow-based dolls. "There are many different dolls, smallest ones, biggest once [sic], [...] elf ones," he wrote. "There are dolls for everyone." This was a business, after all, like any other. "Our proposal is addressed to all those people who want to live new and pleasant experiences," he wrote. "We propose a 100% legal brothel where you also will not deceive your partner since you will only interact with a sex toy." Why would anyone want to have sex with a doll rather than a human? I inquired. "Are two different things," he replied. "Sex with humans is something normal and usual. Sex with dolls is something new and people like to try new experience." Still, the high-tech wasn't quite there yet, it seemed. "There are some dolls that has a heating system inside," he noted, and that was it.

At this point in history, we're sitting in a kind of evolutionary uncanny valley between what we can imagine insofar as technology transforming the most intimate aspects of our lives and where the reality is. Earlier this year, I took a trip through the hellscape that is the current state of virtual reality pornography, and what I saw wasn't pretty. Body parts disconnected from other body parts. Pixel-based faces aroused a sense of discomfort, rather than pleasure. And I had a hard time forgetting I was staggering around a startup's office with a large piece of machinery attached to my face as simulated men and women engaged in virtual erotic acts before my eyes.

All of which, of course, takes us back to the gap between what I read in those letters from those johns and whatever lies inside of a sex doll brothel. After all, a brothel never really sells sex. It sells an experience, one that is largely rooted in the sensory. Interacting with a living, breathing human being is one thing. Engaging with a silicone doll with an internal heater is quite another. The latter can neither think nor speak, she senses nothing and is incapable of any kind of authentic connection. She is an inanimate object. What I'd heard from those johns was that they'd wanted everything that a doll wasn't. They wanted someone who was alive, someone who listened, someone who, when you reached out to touch her, was blissfully, breathtaking real. Right now, that doll isn't.

In the future, well, one can presume that'll be another story altogether.

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Meet the Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2015.

Nikki Night is 31, her hair a brilliant shade of ruby red.

Based out of Toronto, she's parlayed a gig as a cam girl into a career coaching other cam girls how to maximize their income.

I talked to Night about the webcam performer gig economy, how she became the Vince Lombardi of cam girls, and what the difference is between cam girls and porn stars.

It's the gig economy

For over a decade, Night was a freelance makeup artist. After she got married, and divorced, she found herself struggling to pay her bills and make rent. "I was actually in kind of a bad spot, money-wise," she says. A girlfriend who was a cam girl suggested Night give it a try. At first, she says, "I was like, what the heck is webcamming?" For about a month, she says, "I hemmed and hawed." Then she gave it a try, and, she says, "It was great."

From the get-go, she approached the business of putting on webcam sex shows as exactly that: a business. She created a file for keeping track of fans and finances, pinning down patterns that empowered her to ncrease her profitability. At the beginning, she wasn't very successful. Still, she kept at it, working 12 hours days, six to seven days a week.

The first month, she made enough to pay her rent. The second month, she doubled that. The third month, she could pay her rent, all her bills, and was making more in monthly income than she ever had as a makeup artist.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

All kinds of people make their living putting on sex cam shows: women, men, straight, gay, trans. "Men make just as much as women do," Night says.

Some performers make $20,000 a month. The average cam girl who works 20 hours a week, Night estimates, earns around $2,500 a month. In one two-hour session, Night made $700. Sometimes, she gets strange requests. She declined to bark like a dog for one customer. She was happy to oblige another viewer who paid her to ignore him. It's up to the performer to decide how far they want to push their professional sexual exhibitionism.

Cam girls make their money through a diverse range of revenue sources. Customers buy tokens they use to tip performers in live shows. Performers can do private shows for customers who are charged by the minute. Some performers sell merchandise: photos, videos, underwear, adult toys, access to the performer's private Twitter feed.

The Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

Night looks more like Jessica Rabbit than Vince Lombardi, but at CAM4, a popular web cam show site, she's the head of performer training and development. She coaches performers on how to be the best cam performers they can be, from the fine art of broadcasting a live sex show from your bedroom to how you can increase your income by creating your own money-generating, subscriber-based fan club. She recommends the best webcams and shares tips on creating the most flattering lighting.

As far as Night's concerned, the key to outperforming the cam show competition is attitude. "If you go in with the attitude of, 'Give me money, or I'm not doing anything,' you're not going to make money," she notes. She recommends performers watch their own shows and ask themselves: Would I watch me? Would I tip me?

Performers who hustle too hard may limit their potential. Those who engage in "splitcamming," in which performers host multiple shows on multiple cam sites at the same time, can leave customers feeling like "a human ATM."

Cam girls are the new porn stars

"The difference between a cam girl and a porn star is a cam girl has a one-on-one, unscripted relationship with their audience," Night says. In this sex business, technology has cut out the middleman and closed the gap between performer and viewer. With cam girls, she says, "They're free to do whatever they want. It's live." Comparatively, porn lacks immediacy and intimacy, not to mention the ability to deliver exactly what the client wants on demand. "With porn stars, it's directed, it's sold on video," she says. "There's really that break with any kind of relationship with the audience."

That doesn't mean porn is dead, but porn as we know it may be an endangered species. "There will always be porn," Night says, "that will always be." But the source of porn will change. "It's going to become more like porn will come from webcamming, as opposed to it's like a lit, scripted thing."

One day, cam girls may replace porn stars. "The stars will be born from webcamming," she says. "These webcam videos will be porn."

Online, the heart is a lonely hunter

When your job is being a web cam show star, you tend not to have a lot of conference room meetings or water-cooler talk opportunities. It can be a lonely career path. On the internet, you're connected. Offline, you're alone.

"It's like when you're in front of that audience, there's such a high, and there’s such an energy," Night says. "You're laughing, you're meeting people, and then all of a sudden, your show's over, you close your computer, and it's just like the silence is almost deafening. You can’t hear your viewers, you only see them typing, but in your own bedroom there can be hundreds of people, and then it's gone."

Night counsels performers to take care of themselves, to remember there's a world beyond the webcam. "I remember there was one week when I didn't see another human person," she says. "When my cam was off, it was really lonely." But, she says, "You can always go back there and talk to them."

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The Shine

This story was originally published on This Recording in September 2010.

Maybe a year or so ago, or maybe it was closer to two, I got a phone call from Ari Emanuel. In case you’ve never heard of him, he’s a famous agent in Hollywood and the inspiration for Ari Gold, who is played by Jeremy Piven on Entourage. When I picked up the phone, a woman who sounded like she was Asian and maybe in an elevator said, “Will you hold for Ari Emanuel, please?” I said, “Yes,” because that’s what you do when Ari Emanuel calls, or so I assumed. I don’t remember what I was doing at the time. Probably nothing. I was probably wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt with food stains on it. I am sure it was not glamorous.

I can’t remember what Ari said, but it was something like, “You’re the porn writer?” This was not exactly true. I had been writing about the adult movie industry on-and-off for a decade or so. I wrote about porn, but I was not a “porn writer,” per se. I think I said, “Yes,” because it seemed like the easiest answer I could think of. Then Ari started to speak very quickly about people named Mark and Lev and a famous director, and I had no idea who he was talking about or what he was talking about. I listened to him talk on at this speedy clip. I imagined him barreling out of an elevator with his frantic, frightened entourage of small, insignificant people in tow, and him climbing into a large car with blacked-out windows. He paused. I said, “Mark, who?” He said, “Mark Wahlberg.” 

Ari explained that Mark Wahlberg and his production company partner Stephen Levinson, who is at least part of the inspiration for Eric “E.” Murphy, who is played by Kevin Connolly on Entourage, had a development deal with HBO, and they all wanted to make this TV show for HBO about the porn business. The way that Ari told it, they wanted to make it with this famous director, and, Ari said, the famous director, who I had the vaguest connection to on account of knowing one of his siblings, would only do the show if I was the one who wrote it. This seemed quite odd. It was hard to imagine that anyone important in Hollywood would only do something if they did it with me. I was not even fully dressed, or at least not dressed properly. 

The reason Ari was calling me, or he had my number, was that at the time I was represented by Endeavor, which is what Ari’s agency was called before it became William Morris Endeavor. Maybe six months or so before the phone rang, I had sent the first 30 pages of a novel that I was working on to a literary agent there, and he had signed me. The novel was about — well, frankly, it is hard for me to recall now. It was based in Porn Valley, of that I am sure, and I believe it was about a detective trying to find a killer on the loose in the porn industry. My agent thought it was brilliant. 

After Ari stopped talking at me, I got off the phone, and I called up my agent. Ari had been wanting to do a TV show about porn “forever,” the agent said. He was always shouting at people about it, telling people to go out and find him something that he could turn into a porn movie or TV show or what have you. Ari was into porn, from what I gathered. His interest seemed more than professional, to me. It was like a mission — it mattered. My agent got off the phone and called Ari. My agent called me back and said I had to write a treatment for my TV show about porn that I would be writing for Mark Wahlberg and the famous director. So I did. 

Somewhere along the line, I sent an e-mail to the famous director who was maybe going to direct my TV show. I told him what Ari had said. He e-mailed me back and told me to call him. Basically, what Ari had said the famous director had said was not exactly what the famous director had said, although the famous director had said my name when he was speaking to Ari about said project. I felt kind of stupid. It didn’t matter, in a way, in that we kept working on my TV show. The famous director said Ari does stuff like that all the time. The famous director said that he, himself, had done stuff like that too. I guessed that I had forgotten that this is how it works in Hollywood. Like: The way you can tell an agent is lying is if their lips are moving. That sort of thing. 

I wrote the treatment, and I sent it to my agent, and he sent it to Lev, and then I had to call Lev, because Wahlberg was too busy, and I was to pitch the show. This wasn’t something that I really wanted to do. I called Lev, and it was pretty clear that he had not read the treatment. It sounded like he was at a kid’s birthday party, which made talking about a show about porn awkward, what with small children screaming in the background and such. The whole thing didn’t last very long, but it seemed like it lasted forever. It did not go well. In the end, they didn’t make my TV show, and when I finished my novel and sent it to my agent, he said it didn’t make any sense, and after that we stopped working together. And that was that. 

Last month, I read online that James Frey, who wrote a fake rehab book called A Million Little Pieces, had been hired to write the porn movie show that I had failed to make. According to Page Six, "The plot will focus on a giant video company under siege from Internet competitors and a girl from the Midwest whose boyfriend convinces her to move to Los Angeles to become a star." Which I guess is one way to do it. I don’t know if the famous director is attached to the project being written by Frey. Reached by the New York Post, Frey said, “We're going to make a sprawling epic about the porn business in LA. We're going to tell the type of stories no one else has told before, and go places no one has gone before.” Reading that made me want to vomit, partly due to the fact that it wasn’t me saying asinine things to the Post, and partly due to the fact that James Frey is a total tool. 

A couple weeks ago I sent Alex Carnevale, who is the editor of this site, an e-mail. I asked him if he wanted me to write something for the site. He e-mailed me back something like that he would like nothing more, but that he didn’t have the budget to pay me. I said, I’m offering to do it for free. He said something like, great. I sent him a few story ideas. The first one was about porn, and the other ones were about other things. He picked the porn idea first, because editors always do. I said I wanted to write about this dead porn star whose name was Missy. She was really blonde, and she was really beautiful, and she was really tiny. I met her on a porn set 13 years ago. She had this high little voice, and she was married to a male porn star who was having sex with someone else in the same movie, and she had this inarguable angelic quality to her, which is not something you see a lot of in the porn business: angels. She was one of those people you never forget. I think she had that thing Dick Hallorann, who was played by Scatman Crothers in The Shining, called the “shine.” In the movie, Dick says to the boy, “Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, it can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who ‘shine’ can see.” Missy had the shine. She kept on making porn movies after I met her. Eventually, she left the business and her husband, and she found God. She told the porn industry’s version of Variety that she “had a mental breakdown and went crazy.” She said, “Lord God and Jesus never left me and now I will never leave them.” Of her time in the porn industry, she said, “I met something that was pure evil in that industry,” and, she said, “I'm having premonitions of the end of time.” In 2008, though, Missy died. She was 41, and she was living alone. Her family said it was an accidental overdose of her prescription drugs. They withheld the news of her death for a month so no one in the porn business would come to her funeral. I think about Missy sometimes. Mostly, it makes me sad. When you’re in the porn business, you have to see the shine amidst the shit. Some people can’t see it, though. There’s a lot of shine if you know where to look, but if you can’t see it, you don’t. 

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Data Baby 50% Off at Barnes & Noble

My memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, which recounts my 30-year tenure as a research subject in an unprecendented University of California, Berkeley longitudinal study that sought to predict who over 100 Berkeley kids, including me, would grow up to be, is 50% off for Barnes & Noble Book Haul 2024.

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Playboy To Bring Back Its Print Magazine With Annual Edition

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2024.

Playboy’s print magazine is being resurrected. Today, PLBY Group, Inc. announced it will return to issuing a print version of its legendary magazine, but this time around on an annual basis, starting with a February 2025 issue. In March 2020, Playboy stopped producing its 66-year-old print magazine, which had been published since 1953, citing the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic as the reason. Along with reviving the print magazine, the company is relaunching its Playmate franchise with a worldwide search for both the 2024 and 2024 Playmate of the Year and as of this week a newly designed website at Playboy.com.

In recent decades, Playboy has struggled to find its footing in a changing media landscape. When Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief, who died in 2017, launched the first issue of Playboy in December 1953 with a nude spread featuring Marilyn Monroe, the competition was limited to other adult magazines. In the ’90s, the internet distributed adult content with the click of a button and explicit sexual images became more risque without the limitations that had been imposed upon print publications. Then came a flip-flop. In 2016, Playboy stopped producing nudity in its magazine; the following year, it brought back the magazine’s nudes.

This time around, media veteran Mark Healy will be at the helm of Playboy. His resume includes senior roles at GQ, Rolling Stone, and Men’s Journal. The February 2025 issue will make its debut in conjunction with Big Game Weekend and Super Bowl LIX, which will take place on February 9, 2025, at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana. According to Playboy’s latest announcement, “Original content will be produced with a keen focus on embracing the creator economy, partnering with some of the leading creators today to showcase their unique interests,” suggesting the target audience is young and flush with disposal income.

But the big question is not whether consumers will read still Playboy for the articles or the pictorials but whether or not it’s too little too late for an iconic brand that’s taken a beating in the marketplace and in the town square. PLBY Group’s second quarter report was released today, revealing total revenue for the second quarter was $24.9 million. The same period last year total revenue was $35.1 million. That’s a year-over-year decrease of $10.2 million or 29%. Meanwhile, a 2022 Secrets of Playboy 10-part A&E docuseries raised questions about what had really happened at the Playboy Mansion while other former Playmates rallied in support of Hefner.

Regardless of the history, PLAYBOY'S Playmate and Bunny Open Casting Call is underway. For those who aspire to don the bunny ears and tail, they can apply online. Wanna be Playmates and Bunnies must attend a casting call in a nearby city and submit an application with photos. But users of filters beware when it comes to sending your best shots. “Please avoid harsh lighting, skewed angles, and no filters,” the application advises. “The photos you submit can be professionally taken but should remain largely unfiltered and unretouched.” If you get picked to be in the magazine, that might change. But for now, they want to see you fully clothed.

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In the Crisis Zone

I’m delighted to share that I’ll be a Participant at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma’s Reporting Safely in Crisis Zones Course for Freelance Journalists in New York City this fall. The Dart Center is an amazing organization, and this course looks incredible. I’m really looking forward to this experience.

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Etsy Banned Sex Toys, But It Can’t Ban Sex

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2024.

Etsy, the e-commerce platform, prohibited the sale of sex toys as of July 29, 2024. In a June 27, 2024, public letter entitled “Strengthening Our Approach to Mature Content on Etsy,” Etsy Vice President of Trust and Safety Alice Wu announced the platform had updated its Adult Nudity and Sexual Content policy. The updates included limiting the sale of adult toys sold on the site, prohibiting realistic depictions of nudity, and imposing stricter criteria for listings featuring mature content. According to Etsy’s updated policy on adult content, pornography (including Playboy magazine) is prohibited, human models cannot expose their private parts (which includes their “gluteal clefts”), and the sale of sexual services and custom “content that sexualizes a specific body part” (“‘e.g. foot pics’”) are not allowed. Perhaps most impactfully, Etsy prohibited the sale of adult toys except for “non-insertable and non-penetrable adult toys and sexual accessories.”

For sellers who specialized in selling sex toys, the potential consequences were catastrophic. On X (formerly Twitter), Simply Elegant Glass, which sells, among other products, glass adult toys, lamented the decision in an open letter to Etsy. “It's hard to run a business oriented around adult products,” the thread noted. The “blanket ban” was “the lazy solution.” Now, they added, “Everything we've built on your platform will be completely nullified in 30 short days.” Free Speech Director of Public Policy Mike Stabile, wondered: “Do adults get to exist on the web or nah?” In Wu’s public letter, she asserted: “Our policies are designed to protect our global community, and maintain our position as the destination for truly special, creative goods.” But for Etsy sellers of adult toys and mature product who had long seen Etsy as a sex positive marketplace, the revised rules felt like a personal betrayal.

So, what does the new supposedly de-eroticized Etsy product landscape look like? With some sellers pivoting in how their more mature wares are sold, the platform’s products aren’t exactly wholly G-rated. A search for “sex toys” produced a plethora of listings for miniature “dong” adult toys for use in dollhouses ($4), a 7-inch carved obsidian “penis model” ($64.08), a black silicone head hood with a silicone vagina where the mouth would be ($337.69), a rainbow-colored Nicolas Cage “penis figurine” ($8), and a “Ceramic Dildo Sensual Sculpture” ($91.73). While Etsy had expressly prohibited “Materials produced by pornographic publishers (e.g. Playboy, Brazzers),” including “vintage adult magazines and films,” there were numerous Playboy magazines for sale on the platform. As for a search for “porn,” that yielded no listings at all. “We couldn't find any results for porn,” the productless-product page read. “Try searching for something else instead?”, it suggested helpfully.

Ironically, as a New York Times article, “Etsy vs. Sex,” pointed out, celebrities are having better luck hawking their erotic wares to consumers. On Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop platform, one can buy a double-sided wand vibrator ($95), a “TEACH ME A LESSON” ruler ($20), and a bottle of something called a “sex serum” ($24). According to a July 31, 2024, Etsy Inc. investor relations report, the company’s second-quarter consolidated net income was $53 million, which was down $8.9 million from last year. So far, it remains to be seen how the removal of the platform’s once copious adult and mature product listings will effect the bottom line.

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How The Hardest Working Director In Porn Gets The Job Done

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in July 2024.

On a recent Saturday morning, the adult movie director Ricky Greenwood was busy overseeing the production of a big budget pornographic feature entitled Project X. A couple dozen crew members were buzzing around the office space that previously housed a biotechnology company. For now, most of the action was taking place in a hallway where a hospital gurney had been rolled into position. Soon, a sex scene starring veteran performers Mick Blue and Cherie DeVille would be shot.

These days, Greenwood is one of the most in-demand directors in the adult business. At 42, he has made, by his estimate, over 500 porn movies, among them Grinders (a skateboarding movie), Talk Derby to Me (a roller derby movie), and Machine Gunner (a war movie). Originally from Montreal, Quebec, he is tall, bearded, heavily tattooed, and speaks with a Québécois accent. His favorite movies include The Exorcist, Point Break, and High Fidelity. Among the directors he most admires is Michael Bay: “He’s doing commercial movies that are like a big cheeseburger.” Greenwood says this is not unlike what he does. “I know when I’m making porn, I’m making a sort of entertainment. I go with that and play with it. He’s that type of guy.”

Before he got into the adult business, Greenwood worked in television in Montreal. At a certain point, he took a job directing a porn movie. It wasn’t a positive experience. So he went back to television. A friend had a boss looking for a production manager in adult. So he gave it another try. This time, things went better. He moved to Los Angeles. He wrote and directed adult movies. He won some awards. The story for the movie he’s directing today came from its producer, Digital Playground. It’s about what happens when the government finds an alien ship that has crashed on earth. DeVille plays a biologist. When Blue arrives on set, the wardrobe supervisor hands him a white lab coat with a name tag that reads: “Dr. John Harding GENETICIST.”

Getting on the same page Prior to shooting the scene, DeVille, Blue, two talent liaisons, and Greenwood convene in a room. As a camera records, the group goes over a “Pre-Shoot Discussion & Boundary Checklist.” (The performers are given time to complete the consent checklist prior to the meeting.) Here, the actors identify what they are willing and not willing to do in the scene. DeVille takes the lead, noting her dos and don’ts among the 30-plus items listed in the “Sex Acts” column (said acts range from the vanilla—say, kissing—to the not-so vanilla—say, bondage). “The goal is to make the talent comfortable, to create a safe space for the talent and make them feel heard and respected by production,” Greenwood relates later.

Make it look good High production value is something of a Greenwood signature. Unlike the low-budget, lo-fi “gonzo porn” of yesteryear, his productions are saturated in deep colors, preoccupied with story, and look more like a movie produced by A24 than garden variety smut. “Real porn back in the day used to be cinematic, used to be a movie,” he recalls, nostalgic. “Now we want to go back to it: big production, big budget, something that is entertaining.” In the hallway, DeVille and Blue, clad in white lab coats, await the call for action. The lighting is tweaked. In a dimly-lit adjacent room, Greenwood takes a seat and strokes his beard thoughtfully as he surveys the video feeds from the three cameras displayed on the monitors.

Catching the sex “And, action,” Greenwood announces. The cameras move in and out, following the actors’ lead. There isn’t a lot of direction. When it comes to filming sex, this director takes a mostly hands-off approach, preferring to let things unfold organically. “I like to let them do what they want to do,” he shares. “I barely direct them for sex because I feel I want to have a more natural sex scene. I want to be a fly on the wall watching them. I don’t want to give them tricky angles and positions. I want us to witness and not have them working. If you create that safety zone, they will forget the camera. You will get those nice moments and scenes. If you direct them, it become like a job for them, and it become like a fake scene.”

Work against stereotype “As performers, we are like athletes,” Blue, who has pale blue eyes and an Austrian accent and is canonized in the AVN Hall of Fame, opined earlier when asked what it’s like working with Greenwood. “Not a lot of directors who haven’t performed understand that stuff. The better the director understand what we do, the better the outcome will be.” As Blue and DeVille do their thing on the gurney, Greenwood watches, his face bathed in the green glow of an EXIT sign. He’s good at his job, he says: “Because I care.” He knows that some people don’t respect what he does for a living. “‘It doesn’t matter, it’s just porn,’” he parrots the critics saying. But it matters to him. “We want it to be good. We want to make it interesting and different. If we give them a regular porn movie, what’s the point of doing it?”

Know your niche A little over an hour later, the first scene of the day is completed. “I love working with Ricky,” DeVille, an award-winning MILF performer who ran for president in the 2020 election, says in a bathroom afterwards. “I like being extremely organized,” she adds, something they have in common. Meanwhile, Greenwood is getting ready to film a dialogue scene with other actors. He’s busy, but thankful for the work. His friends who direct mainstream movies make a movie every five years. He makes nine or ten movies in a year. Still, there’s a stigma with which to contend. In Europe, “People see a porn director as any type of director. They see it as the same thing as a regular movie director.” In America, it’s taboo. To him, porn is “just another genre that people like and can watch.” That said, he believes public perception is changing—for some, at least. “The younger generation don’t see it so much as bad.”

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I Was 758

New York Times bestselling author Dani Shapiro interviewed me about my life story and my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, for her widely-listened-to Family Secrets podcast. The episode is entitled “I Was 758,” and it’s available on most podcast distributing platforms. Thank you to Dani for doing this intimate interview. You can buy Data Baby from the retailer of your choice here and read more about it here.

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What You Don't See

I had this idea recently that I should do a series of photos that I have taken on adult movie sets but the photos have no depictions of sex in them. When I visit a set, there are plenty of photos that I take that have no sex in them; oftentimes, they have no people in them. The subject of these non-sex images is the stuff that gets left out: the waiting prop, the douches and wipes, the clapperboard, the set itself, the girls getting their makeup done. You see these same impulses in the works of Larry Sultan and Jeff Burton, who have both photographed on porn sets. There is a preoccupation with the banal behind the explicit, the ordinary juxtaposed against the extraordinary. Years ago, a guy reproduced stills from porn movies and Photoshopped out the people—I think that’s what he did—but I can’t find his work or remember his name. Anyway, this documentary photography series I’ll be working on is untitled for now. Here is a shot of a gurney that I took on a set I went to this June.

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Meet The Artist Turning Blowup Dolls Into Fashion Designs

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in July 2020. It has been lightly updated.

Nicole Daddona, who goes by Friday, is 32, lives in Los Angeles, and is, as she puts it, “an artist, comedian, fashion designer, filmmaker, and toy designer” who’s created a popular line of blowup doll fashions. If you’ve ever dreamed of owning a handbag with the face of a vintage blowup doll on it or a coat covered in blowup doll faces, Friday has you covered. Here, Friday, who’s also the editor of FRIDAY Magazine, explains how she got into blowup doll fashion and why her designs are so coveted.

Susannah Breslin: How did you come up with the idea of turning blowup dolls into wearable products you could sell?

Friday: Last year I was living in a retirement community with my dad in Connecticut for a few months. I found a vintage blowup doll at the thrift store and immediately purchased it. I've always been drawn to blowup dolls. I just think they're such a fun part of pop culture. I've always made things out of other things. I used to go to the dump with my dad a lot as a kid and turn little trinkets I'd find into accessories I could wear. When I was in high school, I made a chair out of recycled plastic bags. I like upcycling and turning things into other things a lot. After having Judy—which is the official name of this style of blowup doll—around the house for a few days, I knew that I wanted to keep her with me always and that the best way to do that was to turn her into something wearable. I cut off her face—which sounds terrible, but was oddly cathartic—and assembled a very poorly made prototype of what is now the Blow Me Judy Bag.

Breslin: Where do you source the blowup dolls from?

Friday: At first I was getting them from eBay and thrift stores when I could find them, but after posting the bag as a pre-order for sale and getting a larger and more positive response than I anticipated, I knew eBay's blowup doll supply was going to run dry quickly. I found a manufacturer who makes blowup dolls, and now I source the blowup dolls from them directly. 

Breslin: How do you manufacture the blowup doll products?

Friday: At first I was making them myself, but each bag was taking hours to make, and I was getting injured a lot by my sewing machine, so I knew I needed to find some manufacturing help. After a lot of research I was able to find an amazing manufacturer to help with production.

Breslin: Are the items made entirely from blowup doll materials, or do you add other materials?

Friday: The original prototype was, but after wearing it out a few times I realized that the vinyl material of the blowup doll's body wasn't going to be sturdy enough for longtime wear. I like a bag that's sturdy and can fit a lot or a little while also being great for casual or classy events. The Blow Me Judy Bag is all of that and more. When it came time to manufacture the bag on a larger scale, I did a lot of research. It was important to me that the bag, like everything I sell, was made of all vegan materials. I found a great vegan leather material that was the same color as the original blowup doll's hair, and that's what I use for the bag, which is essentially supposed to be the rest of the doll's head.

Breslin: The Blow Me Bag is $89 $150. How did you settle on that price point?

Friday: $69 seemed too obvious. I wanted to pick a price point that would cover my expenses, labor, and time. I run Magic Society completely on my own. I do all the marketing, customer service, shipping, web design, photography, product design—you name it—myself. The price point is on the lower end in the world of designer handbags, which was important to me because the Blow Me Judy Bag is definitely a designer piece, but I wanted the price to be something I'd be willing to pay for a designer bag. I also see it as a piece of collectible art and myself as an artist, so hopefully the value will go up over time. My dream is that one day it will be in a museum between Pedro Friedeberg's hand chair and Warhol's paper dress.

Breslin: Is the Blow Me Judy Bag your bestseller? How many have you sold?

Friday: It sells really well. So far I've released two pre-orders of 100 pieces each. I'm just about to sell out the second pre-order.

Breslin: Why did you choose this model of blowup doll?

Friday: Judy's the one! Out of all the blowup dolls out in the world, she's the most iconic. She has a classic design that's been around for decades, so she has a warm nostalgic feeling about her. I like that she plays it classy with her closed mouth, but we all know what she's really got on her mind.

Breslin: Is working with blowup doll materials easy or challenging?

Friday: It's 1,000% challenging! The mask part of the doll is flexible plastic, which is very thick and difficult to sew, but makes for a sturdy bag. The vinyl the body is made of is difficult to wrangle in the Los Angeles heat, but it's all worth it when I catch Judy's hypnotizing gaze.

Breslin: Your blowup line is amusing, but it's also sort of disturbing. In the product description, you even refer to the Blow Me Judy Bag as a potential "relationship ender." Do you think your blowup products are beautiful? Terrifying? Art?

Friday: I definitely think of it as all of the above. The blowup line is pop art personified. It's high fashion and lowbrow all at the same time. Magic Society's slogan is "Lowbrow High Fashion.” I don't think anything sums that up better than the Blow Me Judy Bag. The good thing is that the blowup line is a great conversation starter. It also makes uptight people uncomfortable, which is always fun. Gotta love scaring Karens. 

To quote Delia Deetz, "This is my art and it is dangerous," kind of sums up most of the work I do. From the films I make with my directing partner Adam Shenkman to the clothing I design, I like to make things that dwell in the subconscious, touch on surrealism, and most of all amuse me. I know in a world as big as the one we live in that there are like-minded people out there who will get it and get something positive out of my creations.

Breslin: Have you gotten any interest in carrying the Blow Me Judy Bag yet from, say, Nordstrom?

Friday: Not yet, but hit me up, Nordstrom! I'm ready to take this line all the way to Fashion Week and confuse the masses. London. New York. Paris. Milan. Retailers, drop me a line! Magic Society will cast a spell over you!

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The Other Hollywood Reporter

AVN, aka Adult Video News, is The Hollywood Reporter of the adult industry. It’s been around forever, and I miss getting the paper version in the mail. In any case, the folks over there were kind enough to mention my recent story on Forbes: “How The Hardest Working Director In Porn Gets The Job Done.” Thanks, AVN!

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August Is the Hottest Month

In August, I’ll be posting more frequently on Forbes. Got a story suggestion or a tip? You can email me here.

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The Porn Director

After a little over a year hiatus, during which time I published and promoted my book, I’m back as a senior contributor to Forbes.com. In my latest story, I spend time with Ricky Greenwood, a very popular, very busy porn director. Ricky is a big bear of a guy, and I enjoyed watching him work. The scene I saw him direct features two award-winning veteran performers: Cherie DeVille and Mick Blue. Read the story here.

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Porn Star 3.0: This X-Rated Social Media Influencer Makes Seven Figures A Year

This story was written by me and originally published on Forbes.com in May 2020.

She goes by the moniker Lena the Plug. Never heard of her? Well, you’re in the minority. She has 3.5 million Instagram followers, nearly 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, and 1.1 million Twitter followers. And she’s built this empire herself.

At 29, Lena is a new kind of adult performer. Once upon a time, adult actresses signed exclusive contracts with adult production companies. Today, influencers like Lena create their own adult content and use their social media platforms to promote their content and score paying subscribers.

Lena didn’t set out to disrupt the porn business. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz and has a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Her family is Armenian, and she grew up in Glendale, California.

Think she’s an amateur?

She earned seven figures last year.

Susannah Breslin: You have millions of followers across your social media platforms. What do you think is your appeal?

Lena the Plug: My YouTube fan base has transformed a lot. I think my appeal at first was purely sexual on YouTube. People showed up to subscribe to my content because they wanted to see me make a sex tape when I reached a million subscribers. Mostly men were watching, but some women showed up as well to see the train wreck they thought I would be. I ended up just sharing the most real and raw, most honest parts of myself on my channel. I sort of treated my videos like they were diary entries for a while. It was an outlet for me. I cried on camera. Yes, I shared the exciting party life I was living with my boyfriend, but I also talked about my eating disorder, losing a good friend to suicide, and how I struggled with the hate that comes with sex work. I went from a 5% female demographic to a 45% female audience, which really stood out to me. I think my YouTube channel has done a lot to really flush me out as a “whole” person, if that makes sense. People see a sex worker, and to them, she is purely a sexual object. It is hard for the consumer to see past that, but when you open up and show “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” you’re humanizing yourself to an audience. They can relate to you in a way that they couldn’t have imagined before. I think that’s my appeal. Getting a person to say: “Okay, she has a totally different type of occupation than the one I do, but I can relate to her. I can see myself befriending her. We are not so different, in a way.”

Breslin: Some people might be surprised to learn that you're bringing in seven figures annually. What are your revenue sources?

Lena: I have a big YouTube and Instagram following, but 95% of my revenue stream comes from selling access to my premium Snapchat and OnlyFans subscriptions. The other 5% is a combination of YouTube revenue, Instagram and YouTube brand deals, adult tube sites, and merchandise. It’s hard to get brand deals when you do 18+ work, or earn a high amount of revenue on Youtube when you are a sex worker—videos get demonetized even if they abide by YouTube community guidelines—so I have always relied on creating and selling quality adult content. It is the bread and butter of my business. 

Breslin: Was being an entrepreneur something you planned or did you more fall into it?

Lena: I’ll be honest. I didn’t think I had an entrepreneurial bone in my body until I started doing this work. I began selling access to my premium Snapchat back in 2016 when it became very apparent that because of my high follower count on Instagram and Snapchat, I would have guaranteed financial success with it. A few different people who ran sites that girls could sell access to their Snapchat on had reached out to me to join their sites. They wanted 50% of the revenue for me showing my entire body online, while they just hosted the site that processed the credit cards. It struck a nerve with me, and I couldn’t get myself to take any of those deals. I decided to have a site built for myself, where I could keep a majority of my earnings. I’ve since moved to larger, more mainstream sites—like OnlyFans—because they offer a reasonable revenue split, but I think that experience with creating my own website is what started me out as the entrepreneur I didn’t know I could be. 

Breslin: Even though adult content is ubiquitous on the internet, there's still stigma attached to sex work. How do you navigate that?

Lena: It used to be really hard, at first. I was overwhelmed with negativity when I first gained notoriety online. I felt I had truly made a mistake in choosing this work and should have never entered this space. I wasn’t used to the repeated name-callings back then. I’ve since gotten used to it and grown thicker skin. If someone calls you a whore thousands of times, it just doesn’t hurt anymore, you know? I see the same negative comments all the time. They lose their meaning after a while. The commenters of these words don’t feel like real people anymore. I basically just block and ignore now. Internally, I acknowledge that whoever is commenting is coming from a very different world than the one I know. They haven’t been exposed to the same things that have allowed me to be open-minded about sex. I try to be forgiving about their hatred and remind myself that there was probably a time where I was more close-minded and would have probably thought poorly of sex workers too. It doesn’t make it right, but it helps me to put it into perspective and try to understand them better. 

Breslin: Years ago, adult performers had exclusive contracts with production studios. What role has the internet and social media played in your career?

Lena: Without the internet and social media, I would have no career. Without Instagram and Snapchat, I would have never known that selling adult content online was even an option. I would have no clue that you can make an entire career off of it. I only got into this business because so many of my followers kept asking me if I had “premium” content. Now I use my social media platforms as marketing tools for my business and [as a way] to meet other creators to work with. I owe everything to the internet and these platforms. 

Breslin: How has the pandemic impacted your business?

Lena: The pandemic has affected a majority of businesses in a very negative way, but my business has been growing steadily during the past couple of months, in terms of selling memberships to my OnlyFans. Also, I always worked from home, so the pandemic hasn’t changed that for me. The one difference in my business is that the type of content I create is a little different. I can’t meet with other performers to shoot content, so I mostly film solo content or shoot videos with my partner, who I’m quarantined with. I have shot a couple of Zoom orgies, which are fun, but I look forward to when I can physically work with other beautiful women in person again. 

Breslin: You announced not long ago that you're pregnant. What was the reaction like from your followers? How has being pregnant impacted work?

Lena: Yes, I am currently 17 weeks pregnant! I made my announcement on social media a few weeks ago, and as with most things, it was good and bad. I was overwhelmed with beautiful messages from many of my followers who are excited for this new chapter in my life. However, many people felt the need to vocalize their opinions about the mistake they seem to think I am making. The number one concern is that my child will be bullied because of my career choice, and that it is selfish for me to bring kids into this world. Others believe that if I’m choosing motherhood, I should leave sex work behind. It’s apparent that these people subscribe to the idea that women cannot be both maternal and sexual, they must choose one or the other. I’m ignoring everyone and continuing to do my job and live my life. I shouldn’t have to leave my career, especially while my success is constantly growing at a steady rate, just because I am having a child. I’m a business woman, just like any other business woman, and I’m in the very fortunate position where I don’t have to give anything up. So far, my pregnancy hasn’t affected my work. People still love my content, even with the extra weight. As I grow and look undeniably pregnant, I am sure I will lose some amount of subscribers who miss my smaller frame, but I will surely gain some new ones who prefer a big-bellied body. 

Breslin: Who's your role model? Kim Kardashian? Steve Jobs?

Lena: I wouldn’t really say I had any role models when I came into this business because I sort of fell into it without even realizing what was happening or how big I was getting.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Extreme Porn Crackdown

This story was written by me and originally published on Salon in July 2001.

These days, it seems like the Los Angeles Police Department has got a thing for porn. Understand, the kind of porn the LAPD wants is not just any kind. When it comes to the LAPD and porn, the LAPD wants the nastiest, dirtiest, most extreme porn around.

"What kind of porn is that?" you might ask. (They are, after all, the police.)

The kind of porn the LAPD wants has naked women fisting each other, and guys peeing on girls, and 80 men masturbating onto the face of one kneeling woman. That's the kind of porn the LAPD wants.

Got any?

The adult-movie industry does. That's why, on Dec. 15, 2000, a posse of L.A. cops showed up with a search warrant at the San Fernando Valley offices of a man who goes by the name of Seymore Butts to get a fisting tape they wanted.

And that's why on May 16, 2001, they pulled over the car of a man named Jeff Steward in nearby Woodland Hills because they heard he was their guy when it came to a popular new porn genre called bukkake that involves one woman, 100 or so men and lots of semen.

As payment for the porn, the LAPD handed Butts two counts of obscenity. It's likely Steward will be awarded a few counts as well.

And it is quite possible the LAPD will be coming back real soon to Porn Valley, USA, for more. Because these days, it looks as if the LAPD has a big hard-on when it comes to hardcore porno.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Seymore Butts lives in a low-lying ranch-style home behind a locked gate at the end of a driveway in the Northridge area of the San Fernando Valley. Outside is a kidney-shaped pool, in the living room is a porn-star girlfriend and in front of a TV is Butts himself.

Seymore Butts is famous. Famous for being a pioneer of gonzo porn in the '90s, setting off with video cam in hand to chronicle sexploits that, as his name implies, involved more than the missionary position. Famous again in the mid-'90s for a porn movie in which his girlfriend gave a blow job to a fireman -- an on-duty fireman -- on the back of a fire truck.

Now Butts may become more famous, perhaps even most famous, for his most provocative production to date.

It's called "Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 1."

In this particular filmic endeavor, two female porn stars, who go by the names Alisha Klass and Chloe, can be seen convening in a Florida hotel room. Klass and Chloe are two of the adult movie industry's "anal queens," postfeminist sexplorers who take howlingly orgasmic pleasure in their experiments at the anal end of extreme porn.

Once situated before Butts' camera, they embark on a trip to the outer reaches of the extreme sex frontier. In a frenzy of erotic competition and mutual admiration, the women end up putting their whole fists into each other's orifices to loudly orgasmic fanfare.

This is where Seymore's trouble began.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Adam Whitney Glasser was born and raised in the Bronx until 13, the Jewish son of a clothing-company sales-rep father and a secretary mother. When the family moved to Santa Monica, Calif., Glasser discovered he preferred girls to books, lost his virginity at 14 and found a cache of his father's adult videos. He was disappointed when he did; as he says now, "I didn't know my Dad just didn't have good taste in porn."

After graduation, Glasser hosted nightclubs and went to junior college, but he quickly came to appreciate where his true interests in life lay. "Once I started dating a lot of women," he says, "I always kind of dated a lot of women." By 24, Glasser had become a personal trainer and opened a gym in Los Angeles. To make extra money on the side he rented the gym out as a movie location, and one night in 1990 in a video store he espied John Stagliano. And Glasser knew Stagliano was the king of the then new field of gonzo-porn.

In the '70s, adult movies meant relatively big-budget affairs shot on film stock, but in the '80s, the advent of cheap and portable video meant anyone could make a porn movie. Stagliano, as a veritable porn pioneer, had created a persona to match the new medium -- "Buttman," a pervert adventurer documenting his "real" sex life so guys back home could watch directly through the eyes of both porn-maker and performer. (A double shooter, really.)

As Buttman's videos gained in popularity among porn consumers, they inspired a new generation of DIY porn auteurs.

Glasser was to be one of them. He offered his gym to Stagliano as a set, and the day Buttman came to film, Glasser says, "I watched, and after that day, I thought, I'm in the wrong business."

These days, Adam Glasser is 37 and known to a certain segment of the world as Seymore Butts. Over the last decade, the porn industry has grown up with him -- into big business. America's hunger for pornography has led to the annual shelling out of billions of dollars on adult videos, erotic magazines, pay-per-view adult programming and porn Web sites. (The exact figure, while widely estimated in the range of $10 billion to $11 billion, is currently being contested by Forbes.com, which estimates it between $2.6 billion and $3.9 billion.) The number of porn videos produced each year has surpassed the 10,000 mark.

Riding this wave, Glasser has made some 90 films, and thinks, after a considerable pause, he has slept with perhaps 400 or 500 women. Today, he is tan and muscular, although his dark hair is going gray in parts and there are lines around his eyes. But if you look at the movies Seymore Butts made, you see why he became as popular as he did.

In videos with titles like "Buttholes Are Forever," and "Tushy Con Carne," Seymore Butts sports a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. He is no stud workhorse at plow, but a man relishing a "spontaneous" sex life with girlfriends and gal-pals. The women apparently enjoy themselves as well. Butts' camera scans their faces almost anxiously for their reactions. Glasser says: "I hated when it looked to me like the woman wasn't enjoying herself, [when] it looked like work, like she was waiting for the paycheck."

Seymore and Adam -- they just wanted girls to have fun.

Glasser had his first big hit when he hooked up with Shane, one of several now ex-girlfriend costars. In his mind, they were the "Burns and Allen of porn." Together they entered the porn pantheon in 1994 with "Seymore and Shane: Playing With Fire," in which Shane engaged in her fireman tryst. After the movie's release, the city of Elmont, N.Y., filed suit, asking $172 million in reparations for the indignity of having its fireman debauched, its firehouse converted into a porn set and its station emblem displayed on-screen. (The suit was eventually dropped, and the credited "Marv the Fireman" resigned.)

Over the years, as a pornographer, Glasser had other encounters with the law. In one, at a Los Angeles porn convention in the summer of 1998, Alisha Klass and two other women were charged with obscenity when the women exposed themselves, and Klass united a cigar and her butt in an ode to Monica Lewinsky. "She doesn't remember completely whether she stuck it in her ass or just put it around her ass," Glasser says today. The case was later dropped.

So by the fall of 1998, when he was in a Tampa hotel room with Klass and Chloe, it must have seemed only natural to be pushing the envelope while making porn. That day, someone had brought up fisting, as in the insertion of the fist into the vagina or anus for erotic purposes. The practice, while not unknown in certain parts of the gay and S/M communities, is for many, even in porn, considered extreme.

"We were sitting around talking about what we would do in this girl-girl scene, and I said I would love to do that," Klass recalls. She was Butts' girlfriend, a relationship repeatedly consummated on camera, in "Behind the Sphinc Door" and "Best of Bunghole Fever," among other videos. The brunet has begun some moves into the world of mainstream filmmaking, including a small part in Wayne Wang's recent "The Center of the World" and a rumored fling with Bruce Willis, documented in the tabloids. ("I'm not in love with Bruce," she told the World Entertainment News Network. "It was all fun for me and now it's over.")

Neither Chloe nor Klass was an average gal. Chloe was already a devout fister in her private sex life, and Klass is famous for talents like self-fisting and accoutrements like a tattoo on her rear reading "SEYMORE BUTTS." When it came to fisting, as a stripper Klass had done research. "Sometimes I'd be onstage and put my hand in my ass, and sometimes people were shocked by it and sometimes they liked it," she reports matter-of-factly.

For their scene in "Tampa Tushy-Fest," Klass and Chloe do seem to like it. To begin with, Klass vaginally fists Chloe with one fist. Next up, Klass vaginally fists Chloe with two fists. After that, Chloe anally fists Klass with one fist. And, as a finale, Chloe anally fists Klass with one fist while Klass vaginally fists herself.

To describe Klass and Chloe's performance this way, of course, removes their actions from the context in which they were created. There are plenty of other interesting moments in "Tampa Tushy-Fest": Klass' bong-toking, her substantial "squirting" and her proclamation to Chloe's crotch, "I wanna stick my whole head up there!"

There is orgasmic moaning to consider for consensuality, Chloe's hand instructions to be debated as points of education and, for political significance, the post-fisting moment near the end when Alisha turns to the camera and crows, "Fuck, yeah, that's girl power!"

"It was a really positive, fun thing," Klass says of the fist fest. For her, it was "enlightening" and "empowering."

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In the five years or so preceding, porn makers had already been producing increasingly more extreme porn. Take "The Houston 500," in which porn-star Houston has sex with an alleged 620 men. (There were actually only about 125 men involved.) Or "Girls Who Puke," in which several women have sex and then, as one might surmise, vomit. Before the current "Tampa Tushy-Fest" imbroglio, there was Anabolic Productions' notorious "Rough Sex 1," which was recalled after female stars claimed they'd been physically abused.

To stay competitive with the Web, where anything goes, shock-porn grew in the 1990s under the benevolent shade of Bill Clinton's perceived hands-off policy toward porn. Porn flourished under the benign rule of a president with whom some porn makers felt a certain kinship in the erotic dalliances arena. By the end of the decade, porn sales were growing larger, and the perception by some in porn was that legal risks were becoming rarer.

But most of those in the porn industry still stayed away from certain erotic acts, those themes and images traditionally considered taboo in commercial porn and most likely to garner porn prosecutions. Simulated rape is one; the pairing of S/M practices and sexual intercourse is another. Other classic porno no-no's include bestiality, implied incest, insinuated pedophilia ... and fisting.

With "Tampa Tushy-Fest" in his hands, Butts got to thinking: What was so wrong with fisting? "I wanted people to give it a chance," he cries plaintively now.

"I called up one of my lawyers," Butts recounts, "and I said, 'Can you please refer me to the specific legal reference to fisting? Please just tell me the page?' And he says, 'Well, you know, it's obscene per se.' And of course, I had to get the definition of obscene per se, which means it is likely to be found obscene. Which to me is just utterly gobbledygook! I mean, what the fuck are they talking about?"

What the fuck they were talking about is, in fact, the sanctioned method used to assess obscenity, dictated by a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case called Miller vs. California. According to it, a work is obscene if it appeals to "the prurient interest" as dictated by "contemporary community standards"; if it exhibits "in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law"; and if it lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Then, and only then, is it obscene. Since all pornography, by definition, appeals to the prurient interest, one could perhaps forgive Butts for doubting that a judge or jury would find the taboo practice of fisting any more shocking than a garden-variety porno act like double penetration.

Butts decided to cut two versions of "Tampa Tushy-Fest" -- one with fists, one without. Then he sent several thousand fist-filled copies out to retailers across the United States. A week later, his phone began ringing. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" demanded one retailer. He received 50 calls about the tape, Butts estimates, half negative. If they didn't want it, he told them, all they had to do was send it back, and he'd send the edited version in exchange.

Ten percent sent back the original "Tampa Tushy-Fest." "To this day," Glasser says, "the number of requests we get for that movie are great."

Some porn producers were angry, believing Adam put them all at risk. But at the 2000 Adult Video News Awards, "Tampa Tushy-Fest" won "Best Gonzo." Klass and Chloe, for their part, won "Best All-Girl Sex Scene."

The fisting debate died down.

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That is until 8 a.m., Dec. 15, 2000, when several members of the Los Angeles Police Department showed up at Seymore Inc. in the town of Chatsworth, on the far western edge of the San Fernando Valley.

They were looking for porn.

The LAPD served Adam Glasser's 69-year-old mother, Lila, now a divorcée and the company bookkeeper, with a search warrant. Glasser was called to come down. He says the cops acted reluctant, like they were fans of his -- and of his girls.

The police left with the master tapes for "Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 1" and the yet-to-be-released "Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 2."

They'd let him know by mail, they said, if he'd be charged.

Three months later, on March 16, 2001, Butts was charged with two counts of obscenity: "distribution of obscene material" and "advertising of obscene matter for sale." The charges were misdemeanors, threatening a $1,000 fine and six months in jail. As secretary of the company, Lila was charged along with her son.

The boys in blue, it turns out, had had their eye on Butts for nearly two years, according to court records.

Upon receiving an anonymous tip in January 1999 that there was fisting to be found in "Tampa Tushy-Fest," two vice officers began surveillance of Butts and company. After a few days in January staking out, appropriately enough, the back door at Seymore Inc., the officers ordered themselves a Seymore Butts catalog in February. In March, an officer obtained his own trial membership at SeymoreButts.com, and in May, an officer purchased a copy of "Tampa Tushy-Fest" online. After a bit more surveillance in June, in July the cops took a personal field trip to a Los Angeles porn convention.

The LAPD stayed on the case. In what may have been one of the more spectacular perks ever accorded working police officers, members of the vice squad traveled to the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas in January 2000 to watch Butts and his muses accept their porn awards. An officer then bought a second copy of the video in May, and in November, the LAPD finally got its warrant.

Implicit in the investigation was what Butts' lawyer told him: Fisting is obscene.

What Adam wants to know, like Nancy Kerrigan, is "Why?"

Sexpert Tristan Taormino, after all, announced last spring in her Village Voice sex column that fisting has gone mainstream. "Fisting is not just for muff-divers anymore," she decreed. There have been other fisting films made since, including Chloe's unmistakably titled "The Fist, the Whole Fist, and Nothing But the Fist," from Elegant Angel.

"You think they'd go to the scene where the nun is raped in the wheelchair and then thrown in the swimming pool," Butts says darkly, referring to a film by a rival producer.

Because these days, extreme porn is all around him.

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Five months later, the LAPD was back in the valley. Because on May 16, 2001, the LAPD decided to add "American Bukkake" to its porn collection. If the department was developing a taste for extreme porn, then why not bukkake?

Bukkake is the deformed, molested stepchild of traditional smut. The tale told in porn circles is that bukkake was born in ancient Japan as punishment for adulterous women. Taken to a cave, bound and forced to kneel, she would then endure all the village men masturbating onto her face.

Bukkake lives on in present-day Japan as a porn genre. In its classic form, no one touches, no one speaks. With a clap, the loincloth-clad men stand. With a clap, they remove their loincloths. With a clap, they throw their loincloths in the air to shout, "Banzai!"

Then the bukkake-ing begins.

In hindsight, one supposes the American porn industry and bukkake were destined to meet. It was 1999 when Jeff Steward, who owns JM Productions, the Chatsworth-based porn production company, came into possession of a Japanese bukkake tape. Not long after, the "American Bukkake" series was spawned.

Every third month, 60 to 100 men have been showing up for bukkake, American-style, on Wednesday nights at a North Hollywood sound stage. Its mostly amateur male performers are brought in through advertisements in Los Angeles weeklies and a busy "bukkake hotline." The men bring proof of a negative HIV test. They are paid $35 each.

By last September, according to video tracking done by Adult Video News, "American Bukkake" was proving quite popular among U.S. consumers. The February 2001 issue of AVN lists "American Bukkake 11" as the seventh most popular video sold the week of November 2000.

The day "American Bukkake 11" was shot last September, some 80 men -- and this reporter -- made their way to North Hollywood. Waiting in a threadbare holding room, the men were white and black, Asian and Hispanic, short and tall, fat and skinny, handsome and not. They were handed black garbage bags for their belongings. Then they stood waiting in the crowded room in their underwear.

Many of the men wore masks or bandannas to hide their faces. Some of them kept their socks on. One was a midget.

Kiki D'Aire was the bukkake girl that night. A sweet-faced and Vargas-bodied blond porn star, D'Aire has appeared in roughly 100 adult videos, among them a number at the extreme end, from "Missionary Position: Impossible" to "White Trash Whore 19." She is the cheery type of 24-year-old who makes people feel fine about everything, even the prospect of 80 men about to orgasm on her visage.

D'Aire entered the large stage-area room wrapped in a red silk robe and asked for vodka before the bukkake began. The set behind her was that of a business office, and for the movie's opening scene, D'Aire masturbated alone on top of the desk while the men waited testily in the next room, their eager hooting now muffled.

Filming D'Aire was "American Bukkake" director Jim Powers, a good-humored stockbroker turned porn director. He is known for shooting some of the most shocking porn being made today -- "Freaks & Geeks"; "Fatter, Balder, Uglier"; "Perverted Stories." The black T-shirt he wore that evening read "Can't Hold Back the Demons."

D'Aire was escorted from the room. The bukkake men were funneled in. When D'Aire was brought back, the men cheered. One man, in a Darth Vader mask, breathed heavily through his vents.

"You guys are turning me on so much!" D'Aire announced to the crowd.

Powers implored the men, "Please try to come on her face!"

The group was directed to take off their underwear en masse. At Powers' prompt, they threw their boxers and BVDs in D'Aire's direction, shouting, "Banzai!" D'Aire giggled.

Powers emphatically coached the men, "When you're done coming, jump back!"

D'Aire sat naked on a towel down on the floor. The men formed concentric circles around her. For the next two hours, the men masturbated from ladders and on desks, jockeying for closer position.

D'Aire encouraged them. "Oh, yeah," she said, her eyes closed.

The men were generally orderly. It was, for the most part, quiet.

Of those I talked to afterward, one man told me, "It was a lifelong fantasy to do something like that." Another said, "I don't consider it degrading. I don't want to degrade anyone." Another revealed, "It's a way of being a pervert but not really hurting anyone." Another confided, "I'm not involved with anyone right now."

And one discovered, "For me, standing around jerking off with a bunch of guys isn't exactly my fantasy."

In the end, D'Aire left for home with $500.

A girlfriend of D'Aire's, who had done a bukkake, told her beforehand that bukkake was "the easiest $500 in the universe." Looking back, today D'Aire judges bukkake hilarious.

"If you go in there and have fun and treat it like this humorous thing, you'll have a good time," she advises.

What was on her mind during the bukkake?

"What was going through my head was how absurd the whole experience is, how wacky it is that men are so in awe of a girl that they're willing to stand next to 60 other guys jacking off," D'Aire replied. "Two years ago if someone told me I was going to be sitting on the floor waiting for 70 men to come on my face and hair, I would've thought they were crazy. But, you realize there's a place for everybody in this world sexually."

She added, "I woke up the next day and my hair was soft. Semen is full of protein."

D'Aire is very open-minded.

She will tell you she controlled what happened that evening. She believes strongly there are more important things in the world than someone who took so many, in her words, "shots to the face."

If you're going to have fantasies, you have to acknowledge that fantasies aren't always nice, D'Aire says. That is where people have a hard time, really, with porn, she says, because it is happening but at the same time it is not.

When you bring a fantasy to life that way, says D'Aire, sometimes it clouds the issue.

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On May 16, Jeff Steward was pulled over by an LAPD car outside his Woodland Hills home. In January, someone -- likely a policeman, as the same pseudonym was used in the Seymore Butts case -- bought two Steward-produced videos, "American Bukkake 11" and "Liquid Gold 5," a peeing tape, through his Web site.

Now, the police had a search warrant for the same videos and wanted to search Steward's car, home and office. As he was being pulled over, Steward's wife, driving their 15-year-old son to school, was also detained, she says, by a total of 10 police cars.

Steward says he was taken back to his home in a police cruiser, where 20 LAPD officers searched his house. They retrieved invoices and fliers for those videos purchased through his Web site. Steward says he repeatedly volunteered to the LAPD that the things they were looking for -- three copies apiece of "American Bukkake 11" and "Liquid Gold 5" -- were at his office in Chatsworth.

The officers finally followed him there. He gave them the tapes they wanted. They left, pornos in hand. Soon, Steward may be getting a letter, letting him know if he will be charged with obscenity.

Four days after Steward's run-in with the police, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by Frank Rich profiling the adult-movie industry. The cover's headline was "The World's Most Profitable Back Lot," and it noted below, "There's no business like porn business." The essay posited that porn is a business, run by businessmen, who happen to trade in sex.

In an echo of Rich's thesis, Steward himself informed the police, "I have done nothing wrong. I'm a businessman." And at present, as a businessman, Steward defends his work at the extreme end of porn in nakedly capitalist terms. "This is no different than people selling cars at a car lot," Steward says exasperatedly.

The product he pushes, he says, is no different from the rest of the products of pop culture, like the gross-out humor being offered from cable channels to movie theaters. "It's like 'Jackass' on MTV," says Steward. "Some guy swims in feces on MTV, and that's OK. But for a girl to swallow 80 loads of cum is obscene? I don't think so."

After all, when it comes to bukkake, Steward says, he has moved some 200,000 copies already. JM Productions is only up to "American Bukkake 14," and Steward isn't even the only producer making it. The same day teward encountered the LAPD, Jim Powers was back shooting another bukkake that night in North Hollywood.

According to AVN.com, Powers declared on the set, "We're doing this for all of America."

Of bukkake, the businessman says, "If people didn't want it, it wouldn't be made."

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The case of Adam Glasser, who estimates his company earned $1.6 million last year, is scheduled to start in October. Fortunately for Glasser, he has found himself a lawyer with fisting experience. In 1976, attorney Roger Diamond defended the maker of "Plunge 1," a gay fisting film, and won. Diamond says with confidence, "This thing will be a trip down memory lane."

Steward insists, "I didn't do anything wrong." He, like Glasser, with lawyer Alan Gelbard, plans to go to trial, if necessary, rather than cop a plea. He would be fighting for his First Amendment rights, but for his finances as well. Porn makers who take guilty pleas may face fatally high financial penalties if federal agents later pick up the cases of those who already have state obscenity convictions.

Several porn companies, though, are already discontinuing their extreme video lines. Metro Video's "The World's Biggest Gangbang 3" is no longer available at an adult video store near you. And the porn industry is still trying to figure out if, as they fear, the advent of George W. Bush and his unabashedly moralistic attorney general, John Ashcroft, will generate a conservative trickle-down effect when it comes to obscenity prosecutions, with extreme porn the Achilles' heel for the entire industry.

"This is a crackdown," proclaims criminal defense attorney Jeffrey Douglas, who works regularly with the adult-movie industry and sits on the ACLU's Southern California board of directors. As Douglas sees it, the LAPD was just lying in wait for the likes of Ashcroft, hoping that with Bush in office more federal monies will become available for obscenity prosecutions.

The LAPD vice squad, believes Douglas, is hoping extreme porn will lead to easy convictions, resulting in bigger budgets and providing them sought-after respect. "If all you do all day long is watch X-rated movies and search porn Web sites," Douglas says scornfully, "it's harder to get status amongst your colleagues."

Regardless, pornographers pushing the obscenity envelope didn't foresee that this day would come, says Douglas. "I've been at meetings and events where, if you're talking to a 25-year-old porn-maker about federal prosecutions for obscenity, you might as well be talking about the Spanish-Mexican War," he says ruefully.

And with extreme porn, hypothesizes Douglas, a conservative government struggling for a popular foothold could find the perfect political tool. "In order to pursue obscenity prosecution, you need the convergence of two things," Douglas explains. "You need to have both an ideological commitment and a political payoff." Extreme porn would provide a bone to throw the rabidly anti-porn right-wing constituencies who helped Bush into office, as well as an easily demonized enemy to fight against for mainstream support.

Nevertheless, "Tampa Tushy-Fest," says Douglas, isn't obscene by today's community standards. "If what's available to California consumers and on the Internet is taken into account, then Adam should get a written apology," he says.

The LAPD, for its part, says this is all just business as usual. "I've been doing these type of investigations for the last 16 years," says Detective Steve Takeshita, who is overseeing the latest obscenity cases. "This is standard practice."

Sex in the bedroom may have gotten wilder but, Takeshita asserts, that doesn't make movies featuring provocative sexual content any less obscene when distributed. "What two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is between them," he says. "As soon as that activity is distributed publicly, that's where obscenity statutes come into practice."

Regardless of the result of the "Plunge 1" case, Takeshita predicts "Tampa Tushy-Fest" is going down, based on his previous experiences with porn. "I think it will be found to be obscene because of past cases that we've done," he says confidently.

Was the LAPD pressured by the federal government? Takeshita says no way. "The LAPD doesn't receive direction on how to do investigation from the feds," Takeshita snaps. "We are not doing anything we haven't done for the last 16 years or even longer." (The investigation of Seymore Butts, it should be noted, began in the Clinton era.)

Deborah Sanchez, the prosecuting attorney in the Glasser case, agrees with the LAPD. What's new is only that the cases are going to trial, she says. "We've prosecuted dozens of obscenity cases," she explains, "but we've always gotten pleas. This is getting attention now that the city attorney is involved."

Sanchez asserts pornographers like Glasser, who push the limits of porn, won't be able to hide behind the First Amendment in court. "From what I've seen," Sanchez says of Glasser's tape, "this goes beyond what the First Amendment covers." The porn industry, Sanchez says, knows full well the unwritten rules of what they cannot do without risking prosecutions. "The industry knew there are things you just don't distribute."

It remains unclear why 100 men masturbating on a woman is less protected by the First Amendment than, say, three men doing the same thing. It's a state of affairs that only serves to illuminate that, when the subject is porno, the criterion of "community standards" becomes increasingly hard to define.

If extreme porn is the adult industry's indirect attempt to narrow the definition of obscenity further to give themselves greater freedoms, Sanchez says, it will backfire: "They want to see if they can test the waters and push the boundaries a little more as far as the First Amendment."

Sanchez expects to win -- "Juries have sided with us," she says -- and she promises that the city will give the producers more of the same if porn continues to test the obscenity limits of adult video in the future. "It's going to continue to be prosecuted regardless of whether Glasser is convicted or not," she says. "If others are distributing videos with bestiality, fisting, defecation, [they are] going to be prosecuted."

Not everyone in the porn world disagrees. "We've had a free ride for a long time," concedes self-appointed porn spokesman William Margold these days, somewhat wistfully. The act of bukkake, he says, encapsulates what's gone wrong with porn.

"I think the biggest thing bukkake proves is that the adult-movie industry has forgotten how to create," Margold sighs. "When you've forgotten how to create, you go through the motions over and over and over again."

But that's not how Steward and Butts and their cohort see the world. "I'm innocent of any wrongdoing and I'm going to fight," pledges Steward. "Why do people have the right to watch what they want to watch in the privacy of their own home?" he asks rhetorically. "That answer is we live in the United States of America."

Porn producer Rob Black, head of Extreme Associates, has since searched his own online buying records looking for the same pseudonymous "Steven Peterson" of the Butts and bukkake cases. It turns out Peterson had already paid Black a visit. The movie purchased was "In the Days of Whore," and, as Black points out, it is not just any video. The finale was shot in a church and features a multi-money shot accessorized with urine and a crucifix.

"We extend our arms openly with a warm embrace for the consequences to come," Black taunts the LAPD from his Web site. "Give us a call if you want to purchase any other products!"

In a plea for support on AVN.com, Glasser is seeking support from porn friends and fans. He asks that distributors push his product more aggressively, retailers introduce their customers to his videos and, "last, but certainly not least, I simply ask fans to whack off a little more!"

Already, Court TV is calling Seymore Butts.

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