Excellent stuff here:

The question put to the panel—which was comprised of director/performer Sinnamon Love, performer Tina Horn, ex-producer Dan Reilly, Museum of Sex curator Sarah Forbes, creator of Make Love Not Porn Cindy Gallop, the aforementioned Madison Young and moderated by Lynsey G.—was whether porn’s job was to entertain or educate, or neither or both. The panel fairly unanimously agreed that though most porn is not created with the intent to be an educational tool, it often served that purpose.

Cindy Gallop cited a study done by an ISP that the average kid these days sees their first pornographic images at age 8, but often receive no context for what they’re seeing. Makers of porn can not be expected to make what is meant to be a consumer product for adults also be a way of teaching young people how to have great sex, yet porn sex is often the only instructive sex they see. The issues at hand were ones that seem to shape our national problems with sex and sexuality: a lack of comprehensive sex ed, the unwillingness of most parents to have the kinds of conversations about sex that would be truly instructive for kids, a cultural unwillingness to talk about sex and porn openly. But what struck me as the most interesting part of the discussion was the money stuff.

Piracy is a problem not just because it undercuts the performers and producers, but also, she contended, in terms of what kind of porn people are exposed to. Porn, like any form of expression, is not a monolith. Madison Young described porn as a medium, like photography or painting—some is good, some is bad, some is art, some is high quality, some is low quality, some is disgusting, some is educational, some is entertaining. There is lots of amazing, feminist, kinky, exciting, authentic porn being made. But, Sinnamon Love said, if you have a generation of kids who think porn is free, should be free, if they’re raised on what you can get for free by googling, you have a group of people who think porn is only the crappy pirated clips people put on free sites. They don’t realize what is out there, and they also don’t respect performers, don’t see them as real people and don’t think they deserve to be well paid for their work. Madison Young, again, “If you’re not paying for porn, you’re going to get what you’re not paying for.”

Every bubble has to burst right? Porn is no exception:

Somewhere in 2006, we began to run out of licks. Only a year after Digital Playground produced “Pirates,” a porn movie with a $1 million budget, online video began attracting actual pirates, and they didn’t wear custom-made bras or sell for $69.95. Suddenly, those stacks of DVDs consumers had been collecting began to look like the recycling bin after a drinking binge. The party was ending. And then the economy tanked.

In 2008, when Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and the Dow plunged like a unbuckled belt, I was in a 14^th century château outside of Bordeaux, the guest of a studio head with a fondness for firm tannins. The château had been built in a construction boom during the Hundred Years’ War. The family that owned it had long since lost their empire. We were about to lose ours.

Compared to 2004, today’s porn “lifestyle” is more like a basket of yellow lollipops, an industry dominated by low-cost sites like MILFs Like It Big, parody titles like “Beverly Hillbillies XXX” and debates over regulation that threaten to move the industry into empty strip malls in dry gulch towns outside the Los Angeles County limits. But when Jenna Jameson turned “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,” into a bestseller, the dream was still incredibly sweet.

There’s a false truism that porn is recession-proof. It’s one you used to hear a lot in the industry, mostly from people who hadn’t been in the business long enough to see an actual recession. But for the industry to survive in a down market, it has had to reinvent itself – even if it means surrendering some of its legendary flair. Porn’s new power players are less likely the charismatic studio heads, but the heads of large corporate conglomerates.

Really fascinating interview:

Barbara Nitke began her career as a photographer taking stills on the sets of porn films. This was the 1980s, however Nitke’s photos didn’t aim to further the extravagant facade of the big budget shoots of the day. Her behind-the-scenes images showed a more raw, intimate side of the industry, catching a porn hunk yawning between takes, or a starlet taking a mid-gangbang nap. In the 1990s, when the hardcore porn industry moved from New York to LA, Nitke began shooting on the NYC sets of fetish and BDSM movies. Soon after, through her involvement with the The Eulenspiegel Society – the country’s oldest support group for sadomasochists – she began documenting the sex lives of real couples within the S&M community. These powerful, romantic images lift the veil, showing the human side of people often written-off as piss drinking, scary monsters in leather masks. More than anything, Nitke’s work enlightens us about the true nature of people who dare to be sexual deviants.

Barbara Nitke is currently raising money to publish AMERICAN ECSTASY, a documentation of the 12 years she spent working as a still photographer on porn movie sets. (Editors note: since the publishing of this article, Barbara Nitke has since raised the necessary money to publish the book).