|
Confirmed User
Join Date: Oct 2001
Posts: 1,901
|
Forbes article "The Porn Convention" with Seymour Butts, RealTouch, and the decline of the biz
Mainstream loves to do it's pornbiz articles - this one was okay as far as it goes. by Susannah Breslin...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susannah...vention/print/
Quote:
?You can?t write that,? Seymore Butts says the moment my hand moves to write down the two words he?s said, two words that summarize this story, that say everything there is to say, really, about the state of the adult movie industry, and one of the words is an expletive.
I?m sitting with Butts, born Adam Glasser in the Bronx, New York, 48 years ago, on two black plastic chairs inside of a square. Around the perimeter, porn stars sit on tall chairs at high tables signing glossy photos of themselves for patient men waiting in embarrassing lines.
The last time I saw Butts was for another story, and it was 11 years ago. I interviewed him in the living room of his ranch-style home with a kidney-shaped pool in the yard in the San Fernando Valley. His young son wandered into the room; his porn star girlfriend occupied herself in another part of the house. Back then the gonzo porno pioneer was in trouble with the Los Angeles Police Department, which had decided a movie Butts made, ?Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 1,? was obscene.
Now things are different.
In the decade since, the adult movie industry has changed completely, and although Butts has gone off the record as I listen, he is telling me the story of everything that happened in between, and it?s a doozy.
***
Once upon a time, pornographers were kings.
I remember what it was like because I was there. The rise of the Internet was spreading porn across the planet like a virus. There were big budget feature movies, stunt sex videos in which lone women competed with one another to have sex with as many men as possible, and gonzo production studios cropping up like weeds across the Valley. With lightning speed, porn crossed over into the mainstream, and consumers couldn?t get enough. Or so it seemed.
A funny thing happened, though. Over the years that followed, porn became ubiquitous, the market was flooded with product, piracy ate up the porn industry?s profits, the Feds served a series of pornographers with a succession of obscenity indictments, and a recession swept across the globe.
By the time I sit down across from Butts at this porn convention on the second floor of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Ill., over which a steady stream of jetliners descends into Chicago O?Hare International Airport less than a mile away, the adult movie business has transformed totally.
The porn industry as I knew it is dead. And it appears a new industry has arisen.
***
Xaq Fixx is a former Air Force cryptologist and precision-guided munitions specialist. He wears glasses, has a significant scar on his forehead of undetermined origin, and sports a Lenin-esque beard and mustache, the ends of which he twirls into curls.
Fixx is the market research manager for the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, an online adult company that bills itself on its website as ?THE #1 ADULT VIDEO ON DEMAND THEATER IN THE WORLD!? Among other properties, AEBN owns PornoTube, an X-rated YouTube, and xPeeps, an adult webcam site that encourages users to ?xpose yourself.? It also produces the product Fixx is hawking.
I stick my finger into the rubbery, flesh-colored slit on the side of a plastic grey peanut the size of a very large loaf of bread. This is RealTouch, an ?award-winning male masturbator? designed by a former NASA engineer that syncs with adult movies to simulate sex for the male with which it is interacting through your computer?s USB port. The device retails for $325, and the package includes 120 RealTouch VOD minutes, anti-bacterial cleaner, and a 90-day limited warranty.
More recently, the company has begun marketing the RealTouch JoyStick, the lingam to the RealTouch?s yoni, which is to say it looks like a dildo. Available only to adult webcam models at this time, the joystick serves as a remote control for the RealTouch device, enabling users in remote locations to have ?True Internet Sex?!?
Per Fixx?s instruction, Savannah Steele, a busty blonde porn star in a lab coat, moves the joystick, and the mechanism tightens around my finger and increases speed.
?It feels like having sex with a robot,? I announce. I extract my finger and wipe it off with a wet wipe from the box on the table.
|
|