Quotes of the Day

Congratulations, excavators of the erotic. Thanks to your support, the last That Old Feeling column, "When Porno Was Chic," was TIME.com's most popular (hit-on, linked, downloaded) story for the month of April. That's right: porn beat the Pope —both of them.

The column was inspired by a film and a book. Inside Deep Throat, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, is a documentary on the making and impact of the 1972 porn comedy Deep Throat, which starred Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems and was written and directed by Gerard Damiano —porn icons all. The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, by Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia, is an expert weaving of testimony by porn actors, directors and producers, and of their nemeses-promoters in federal and local law enforcement. I wrapped reportage on the documentary and the book around my memories as a film critic and appraiser of early-70s triple-X movies.

The story cued a big batch of e-mail. Many thanks, readers! Some of you gently chastised me for omitting porn monuments of the 70s, like Debbie Does Dallas (that was later, 1978, and I confess I never saw it; by then I was out of the business). A reader named Tom declared himself "disappointed you didn't cover the gay male porn scene in any detail. You should have stated at the beginning that you were only really going to talk about straight porn." Sorry, Tom, but the book and the documentary are about hetero hard-core, and as a straight male I don't have much to say about the few gay 70s porn films I saw —except that they too were artful and subversive in their own right. I did cite the artsy SM film LA Plays Itself, and might have mentioned a Peter deRome short that shows two men at their pleasure on a late-night subway train. That's pretty much it.

One or two correspondents complimented me and my employers for standing up to a vast conspiracy. "Enjoyed your porn article immensely," Bob Page wrote. "Got more enjoyment, though, out of the realization that Time would have guts enough to print this, despite the outcry you must be experiencing from the Religious Right (Wrong)." Actually no. I would never underestimate the sturdy intestines of my TIME.com bosses, but it happens that most of the messages I received were favorable, helpful and worth answering online. A column on porn movies would be nothing without full disclosure, so I'll be including the negative mail as well.

1. Do people watch blue movies in red states?

I began the story with a recent finding that porn accounted for most of the money spent on movie rentals in hotel rooms that offered hard-core. "The image instantly summoned," I wrote, "is of the traveling businessman who wants a smidge of sexual exercise before retiring, but who is too tired, timid or cheap to summon a call girl." A few readers had different images. "What about the more obvious issues reasons not to hire a call girl," asked William S. Fulton, Jr., a Minneapolis attorney, "such as a businessman's concerns about the ethics, morality, and criminality of the transaction?" Michael Neumann concurred: "It's odd that the motive of staying faithful to one's spouse doesn't occur to you as a reason for not summoning a call girl. I'd expect that to be a motive at least some of the time." Noted: watching porn can be an act, not of cupidity, but of fidelity.

Extrapolating from the hotel-room survey, I surmised that the porn "phenomenon can't be simply a big-city, left-wing perversion; a good many of those renters, those consumers of hotel porn, have to be red-staters."

"Interesting article," writes Paul Benjamin, "but based on a premise that isn't necessarily true. My experience is that the consumption of porn is far higher on the coasts than in the red states. I lived in Oklahoma for three years, and never even saw a video rental store with an adult section. I travel on business to a number of red states, and the hotels I stay in don't even offer any X-rated things on their in-house TVs. It doesn't have to be 800 guys renting a million apiece. It could be 8 million guys renting a hundred apiece, and there are easily 8 million guys in the right demographic in the big cities of the east and west coasts. It still seems very possible to me that the whole porn phenomenon was just a bi-coastal thing all along, so that it was just a fad that faded like so many other fads have faded."

For a start, this fad hasn't faded. Porn is pervasive —big, if not $10 billion big. And following Mr. Benjamin's logic, I added up the number of people in coastal states' big cities (those with a population of 200,000 or more). It came to about 24 million. Dividing that in half to get the males (consumers of the overwhelming majority of porn), subtracting another 2 million for those underage, I get 10 million —of which, Mr. Benjamin guesses, 8 million rent 100 pornos a year!

A few caveats: 1. We'll learn in the next note that the number of porn rentals is probably exaggerated. 2. There are plenty of Democrats in states whose majority voted Republican, plenty of Republicans in Democratic states. As Randi Rhodes says, most states aren't red or blue, but purple. 3. I didn't do a lot of research on the subject, but I don't think porn proclivity is political. My only evidence, and it's anecdotal, comes from reader Vic Petersen, 25, of Salt Lake City, Utah —could a city or state be redder than the Mormon capital of the world? He writes: "me and my wife get the porno every time we stay in Vegas."

2. How big is the porn video industry?

"Pornography is big business," I wrote in the last column, "an industry that earns an estimated $57 billion worldwide annually —$20 billion just for adult movies in the U.S., where some 800 million videos are rented each year, according to Paul Fishbein, the founding president of Adult Video News."

Some readers questioned whether the porn industry was quite that extensive. Tony Comstock writes: "I know there have been cuts to the Time Inc. research staff, but you should really check those figures Fishbein gave you. They're wildly exaggerated, probably by an order of magnitude." In fact, the research staff for this column is me; and Fishbein gave these stats not to me but to CBS News. (Could this have been another network bollox-up, like the one about Bush in the National Guard?)

A more commonly cited number, from a Frank Rich story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, is $10 billion annually. This stat was widely challenged: by Vivid Video president Bill Asher, who put the take at $4 billion, by porn journalist Luke Ford, who estimated the take at about $3 billion, and by Forbes Magazine's Dan Ackman, who calculated it at about 5% of Rich's figure: "the adult video business grosses at best $520 million" annually, he wrote.

I think Ackman is mistaking grosses for what Hollywood used to call "rentals," the studios' share of the gross ticket sales, which it splits with exhibitors. The porn equivalent of "rentals" is the income a company like Vivid Video of VCA receives from its sale of movies to video outlets. A video store may buy a porn title for $10 or $20, then rent it out indefinitely, earning hundreds per cassette over time. Surely we want to know what people spend on porn, not the percentage that dribbles back to the producers.

I floated the high number, so I'm stuck with amending it. My updated guess would be near Ford's number —which is about what the Lord of the Rings trilogy earned in theaters. Not bad for a segment of the film industry that spends thousands, not a $100 million or more, on an average title. The strongest case that hard-core isn't as big as Rich said it was: Where's the Bill Gates of porn?

3. Where do you find this stuff?

"The major research website makes it difficult to find 70s-porno data," I wrote. "if you go to IMdb and type in the words Deep Throat (or School Girl, or Behind the Green Door), you will not find the movie; porno is listed only under the actor or director's name." And it can't be a matter of bandwidth; the actor Peter North is credited with 1,587 porn movies, and each title has its own listing. I surmise that IMDb doesn't highlight porn pictures because they aren't offered by the site's parent company, amazon.com.

I got a clarification from reader Ben Jennings: "In order to search for adult titles on IMDb, you simply need to enable it in the Search Preferences section of your personal account options." Sorry, but... "personal account options"? It sounds like Bush's plan for Social Security. I have used IMDb dozens of time a day, nearly every day, for 10 years, and never needed —or known of —this premium service.

"With all due respect to the IMDB, they don't have a very deep porn database," writes webmaster Jeff Vanzetti. "We, on the other hand, do. The Internet Adult Film Database lists just under 50,000 porn titles, and have links to vendors on about 65% of them. There's a great many porn movies out there that have fallen out of print, but there is also a bit of a resurgence on some of the classic titles you mention. For example, if you searched for Story of Joanna on our site, you'd find a review of the movie and links to a half-dozen vendors who are selling it; some on DVD." A supporting comment —"You can find links, and ordering info, to pretty much any legal adult video by using the search form at http://www.iafd.com" —comes from Kevin, who has my favorite current e-mail address: defiant@depraveddollars.com.

Another resource I didn't know of: "You will find Story of Joanna and other movies you mentioned quite easily on Emule," Hikari Kage informs me. "Which goes to show ... the wide range of tastes (and the simple, and oh so rare, existence of taste) of those who frequent these new, exciting, and of course slightly illegal (as everything exciting) meeting places of the lewd and the damned." OK, Hikari.

Readers who want to find many of the films I mentioned —Mona and School Girl among them —should go to Mike Vraney's Something Weird Video, an exemplary trove for soft- and hard-core sexploitation.

4. Did they love it in Tacoma and at Texas A&M?

The original column was steeped in nostalgia, and so was some of the mail I received. Clint Weathers, a Minneapolis photographer and teacher, jotted a few kind words and added: "It certainly doesn't hurt that I had a celebrity crush on Annette Haven in my teens so you got nostalgia points, too." Haven was a prime lady of the higher 70s porn; her elegant manner and sweet overbite won many a heart. She was rumored to be considered for the lead role in Brian DePalma's Body Double, a thriller about the porn business, but settled for a cameo.

Reader Rick Taylor had a double layer of nostalgia: 50s going on 70s. He recalled seeing Deep Throat "along with my new wife it at the Community Theatre in Tacoma, Wash., probably about 1975, where it double billed with The Devil in Miss Jones for ages. I hadn't been in that theater since I was a kid watching the usual Hollywood fare. I can't tell you what a strange experience that was. They had the lights waaay up to guarantee that the audience behaved. I kept looking at the fixtures, and had these flashbacks to Abbott and Costello while looking at the screen and seeing Linda do his [Harry's] thing. I guess you can go home again, just that it's not quite the same. I do remember my wife and I going home afterwards and having a most pleasant evening, though."

In the 70s, a visit to Deep Throat and Damiano's follow-up, the much darker Miss Jones, was a mandatory social event for many young couples —and undergraduates. "I attended Texas A&M University, located in a small hick town called College Station," writes Freeman Fisher, now of West Hollywood. "The Campus theater, a tired single-screen 40s movie house, to my amusement was showing Throat when I enrolled in the fall of 1974. For 4 years it showed continuously, this epic tonsil-tickler, interrupted only once for 3 or 4 weeks with an exclusive run of Barry Lyndon for the entire area between Waco and Houston!... The double bill of Throat and Devil in Miss Jones...proved as much a rite of passage in this redneck college town as beer bongs, two-steppin', and kissing girls after every touchdown scored by the beloved football team."

5. What was it like to be there?

I got insights on 70s porn from two important figures in the genre. Jamie Gillis, called "porn's quintessential pervmeister" and recently ranked #12 in Adult Video News' list of the top 50 porn stars of all time, wrote me to correct my assertion that Damiano was the director of the 1978 Water Power. "Damiano had nothing to do with the 'high colonic' film, which I starred in," Gillis tells me. "His name is on it —that's all." (On the same subject, New York University savant Dave Cheung helpfully adds: "Damiano didn't make the notorious Waterpower. There's a guy named Warren Evans over at the discussion forum at DVDManiacs who claims that he's the director of this.")

I also heard from Howard Ziehm, co-director of the original porn fiction feature, Mona. Ziehm and his partners, producer Bill Osco and co-director Michael Benveniste, also did the early porn film Harlot, which I haven't seen, and assembled Hollywood Blue, an entertaining clip job that included the soft-core short that supposedly featured Marilyn Monroe (actually, Monroe lookalike Arline Hunter) and a homosexual hard-core reel with a young man bearing a strong resemblance to TV's Rifleman, Chuck Connors.

The team then made Flesh Gordon, which "began as a 25K porn film," Ziehm writes, "but wound up costing 500K. Because of the serendipitous hiring of a group of young animators, the film evolved into something much more." The team headed by SPFX maestro Jim Danforth included several young men who would build the vocabulary for Hollywood visual effects: nine-time Oscar winner Dennis Muren (the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park films, E.T. and The Terminator), Gregory Jein (Oscar-nominated for Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Joe Viskocil (Oscar winner for Independence Day and Dave Allen (Oscar-nominated for Young Sherlock Holmes), plus six-time Oscar-winning makeup man Rick Baker. "The porn scenes that we shot for the film were confiscated by the police. They confiscated the film's negative and I had to relinquish any hard-core in order to get the film back. By that time, I had decided not to make the film hard-core anyway, so I didn't care."

I was most interested in Mona —which was shot in L.A., not San Francisco as I had written. For a very-first-of-its-kind, the film is pretty impressive: a clever soundtrack, a black-and-white flashback to the heroine's youth, a decent sense of humor and some realistically shot, fairly hot whoopee. When I heard from Ziehm last week, I asked him to elaborate on his porn years, and he sent me the cogent commentary that follows.

Before Mona, porn films had been 10 or 20 mins. long, and all but a handful of those were silent. The biggest challenge, I imagined, was finding people who had some skill at delivering lines and would agree to be filmed having sex.

His reply: "Rarely had anyone learned their lines before the day of the shoot. They were sexual people, not thespians, although some kidded themselves into believing otherwise. It would be like trying to pretend that a defensive end could play cornerback. The idea of writing a complex script for people who were going to come to the set without even looking at the script was absurd. The script of a porno movie is a bridge between sex scenes —that's why the fast forward was the most important feature of video and DVD players. If I wanted to create great film stories I would have gone to a studio. After Flesh Gordon I had the chance.

"Mona was essentially the first porno with a plot that worked. It was written, if my memory serves me, by Bucky Searles. [Searles wrote the songs for the 1975 quasi-porno musical comedy Alice in wonderland.] The budget was 5K and shot in 3 days. Benveniste directed the non-sex scenes, and I directed the action scenes while doing camera, basically the way I did loops. When Bill told me he was taking it to Lou Sher [at Sherpix, a relatively legit distributor of soft-core exploitation movies], I thought he was nuts.... When he came back and told me he had sold Mona and Hollywood Blue for 100 grand I was awestruck.

"I used a pseudonym for most of my work because I was busted so many times I didn't want to give them a map where to get me next. I called myself Harry Hopper, Linus Gator and others when I did the 'pastry' series with Peter Locke: Sexteen, Honey Pie, Sweet Cakes, Hot Cookies, Star Virgin and Naughty Network. [Peter Locke had written and directed the very funny vaudeville-style porn, It Happened in Hollywood.] When video came in, it just wasn't worth the hassle, going back to making extended loops. In all, I had a court battle over my head for almost 11 years. By 1980 porn budgets were often 100K and rising. Then video came in and everything reverted back 10 years. Video producers had budgets as low as 8K and that included the director's profit. I dropped out. The legal and other problems just weren't worth it."

Ziehm's overview: "Porno movies were part of the revolt against 'shame.' That it took a ruling by the Supreme Court to clarify that nudity was not obscene just goes to show how addled the human mind had become. Once you put the diaper on the baby you've created a little nut: 'What's wrong with me, mommy, that I have to be covered up?' Porno offered a door to escape this madness, and the early nudie/porno participants jumped through that door. That the industry has become so successful is testimony that most of society felt the same way. Look at modern mainstream film, television and books. Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City et. al. Even Lynn Cheney's book included graphic sex."

Ziehm, who says he's writing his autobiography, recently edited the book Golf in the Comic Strips, with an introduction by Mr. Bob Hope.

6. Whatever happened to Harry Reems?

There is life after porn acting; indeed, there is long life in porn acting. Proof of both comes in this note from Gillis, who by now has enjoyed a lengthier career in movies (35 years) than Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart did. Gillis chimed in to correct a statement I made: "You probably know that Harry Reems didn't 'end up panhandling on Sunset Boulevard.' He survived that period and is in Park City, Utah, where he is enjoying playing the role of upstanding, successful citizen. Why not also mention that, instead of feeding into the most banal cliches about the business?" (Chuck Mobley of Douglasville, Ga., added: "You did 'Harry Reems' a great disservice. I read that he's a millionaire real estate tycoon in Colorado.")

Good point. Of course I knew Harry turned out fine (I'm shouting at myself), since he was an interview subject in Inside Deep Throat. I should have made that clear. In the film, Harry's easy smile and a thick mop of white hair gives him a Steve Martin look as he reminisces on the Deep Throat starring role that earned him $250 and a Memphis jury's conviction for obscenity (with a possible five-year jail stint). In the late 70s Harry did indeed become addicted to drugs and alcohol, and cadged coins on Sunset. He has said he "developed two ulcers, chronic pancreatitis, a diseased liver." A decade later he wound up in Park City, where he joined AA, converted to Christianity, got married and opened a real estate brokerage. Though he hasn't done hard-core since Cumshot Revue 5 in 1989, he still uses his nom-de-porn. Not Herb Streicher (his name as an off-off-Broadway actor) but "Harry Reems CRS [Certified Residential Specialist], GRI [Graduate Realtor Institute]."

Is he a millionaire? I can't say for sure. But with Sundance Festival types inflating real estate values nearly to Aspen heights, he's probably doing pretty well. I'm pleased for him. Harry radiated a good-natured enthusiasm in a variety of roles. He was an actor whose roles required him to have sex on screen, not a "sex worker" who had to learn how to act. Same with the saturnine sado-master Gillis, who ornamented several 70s hard-cores directed by Damiano and Radley Metzger, and is still working. In The Other Hollywood, Gillis said, "I think of myself the same way Marc [Mr. Ten-and-a-Half] Stevens' mother described him —as 'an actor with a specialty'."

7. Were porn actresses forced?

"I find it difficult to view a lot of the porn from the 70s," writes Mark McKee of Albuquerque, "as it is fairly obvious that many of the women were drugged and coerced. Today that sort of exploitation is reserved mainly for certain web sites where women who grew up on MTV are manipulated, a la 'Girls Gone Wild,' into performing sex acts for little or no money. [In] the mainstream porn industry, the actors are sober and enthusiastic about their work, and the women actors get the big bucks and the most editorial control. I enjoy watching hot sex scenes without having to wonder just what they did to that girl..."

Juliann Brumbaugh of Stow, Ohio, writes: "I do hope you will investigate it deeper and learn how Linda Lovelace suffered (humiliation, physical harm) during the filming of Deep Throat. She was no ingenue. The insides of her legs suffered broken blood vessels that never healed. She was threatened into completing that movie. Porn was and is humiliating to women. There are erotic films, however, that include women's fantasies and do not physically or emotionally abuse women — those are good."

I did indicate that Linda Boreman, later Lovelace, was dominated, perhaps abused by her husband and promoter Chuck Traynor. She may not have been the only woman brutally exploited in the genre. I don't know. I haven't seen other testimony about women coerced to do hard-core. It's tough for me to imagine under what circumstances I, or any man or woman I know, would be photographed having sex. But plenty of folks —prostitutes, underemployed actors, free-loving boys and girls of the swingin' 60s —volunteered. Today, many more men, and especially women, cue for roles in porn videos. Who knows why people do things? Some of us perform, others watch, and one or two lonely souls write about it.

8. Is porn harmful?

"Your article has missed some very important points," writes Helen Earle. "I suggest that you go to your local police station. There you should find statistics, that whenever porn shops open up the crime rate skyrockets. Not to mention the effect it has on marriages, women being raped and abused, and innocent children forever victimized by this supposedly 'harmless form of entertainment.' The men who use these materials and become addicted to them are also victims. Many of whom need to seek years of counseling. Our jails are packed with those who couldn't stop, or stop themselves for harming an innocent person. Would also suggest you listen to Ted Bundy's final speech, before his execution. He does not blame any one or anything for the monster he became, except for his use of porn. In his speech he begs men to stay as far away from it as possible."

Joan Harris of Charlotte, N.C., ups the ante (and the rhetorical volume) when she writes: "I have to ask you why the hell you spent even five minutes writing an article that (at least in the opening paragraphs, which made me too sick to continue) normalizes and in later paragraphs probably glorifies and glamorizes pornography. Are you insane or a deviate? Do you not have any daughters or other female relatives whom you care about?? Or do you sexually abuse them or allow others to?? Because the core issue with pornography is not about allowing men to artificially stimulate/satisfy their exaggerated sexual needs. It's about allowing women and children to be exploited in the production of that porn and perhaps become victims of those stimulated by it. It is not just about promoting degeneracy, which is bad enough. It's about promoting danger for women and children everywhere, even those who are corrupted by articles such as yours into thinking that pornography is chic, so that they want to buy it or do it too. You should be fired for this, not because sex is bad (sex is great in the right place at the right time with the right person), but because pornography is bad anywhere, any time, for anyone. Pornography and your 'freedom of expression' article glorifying it belong in the gutter, where you can "express" yourself any way you want to, not in mainstream media."

I'm tempted not to respond, rather to let these accusations stew in my reader's mind and mine. And really, Ms. Harris, you'll have to ask my wife if I've stopped beating her. The point of the original column was not to describe how some porn directors aspired to be film artists, not to judge the societal impact of their work.

Still, a few points. I won't debate —because I don't have the data —Ms. Earle's "statistics, that whenever porn shops open up the crime rate skyrockets." But porn shops are only one venue for pornography; the rest is over cable and through the mail, and those can't be calibrated by neighborhood. Further, as video porn has become more available in the past 15 years, crime statistics have dropped significantly. Even further, many studies indicate that the sexual release porn gives men reduces their tendency toward sexual brutality. My anecdotal guess: consumption of porn triggers far less domestic violence, and have ruined far fewer families, than consumption of alcohol. Shall we ban booze too?

9. How much hard-core could a soft guy watch if a soft guy likes soft-core?

Toward the end of the story, I blithely and ignorantly dismissed porn of the past 20 years. "Granted, I can't authoritatively swear that today's hard-core stinks. That's because I haven't seen a porn video...in decades. Except once, a few years ago, in a hotel, for about five minutes."

A few readers called me on my blanket dismissal. "Just thought since you wrote articles about the old days of porn industry," said one correspondent, "you should watch ones nowadays to have a final say." Michael S. Huff, Jr., offered some suggestions: "The sexual revolution exists on IPB (instant picture boards) today, where we have safe sex & stay healthy as we can! Go see any porno by Rocco ... always European & always way HOTT!" (Thanks, Michael. I've seen Rocco Siffredi, the Italian Stallion, in two films, both artsy-sexy efforts by the French auteur Catherine Breillat.) Others said I wasn't missing much. Lawrance Bernabo finds the later porn films "sexually redundant and repetitive to be sure, but also narratively boring. We are not missing anything as far as I know and have no reason to go 13 minutes in a hotel room out of sheer curiosity. So if you want to say current hard-core films stink, Richard Corliss, I will not say thee nay."

Others don't believe me. "With the knowledge you have on this subject," writes Sam Birtciel, "I get the impression [that] when on the road, you summon up a movie, get in a corner, and beat yourself to sleep. Better be careful, the next time you might be the one in the movie; watching yourself." A fellow who can produce such vivid imagery (why would I "get in a corner"???) ought to be writing movies rather than thinking about other people watching them. But no, I say no, Your Honor, my interest in hard-core is only scholarly.

One correspondent, "Catchley" raises an aspect of porn that hasn't changed in a century: lying about seeing it, or about not liking it. "Although practically everyone is a customer (at least some of the time), it's considered pretty pathetic to actually admit to it. Close friends may joke about their late-night, internet beat-athons, but you certainly couldn't cop to it in a Time magazine article, for fear of pissing off the boys on the board. At least, wouldn't be a good idea. Err on the side of virtue. It's safer in today's hypocrisy/corpocracy we call the USA."

I'm not a hypocrite, Catchley, at least not on this matter. I'm a remnant of the soft-core 60s, a period that established my cine-sexual preferences. As an teen in the early 60s I patronized Philadelphia's "Aart" houses (spelled that way so their ads would run first in the local newspapers' alphabetical listings of movie theaters), where a double feature often paired a serioso foreign-language film —it's where I first saw Godard's Vivre sa vie and Bunuel's Fever Rises at el Pao —with a Russ Meyer nudie or one of the lightly sexed-up imports from Metzger's Audubon Films.

What did the "high" and "low" ends of these twin bills have in common? Sultry women, in various states of arousal, threat and undress. I suppose I received a cinema education from my trips to the Aart Walton, as much from my devouring of Ingmar Bergman and Billy Wilder films elsewhere; but the women were the lure. They got me into the theater, kept me there and have stayed with me. In the early 70s, I even wrote a jaunty memoir of my grind-house days, "Confessions of an ex-pornologist," for the Village Voice (an article that will never, I guarantee you, be anthologized). It was, in its way, a fond farewell to the Fabienne Dalis and Ute Ericksons of my voyeuristic youth, at the precise moment they were being made redundant by the less comely, more voracious Linda Lovelace and Georgina Spelvin.

It's said we are all prisoners of our youth. I know I am, and you know too; this column, with its dewy memories of films, comic books and TV and radio shows from the 50s and 60s is a testament to the cage I cheerfully built for myself then and, to an extent, occupy now. The sight of a woman's body, in all its contours and mysteries, remains a visual enticement to me. A closeup of her vagina is not. The difference between the soft-core cinema of the 60s and the hard-core of the 70s, as any cop could tell you, was the shift in emphasis from a woman's breasts to a man's penis —from an object of contemplation to an object of competition. Why would I want to exit the seraglio and enter the locker room? In a theater showing 70s porn, the actresses underwent their exertions, the actors achieved their workmanlike erections, the camera crept in for a microscopic, medicinal closeup; and I would sit there impatiently, my eyes fixed on the red EXIT sign, wondering atavistically if the ladies would please remove their clothes.

But that's my old-fashioned quirk, obviously not shared by millions of other men. The porn business did fine without me.

10. What's the future of porn?

I haven't been paying attention, so I'm grateful to readers who tell me that, for all the attention paid to sex superstar Jenna Jameson, the next stage is personalized (or do I mean privatized?) porn. Tony Comstock, whose Comstock Films produces a series called Real Life, Real People, Real Sex, writes: "For the last 10 or so years I've been making sex films with one specific goal in mind: to find a way to show people having sex that doesn't make the viewer want to do anything but have sex. I've had some modest success, but the financial realities of porn are constraining to say the least. In the 'porn industry' $25K is considered a workable budget, $250K is an epic."

I entrust the penultimate words to Jack M. Rice of Long Beach. "The paradox of porn is this: judging quality is both objective and subjective. While the quality of a particular work can be objectively tested (I hope it's unnecessary to explain what the test is) the results of the test will vary from one viewer (or reader) to the next, because the testing equipment can't be calibrated from one viewer to the next. [He means that one man's hard-on is another's ho-hum.] Thus, the best porn will of necessity be custom-made. With film, as a practical matter for the average consumer, this was problematic. With video, it is not. The consumer can now easily customize his smut, by making it himself. Of course, production values are a factor, but home video equipment is now so good that it's a diminishing factor.

"Since the porn industry can't compete with the amateur's ability to customize the action, thanks to home video, its only edge is the models, which is why today's porn models are prettier, handsomer and more extreme than ever. Nevertheless, 'amateur' commercial porn, authentic or faked, has been the fastest growing segment in the industry. The minimally attractive —or even not, if they have a special 'talent' —can now produce and market their own porn, the 'studios' having become as much distributors as producers. It's an evolution not unlike Hollywood itself. So in a way, today's porn is better than ever. The difference is that the best is no longer commercial. Isn't that nice, for a change?"

I'll leave that for you to answer, dear reader. To all who agreed with my column, and to those who didn't, my thanks —for sharing your thoughts with me, and for writing this column.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss dips into his e-mailbag for another deep dose of hard-core nostalgia