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Porn-shop owners have kept a close eye on the coalition of religious and women's groups coalescing around the issue of exploitation of children and women. As a result, nearly all of the most lurid fare, dealing with children, bestiality and torture, is gone from the shelves. Some stores have begun removing milder material on bondage and discipline as well, on grounds that the legal and political hassles involved are too much trouble for such minority tastes.
The new couples tapes have at least a vague story line, an interesting location and far more foreplay than films aimed primarily at male audiences. Conventional porn films were considered slow getting started if there were fewer than three or four sex bouts in the first ten minutes. Impatient males ( watching the new tapes for couples must put up with five or ten minutes of character and plot development before the clothes finally come off. Says Sexologist John Money of Johns Hopkins University: "Women are turned on more by the story line and men by the visual image, and that's a very basic sex difference."
Some producers are trying to lure women by making hard-core imitations of soap operas like The Young and the Restless or Harlequin romances. Says Bill Margold of West Hollywood, a longtime performer in and director of porno films: "The industry is trying to capture the soap opera, the romance novel. We're trying to capture admiration for the female." Says Money: "On network soap operas you get above-the-beltline love and guess the rest. On videos you get below the beltline but a romantic story line as well."
Romance is only one aspect of the new porn. Former Film Producer Marga Aulbach of San Francisco says her movies "stressed equality and the idea that sex was for both women and men, not just men having sex with women." She says she received a lot of letters saying things like "It wasn't offensive or sleazy" or "I didn't feel the least uncomfortable when I was watching it."
Women in the porn industry are playing a role in modifying the product. Female stars, who once seemed willing to do almost anything onscreen that was not fatal, are now wary of mistreatment. Newcomer Barbara Dare (Deep Throat Girls, 10 1/2 Weeks), named the best new porn starlet of 1987 in two polls, says she will not take part in anal sex or bondage and subjugation. "There's a lot of bad stuff out there and a lot of beatings," says Dare. "I would never do that. I do couples films." Seka, a porn star who now directs and produces her own films, sees a "tremendous amount of change" because women are rising to positions of power in the field. One currently popular couples film is Candida Royalle's Three Daughters, which seems like a cross between Debbie Does Dallas and The Waltons. Daughters features three college-age sisters groping their way toward adult life, surrounded by randy and caring males, a warm emotional family and a good deal of expensive lingerie. The film cost more than $70,000 to make, high by standards of the industry.