Webmaster Access is a regular convention of adult webmasters which regularly convenes in Los Angeles. Like many conventions in any hotel or convention center in the country, the morning is filled with seminars, breakout sessions, and blazer-and-dockers networking events, and the evening is filed with drinking.
At a morning roundtable on hosting (and I mean this literally: there were about 12 people chatting informally over Sheraton mints around a circular table), I met Brad Mitchell of MojoHost, a Michigan and Florida-based web hosting company.
Mitchell's company hosts about 30,000 adult sites in a Tier-4 facility in Miami, perched above the city on 30-foot stilts and sharing space with Google, Yahoo, and the United States Department of Defense.
"When we give a tour," he said, "guests need to be on a list beforehand, have passports and driver's licenses, and be accompanied by one security official for every four guests," he said. "There are parts of the facility I have never seen."
So the DoD and Google have no objection to sharing space with a Known Pornographer?
"Every datacenter in the world is mostly porn," he said. "The Internet runs on porn."
He was asked about Denial of Service (DOS) attacks, in which servers are bombarded with information requests that are designed to overwhelm them. A web surfer experiences a DOS-attacked site often enough by not being able to access it.
"DOS attacks are infrequent," he said, "but we sometimes have to rely on our upstream carriers that we have relationships with to help us out and, less often, I'll have to drop a client because he is a magnet for DOS attacks."
Why would a client be a magnet for DOS attacks?
"Because he has pissed somebody off," answered Ycaza Thrush of Los Angeles' RightHosting.
And not only that...
"Somebody hacks you and all of a sudden you've got Mexican Donkey Child Porn on your site. And there's a guy from the FBI, a guy from the Secret Service, and a representative of local law enforcement at your door."
As a hosting provider, what do you do when confronted by this?
"Hand over the hard drives as quickly as possible," Thrush said.
Mitchell said that he had a client who was traveling through Thailand and posting his sexcapades with the locals on his blog. "And I guess he angered some of the nationals," Mitchell said, "because whatever hosting company he uses, DOS attacks follow."
And what is the busines model of hackers?
"What is their business model?" Thrush asked. "Basically to get as much informaion by doing as little work as possible."
By holding sites for ransom or by selling customer credit cards to third parties?
"Whatever involves the least effort," Thrush repeated, noting that "Russia and Asia-Pacific net is full of hackers with no compunction about fucking you up."
And what legal resources do you have when you get hacked?
"The Feds will not lift a finger," Thrush said. "Unless they're guys you've helped before."
It was interesting that the only red flag these web hosts identified was child porn, but that all other adult content seemed to transcend the moral and ethical objections that would traditionally skeeve out mainstream business partners.
Clyde DeWitt: "It could have been a hardware convention"
One of my favorite new sites is Bitter Lawyer, which was described to me as "porn for lawyers insofar as lawyers are narcissists about how hard their jobs are."
A recent issue features an interview with Clyde DeWitt, 60, a hard-working lawyer who has argued adult industry cases for many years. He finds the term "porn" distasteful.
The subject line refers to a birthday party he attended for a client's one-year-old daughter. The client was/is a major player in the adult business, and the other guests, dressed in casual clothes and eating barbeque like any other Southern California families at a weekend party, "controlled a majority of the adult video output in America."
DeWitt was at today's seminar as well, advocating a campaign of shaming content pirates.
Linguist, MIT professor, and essayist Noam Chomsky said he'd never heard of "The Hustler" magazine, but consented to a 2005 interview because editors had sent him a list of his friends who'd also been featured in its sticky pages.
He said that, after the magazine had not sent him a transcript to approve, he had forgotten about the interview. He certainly would not have consented if he'd known Hustler was a porn publication.
So Chomsky seems irritated to be asked about his views on pornography in this YouTube video, as if that What Porn Does is degrade women and that is a foregone conclusion. In response to the argument that women in pornography concede to and are compensated for filming, Chomsky says that if a sweatshop burns down, are its workers not to be pitied because they agreed to work there?
I'd argue that porn's real victims of degradation are the mopes who make $50 (or nothing) to hang around and jerk off in bukkake videos, but those guys like doing that.
Oddly enough, the issue of Hustler displayed in the Youtube video is not the one that was widely available: both issues featured an embracing Krystal Steal and McKenzie Lee (and Sheryl Crow nude), but the newsstand version bumped Chomsky off the cover for Lesbo Cherry Popping. Maybe that's why he was peeved; he was all set to pose casually by his Hustler cover at Harvard Square's Out of Town News and it was More Chomping, Less Chomsky.
Degradation surely is in the eyes of the beholder. I want to invite Professor Chomsky to an Anabolic shoot to prove my theory of applied generative grammar.
One of the cool opportunities for gracefully aging performers in the porn industry is to start one's own company and keep your name alive by attaching it to the flesh of newcomers. This was a successful model for Jill Kelly, Danni Woodward, Jenna Jameson and, to a lesser degree, Hellraiser's Pinhead.
Following in these footsteps, beloved pornstress and NightCalls host Juli Ashton launched her Juliland.com and regularly featured a Juliland "JGrrl" of the Month. The no-nonsense Audrey Bitoni has just been named Juliland's JGrrrl of the Year.
It is unclear what Bitoni will receive in addition to this honor, but one thing's for certain: Audrey Bitoni is comin' at ya!
Former Vivid Girl and current NinnWorx contract performer Brea Bennett has many irons in the cauldron, including her redesigned website, which will be a clearinghouse for her myriad talents.
She writes:
This new site coming soon, will be my personal baby, quite simply put - the site will consist of five major parts, Glamour/Gonzo, daily Webcam shows with I and my friends, Reality based media, Brea Bennett merchandise and Holistic/Spiritual sales, and finally my music!
It would be folly and madness to go anywhere else for all things Brea, even to the Shadow Realm of Faerie.
Like any complex and multifaceted star, Bennett alternates between refering to herself in the first and third persons, like offering multiple angles on a Blu-Ray disc:
My new website is just the beginning of my sensational plans for 2008, including the launch of a clothing line, my band's continued touring schedule and the addition of Brea's Playhouse to this multi-talented beauty's growing empire.
I, for one, and Gram, for two, am/is very excited! Both of us have/has been everwhere, and I/he always ask/asks Brea how she got started and how to get in the business. She replied that upcoming events are almost certain to make you almost famous:
Everywhere I go I am asked how did you get started? Do you have any advice? Can you please help me get into the industry…so I conjured up a venue to hold monthly talent searches this coming May and every month thereafter at hip night spot e4, in Scottsdale, Arizona with sponsor Playtime Magazine. It’s just a place where the lady’s can get a little crazy, and the ones who are serious have a chance to shoot with me, my company and my website…for almost certain exposure.
Bennett's new site will go live shortly. Prepare yourself to be enchanted.
"It's a fantasy of mine to be a fantasy of someone else's," said Alix Lakehurst, a Chicago porn actress who is a throwback to a brassier, fleshier time.
Lakehurst makes me think of Gina Gershon, but not because she's little and ropy.
"I took my porn (last) name from the movie theatre I first went down on a guy in," she said.
It was while I was watching Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly in Bound when that first happened to me. I should check to see if there's any porn girl working named Susan Showcase Cinemas Lawrence.
Lakehurst is busty and Greek in a way that must make people ashamed for knowing, like if your school crossing guard, postal carrier, or waitress was that busty and Mediterranean. She catches people looking at her when she's on the train in Chicago.
"They don't know the half of it," she said.
Lakehurst lives in Wicker Park, a community north of the Loop in Chicago, and when she's not working for boobcentric companies like Score in Florida, Big Top, or Homegrown Video, she is making guerilla porn on public transportation or Amtrak.
It was her flashing video on the train that first made me aware of her, then I met her in Las Vegas at the AVN convention, and recently she sent a DVD of her home videos to fans, in which we are treated to her philosophy on boob oiling ("I moisturize them every day") and see her joining the 20 feet high club in the bathroom of a moving train.
Lakehurst's appeal is not that she looks like a porn star. She started getting naked on camera two years ago and now, at 34 and far away from Porn Valley, she has neither the motivation nor the pressure to look a certain way.
"I work out and count calories," she said, "but otherwise I'm lame and geeky. And I don't want to be 95 pounds."
As much as she has created a vocal and supportive fan base on her website, We Could Be Naked, Lakehurst's weight does bring out some surprisingly harsh responses from detractors, who want their porn performers to look a certain way.
"What surprises me is that they go to the trouble of logging in and writing things like that," she said.
Many of Lakehurst's fans compare her to fleshier porn stars of the 80's. One of them, Christy Canyon, became a particular obsession of Lakehurst's, too. A blog and a series of articles for Mr. Skin, The Road to Christy Canyon, detailed Lakehurst's quest to meet her hero, whom she'd first seen in a porn when Lakehurst was 19.
"She changed my life," Lakehurst said. "I thought she was so beautiful."
Lakehurst eventually met and interviewed Canyon on the set of the latter's Playboy Radio show.
Lakehurst is different from other porn stars, too, in that her lack of proximity to America's Great Porn Proving Grounds limit her exhibitionism to her website where, self-directed, her persona is much more vulnerable.
"It's also because I actually like sex," she said. "I know I'll get tired of it if there's no connection, or if it's like a factory down there. I don't want to be desensitized."
Because of this, Lakehurst has not developed a thick skin, or the killer instinct required to either succeed in mainstream porn or at least to not feel personally slighted.
"I know it's a business about bodies and boobs and asses," she said, "but it's hard to get away from the feeling that when someone doesn't like my ass, they don't like me."
Lakehurst is discouraged with mainstream porn after a recent bad experience with the company Bang Brothers, which she wrote about on her site. "I could win a hip and thigh award but not an ass award," she said.
This vulnerability makes Lakehurst worth watching, especially in a business where 18-year-olds can develop the thousand-yard-stare pretty quickly.
"When I was younger I drank a lot," she said. "I was unhappy all the time. I liked cocaine. But now I don't. I want to feel more."
The best superheroes drop clues about their abilities with their outfits. Spider-Man looks like a spider, Batman emits little screams to navigate in the dark, and Apache Chief cries when you litter. But what does this woman do?
It seems her ensemble is tailored to combat a specific kind of foe, but what is it?
This image comes from a site called Bizarre Japan, which is redundant.
Benny Profane writes:
That is Kekko Kamen, created by the famous manga artist Go Nagai (Creator of DevilMan and pretty much every giant robot from the 70's.) Kekko Kamen's main superpower is grinding her crotch into her enemy's faces until they are subdued.
Mandy Morbid, last seen cavorting in these virtual pages with Glenn Danzig, has launched MandyMorbid.com, featuring a free hardcore video every week and a spare and haunting design.
Is it because she's Canadian that the callipygian and pink-haired Morbid has strap-on bathroom sex with Sssha Grey? No. Her being Canadian is a red herring. She has strap-on bathroom sex with Grey because it needed to happen.
Grey greyces the launch of Morbid's site the way David Bowie played with The Arcade Fire or Nancy Reagan once lent her street cred to "Diff'rent Strokes"; it is good to open with a celebrity. Next week Morbid, who runs the site herself, will take on someone named Ming the Merciless.
Morbid is the partner of similarly-tinted Zak Sabbath, who told me that he is building a monster to fuck Morbid in a future website update.
"It has to have the right number of tentacles, but also look serious enough to pose a fucking threat," he explained.
Chicago, the City of Broad Shoulders, is the home of Libido Films, a company that favors a gender-equal approach to erotic movies. Does this mean they don't engage in the exclusionary and demeaning practice common to California's porn industry of paying female performers twice as much as male performers? That would be good. Does this mean the male talent do just as much gaping? That would be bad.
Jack Hafferkamp and Marianna Beck started the quarterly LIBIDO: The Journal of Sex And Sensibility, in 1988, and over its decade-long run its founders realized that the contemplation of someone's privates is best accomplished without a book in one's hand. That is why they started Libido Films, and have produced arty, filmic, couples-friendly porn for the past eight years. Couples-Friendly=No Gaping by Anyone.
Read more after the gap.
What is interesting (to me, anyway, who subsists on a diet of highly processed porn) is how natural people look, and by natural I mean everything from older, shorter, flabbier, more exotic, less affected, and more compelling than the folks who are in porn down here. Still, I'm amazed that the paths don't cross.
"We are in Chicago, where people are naturally beefier," Jack Hafferkamp told me. "We find our talent through word-of-mouth referrals; people we know send us to other people."
Libido Films.com is a pay site that features retouched antique porn from a variety of sources, as well as the company's original productions.
I call this photo "When Batman's Away."
"Our biggest seller is the feature Urban Friction." Hafferkamp said. "Historically --because it still sells -- it is Ecstatic Moments. Stories of Oh! Part One has done well, too."
That's all well and sex positive and good, but my interest was sparked by Orgasmi: The Faces of Ecstasy, a collection of orgasm faces made by 22 SF Bay Area residents. Shot from the neck up, the film seems like a great aid for novice porn stars.
I noticed that in Libido Films' previews that there were very few blondes; that is probably why Chicago native Hillary Scott had to move here.
Webmaster Access is a regular convention of adult webmasters which regularly convenes in Los Angeles. Like many conventions in any hotel or convention center in the country, the morning is filled with seminars, breakout sessions, and blazer-and-dockers networking events, and the evening is filed with drinking.
