Data Dating by Malinowska Ania;Peri Valentina; & Valentina Peri

Author:Malinowska, Ania;Peri, Valentina; & Valentina Peri [Malinowska, Ania & Peri, Valentina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Data Dating
Publisher: Intellect Books
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Taking the Pulse of the Adult Industry

Every January the Adult Video News (AVN) Adult Entertainment Expo sets up shop in Las Vegas. Described as the world’s largest adult industry extravaganza, the four-day event, which culminates in the glitzy AVN Awards Show – affectionately known as the Oscars of Porn – attracts an estimated 35,000 people annually. The show represents different things to different people. It is at once a trade show, with business seminars and networking opportunities; a media and promotional showcase for new products, upstart companies and the latest technological innovations and an over-the-top, immersive fan experience in which performers in mesh body suits and barely-there-exotic dancewear canoodle, twerk, pose for photos and sign autographs as a way to say ‘thank you’ to the fans who not only make them into stars, but who also help keep the adult industry alive. It is also an opportunity for academic researchers to take the pulse of the industry, make research contacts with directors and performers and get a sense of what is trending commercially and what is not (see Comella 2010, 2014).

The Expo brings together under one roof the people, products and commercial interests that define a constantly evolving industry. In doing so, it makes visible what is often hidden from view: marketing and promotional apparatuses, performances of erotic labour and displays of porn fandom, laying bare the mechanisms that sustain a multi-billion-dollar industry that trades in commercially manufactured sexual fantasies and desires.

The show also functions as a cultural touchstone, a cliff notes version of an industry that remains somewhat enigmatic to the casual observer despite its cultural reach and influence. Celebrated writer David Foster Wallace shined a spotlight on the AVN Expo and Awards show with his longform essay ‘Big Red Son’ in which he sounds both enthralled and repulsed by the hyper-sexualized world he finds himself in and the people he meets (2005). The film Inside Deep Throat, the 2005 documentary about the making of the movie Deep Throat and the rise of 1970s porno chic, ends with scenes from the trade show floor juxtaposed with talking heads lamenting the rise of mass produced VHS pornography and the demise of porn’s ‘Golden Era’ of the 1970s and early 1980s. Author and anti-pornography activist Gail Dines, for her part, has written about what she sees as the ‘predatory capitalists’ who come to the show promising empowerment but delivering subjugation instead (2011).

Organized by parent company AVN Media Network, the Expo is part of a larger adult industry apparatus aimed at both promoting and legitimizing a historically stigmatized industry. AVN was founded in 1982 when Paul Fishbein and two friends started a monthly newsletter in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania geared towards educating video store buyers and consumers about the emerging adult video market. Created on a shoestring budget of $900, the first issue, which debuted in February 1983, was eight pages and had 20 subscribers (Alilunas 2016b). Since then, AVN has become an industry stalwart, with holdings that include several print publications, a digital publishing presence and the annual AVN Expo and Awards Show.

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