Off the Strip

Posted: January 31, 2012 | Author: gsvoss | Filed under: Adult Entertainment, Events | Leave a comment »

To an extent, the show was like any other trade conference for the entertainment industry. The companies dealing with digital content were voicing their concern and anger about piracy, illegal downloading and the proliferation of free sites out on the net. Some of the larger players had axed the DVD arm of their companies; everyone was worried about how to get their customers to actually pay some damn money for their products. Over in the toy division, manufacturing had been steadily shifting over to Asia for some time and the same issues about rip-offs were rearing their ugly head – in the panel sessions one head of division, Michael Klein, told the audience about the phonecall he’d received from a colleague who was over in China on business and had just seen a very impressive window display of Michael’s company’s toys. Only problem was, Michael’s company didn’t actually sell their products in China; the entire display – banners, boxes, branding – were elaborate and detailed copies.

Oh, and if you headed into the main hall area you’d see videos of naked ladies doing very rude things with each other projected onto the walls; and some of those same ladies (partially dressed) down on the show floor surrounded by (mostly) men with cameraphones, snapping away. Welcome to the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo 2012.

Background: I did my PhD on the dynamics of technological innovation in the adult entertainment industry, and completed a couple of years ago. Academia moves slowly, industry moves quickly, so as I’m getting papers, chapters and book proposals up and running I’ve been gathering more information and what changes the adult industry has seen.

There have been many changes driven by the Internet, some of which Benjamin Wallace wrote about recently in the New York Times. Beyond those disruptions, AEE itself has been transformed – after running as part of CES for many years, the two events made a break this time around (which Nick Wingfield has written more about here). AEE 2012 left its old home of the Sands and shifted across town to the Hard Rock Hotel, about a mile off the main strip. The move seems to have been for the best; as the show got smaller, the booths and vendors became swamped in the massive halls of the old venue, but the smaller size of the Hard Rock Hotel seemed to be a better fit. Whilst several industry attendees said that being in a new space gave the show a ‘buzz’ that had been missing for some years.

Some things remained the same. The men on the legal panel – Lou Sirkin, J Michael Murray, Marc Randazza, Jeffrey Douglas and Clyde DeWitt – represented several decades of experience in the industry, and picked up on the same old stories about how adult retailers would find it difficult to set up shop anywhere that wasn’t an industrial estate in the back-end of nowhere. There are still tensions around the 2257 record keeping requirements, and dot triple-X continues to rumble on. Parody films are still going strong – “This Ain’t Glee XXX” was released last year – and mainstream pornography still predominantly consists of blonde white women (Lynn Comella wryly noted that, depressingly, this even extended to the demography of the ‘It’s (Not) A Man’s World’ womens’ panel). Beyond performers, there are still a lot of women in senior management throughout the industry; “more than at CES” as Allison Vivas of Pink Visual sharply noted. Nina Hartley is still around and as awesome as ever.

Some things change though, and the elephant in the seminar room was the ‘global market’. In the panels, the world outside the USA was a place of magical golden opportunities filled with people who would buy content for their phones and tablets, who would pay with debit rather than visa cards, and who might be the next great hope of an industry that has not had an easy few years. Over in the exhibition halls, the 19 companies who had come from outside the US had been shunted off into the desolate ‘International Pavillion’, several corridors away from the central show areas. Whilst the central halls were heaving – sometimes unpleasantly so – with fans, performers and industry folk, the International Pavilion was eerily quiet. Representatives from the “Dongguan Zhida Toy Factory” and “Guangzhou Guangxiang Enterprise Co, Ltd (DOUBLE ONE LATEX FACTORY)” sat with polite and fixed smiles behind tables stacked with rows of brightly coloured dongs; behind them, large banners with company details and photos of workers in the factories efficiently assembling the toys. As heartbreaking as it is to see anyone so unloved anywhere, trade show or otherwise, the isolation of the Chinese rubber factories by US participants also seemed odd: here, on Nevada soil, were the people who were shifting the very geography of the value chains of the old sector. Maybe next time.

Really though, AEE is a fan event and once the men – and some women – arrived on the Thursday afternoon the show was transformed into a heaving mass formed into crowds and snaking lines to get pictures with their favourite performers. Moving between the levels shows how different in scale different companies are – in the stalls of the ‘Fan Fest’ the performers with Wicked contracts were elevated up onto podiums with massive photo banners of the giant selves behind them. Go up a few levels however, and wedged around the balconies are the actresses either with the smaller studios or working independently. One of the latter had no shiny banners or platforms, simply pictures of her which looked as though they had been printed out on in the hotel ‘business area’ that morning.

Whilst the usual big players were there, some oddities had also crept in. “Erotic Beverage” energy drinks were doing the rounds, although most folks seemed more inclined to stick with the barrels of ‘Rockstar’ sold in the hotel shop. The ‘Retired Porn-Star’ t-shirt stall, doing exactly what it claimed to do, generated an outraged “WTF?” from a long-time attendee. I was personally a bit surprised by the make-up vendors Eye Kandy, but the sales staff said that the company had been coming to the show for several years now. They were doing a roaring trade, peddling a concoction of ‘liquid sugar’ which when mixed with glitter creates a sparkling paste which sticks to the face LIKE GLUE. It’s an oversimplification to say that they were catering to the market of women left to wander the halls alone whilst their boyfriends queued for photos and autographs – some men stood by their ladies whilst their lips were coated with iridescent neon pink sparkle, as other ladies got in line for a signed picture from Stormy Daniels – but they were doing a roaring trade. By the end of the final day, worn down by a blazing headache brought on by too much second-hand smoke and first-hand caffeine, I picked up some pots of gold, green and purple glitz for myself. Tasteful, no, but a necessary end to a knackering 4 days.

AEE is an exhausting event. As a trade show, it’s like many others in far duller industries – somewhere to see your friends and colleagues in a welcoming space, catch up on all the industry news and gossip, have early breakfast meetings and then stay up late drinking until some ungodly hour. As a fan space it’s not dissimiliar to many facets of Comic-Con, although it is at least explicit, in many ways, about being aaaall about the male gaze*. For the unsuspecting residents of Hard Rock who weren’t there for the show at all it was likely a strange few days in which tiny women in tinier clothes walked through the corridors of the hotel, unsettling soundtracked by the Mumford and Sons piping out over the sound system.

Unpicking the porn from the pornification in Vegas is difficult though. Walk up and down the main strip and you’ll be accosted by folks in candy-coloured hoodies shoving leaflets with details of the local sex workers into your hands; I would be fascinated to know whether they got more, or less, work from AEE than from visitors to the other two trade shows in town that week for the guns and concrete industries.Raise your eyes, and the massive benevolent face of Holly Madison beams down on you from the posters advertising ‘Peepshow’, Las Vegas’ “only stripshow spectacular”. The photo frames at the top of the page were on sale in the newsagents in the Hard Rock, and were unlikely to have been produced by any of the show’s vendors. The tasteful goblet above wasn’t from the show either but was on sale in the ‘New York New York’ hotel (gender theorists, it was next to a black ‘Rock Star’ goblet which was presumably for sale to dudes). If you want to be a “Porn Star”(TM), the accessories are all around – by the last day of AEE, the real female performers and other ‘booth babes’ were taking off those high high heels as soon as they could and getting back into their comfy Uggs and leggings instead.

*They tried a GayVN for a few years – it didn’t take.

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