Romantic Porn in the Boudoir

By John Leo

At a screening of a porn film, a female critic spotted something in the movie that offended her sensibilities. "Good grief!" she exclaimed, rising from her seat as bodies heaved onscreen. "Just look at those dirty sheets!"

That incident may not go down in history as a turning point in the fortunes of porn. On the other hand, maybe it will. Steffani Martin, who was one of five females among the 30 viewers at the screening that day in Manhattan, says it was a good example of the new female consciousness breaking in on the crude male world of pornography. Says Martin, now head of Womero, an X-rated film distributorship in New York City: "The female consumer is beginning to change porn films. She won't tolerate dirty sheets, low production values and creepy male actors with 37 gold chains around their necks. Women want cute guys who talk like real people and sex with some class."

Like the rough frontier males of the Old West eyeballing the first shipment of schoolmarms from back East, the porn industry (estimated annual U.S. sales: $8 billion) is beginning to reshape itself to accommodate women. The pressure is largely an unforeseen by-product of the VCR revolution. Males who once trekked to sleazy inner-city theaters began to take porn videotapes home. Wives and lovers started to make their opinions felt, and their voices began to affect the market.

One lesson learned by the porn industry is that traditional female repugnance to porn can melt when the product is cleaned up a bit and presented at home, where the woman can feel safe and treat the movie as a prelude to lovemaking. Women account for perhaps 40% of the estimated 100 million rentals of X-rated tapes each year. "The VCR put porno where it belongs: in people's bedrooms," says an executive vice president for one porn house, Essex Productions of Chatsworth, Calif. "I never felt it belonged in theaters. People feel that in the comfort of their own homes, they are allowed to be a little wicked."

As a result, porn theaters and other sex emporiums -- bookstores, peep shows and strip joints -- have fallen on hard times. Manhattan had 121 such outlets a decade ago. Now there are only 42 in all of New York City, and more are likely to close if the city moves ahead with its Times Square redevelopment. There are now about 350 porn theaters in the U.S., half the number of a decade ago. The remaining theaters have trouble getting new X- rated fare, since many, perhaps most, "dirty" films are now shot on videotape and cannot be projected clearly on theater screens.

Sex magazines are declining too, under pressure from the Meese commission, churches, feminists and the easy availability of sex tapes. Says Detective Don Smith of the Los Angeles police department: "All the people now in video were making 8 mm or were in magazines. We're talking the same players; we're just seeing a change in the industry." The customer who cannot buy a soft-core magazine like Playboy at the local 7-Eleven can go next door and rent Oriental Lesbian Fantasies for the same price or less. And he may never go back to Playboy. Says veteran Pornographer Al Goldstein: "There's no way a magazine can compete with a tape when it comes to fantasy."

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.

An endlessly languorous coupling between one of the sisters, wearing a teddy, and her piano teacher is decorously filmed at a distance. Whatever its impact on females, male viewers may think they are watching two tired high ) school wrestlers from a balcony seat. "It's beginner's porn," says Steffani Martin. "Sensitivity is wonderful, but it's not grounds for arousal," says Jim Holliday, a longtime porn maven who says he has watched some 7,000 X-rated films, and is the author of Only the Best, a new book about pornographic films. "I admire Royalle, but I personally don't find her films to be the least bit erotic."

Royalle's four films are considered the best examples of porn in the feminist style. The sex scenes flow from female passion and needs, not male lechery, and women tend to initiate the sex. In Daughters, the male leads are unremittingly sensitive and determined not to dominate. When one of the three daughters gets a job in London, her boyfriend cheerfully changes jobs to follow her abroad. The youngest sister, after an endless series of chaste dates with a refined boyfriend, consummates the affair as the film ends. Says Royalle: "Women like the buildup, the tension -- Will it or won't it happen?"

Royalle risked feminist wrath, however, by including a mild and playful bondage episode. She acknowledges that bondage and submission scenes, though high on the lists of female fantasies in sex polls, are "politically incorrect" with the women's movement. "Women do have these fantasies," she says, "but people are still so ignorant that they take them literally and think women want to be mistreated."

Though many feminists oppose all X-rated material, some seem willing to accept couples films, at least in principle. "If this porn is the new erotica that appeals to women, then I think it's terrific," says Gloria Steinem. Betty Friedan, a longtime opponent of censorship, says, "Any romantic, exploring, playful or humorous depictions of sex are O.K. with me." Women- oriented hard core will never eclipse the darker forms of porn, but as Porn Star Dare says, more and more people do not mind watching "things that couples would do when they get home."

With reporting by Scott Brown/Los Angeles, with other bureaus