Yesterday’s LA Time’s article “Porn Shoots Get Under Their Skin” is the poorest piece of porn journalism I’ve read in years and coming from the LA Times, the only paper in America which can claim the adult industry as local news, is especially disappointing.

The story (which you can read without my comments here) reads less like a report and more like an attempt to create outrage about a non-existent problem via a unnecessary story that’s sure to bring thousands of people to the LA Times website.

If there’s a story to write about porn production in residential neighborhoods it can either address adult movies ignoring the rules and shooting without permits (or breaking the rules of the permits they hold), or it can explore public resistance to legal porn production, what that says about the protesters and whether the law needs to be revised in light of their upset.

Claire Hoffman, LA Times Staff Writer, does neither. She finds no broken rules, no arguments for new laws and no permit violations but chooses instead to use porn’s appeal to build a ‘link bait’ article lacking analysis and integrity. Here’s the article again, with the questions I found myself asking about it when I read it yesterday. I’d love some answers.

Porn Shoots Get Under Their Skin
Encino neighbors may object to the filming, but there’s little recourse if city permits are in place.
By Claire Hoffman, Times Staff Writer
April 30, 2006

Two weeks ago today, inside the million-dollar-plus houses on a quiet cul-de-sac in Encino, the neighborhood kids delighted in what the Easter Bunny had brought.

Then, about 10 a.m., the porn stars started showing up.

Helaine Gesas, who has lived on Hayvenhurst Avenue for 38 years, was in her kitchen cooking Passover supper when she noticed men hauling cameras and lights into the two-story house across the street.

Two mentions of religion in the first three paragraphs and a suggestion that children will be exposed to porn production. I wonder where this is going… How do these neighbors know that “porn stars” are showing up? Are they wearing T-Shirts or do the neighbors recognize performers they’ve seen before?

Her neighbor Kerry Cohen, a paralegal and mother, was on her way out to organize a charity event. As she squeezed past several large production trucks, Cohen looked in her rear-view mirror and saw “scantily clad” young women parking their cars and heading toward the same house.

Paralegal, mother, charity event. Okay I get it, this is a pillar of the community and a ‘good’ person. Why is “scantily clad” in quotes? Were they or weren’t they? If they were did they look any different to the scantily clad women in coffee-shops all over LA? Unless they were walking up the street naked what’s the relevance of their mode of dress?

As far as John R. Johnson was concerned, “that was the end of Easter Sunday.” Johnson, another neighbor, told his 9-year-old daughter to stay inside while what he described as a “prison-yard break” — a large film crew, many of its members covered in tattoos — entered the iron gates of the house in the 3600 block of Hayvenhurst.

“prison-year break”? What does that mean? Were people climbing over fences or digging tunnels? The phrase implies the people commented on are criminals and deserves explanation. What’s the fact that ‘many’ of the crew members had tattoos got to do with anything? Are we supposed to be judging them as we were the “scantily clad” women?

Outraged, Johnson called the city seeking to shut the porn shoot down. But everything, he was told, was perfectly legal.

Okay - so no laws were broken and this was just wacky neighbors upset over nothing right?

In any given year, about 3,900 adult films are shot in Los Angeles, according to industry estimates. As with any other shoot, those films are supposed to obtain permits from the city. But the city doesn’t restrict the content of the projects it approves.

Supposed to obtain permits? They did obtain permits so why suggest they didn’t? Why not point out that the city has no legal right to contravene the First Ammendment and that’s why they can’t control the content of shoots that aren’t obscene.

Which means that if one of your neighbors decides, as Johnson’s did, to rent out his house for the filming of “The Alphabet” — in which sexual acts are performed in alphabetical order by 21-year-old identical twins — there’s not much you can do to stop him.

Hoffman’s now implying incest was part of the shoot but in mainstream porn twins never perform with each other directly. This aside will lead many readers to believe that incest was being shot when that’s clearly not the case.

Many in L.A. have endured film shoots in their neighborhoods and know the infuriation of traffic congestion and sidewalks swarming with self-important production crews. But along with the hassle often comes a little cachet — if you lived in a dump, chances are they wouldn’t be shooting a romantic comedy or luxury-car commercial next door.

When the call sheet calls for neither witty patter nor rich Corinthian leather but instead for orgiastic sex, cachet isn’t what the neighbors talk about. Morality, their children’s physical safety, property values — those are the topics on many people’s minds.

How is children’s safety compromised by a porn shoot in a house across the street? How are property values affected? Why isn’t Hoffman questioning these assumptions or supplying any facts?

The tale of the Hayvenhurst cul-de-sac, where several adult productions have been shooting almost nonstop for two weeks (and were booked to continue through Monday), pulls back the curtain on how one of the region’s most thriving industries — pornography — coexists with the city itself.

Sure, the neighbors concede, they didn’t actually see any nudity or obscene activity, but the mere idea that it was going on next door bothered them.

Obscenity is not protected by the first amendment and is illegal, does Hoffman not know this or is she trying to suggest that the law was being broken behind closed doors as she did with her incest implication? If no nudity was seen by neighbors why did the shoot bother them? According to this article, all they’ve been exposed to is women walking into a house in short skirts and men with tattoos carrying lights. Sounds like the production of Desperate Housewives, Alias and everything on MTV show to me.

A week before Easter Sunday, neighborhood residents received a flier notifying them that there would be filming down the street in the coming days. Johnson, who works at home as an advertising consultant, said he didn’t think much of it.

But soon after the crews started arriving two weeks ago, Johnson’s wife called the number on the flier to find out more about the company in their midst.

She was told it was Califa Productions, which shoots films for Vivid Entertainment Group, one of the world’s largest purveyors of hard-core porn.

The next day, after Johnson barraged city officials with e-mails and phone calls, he was told the production was legal: Califa had been issued the proper permit.

So someone who doesn’t care about shoots in their street suddenly becomes upset when they discover it’s porn but can’t find any violations of the permits to use to close the shoots down. Is that when they called Claire Hoffman at the LA Times?

“As far as content, we don’t have any authority to go in and do anything unless there’s an impact on the neighborhood,” said Steve MacDonald, president of Film L.A., the city agency that authorized almost 55,000 individual days of shooting in 2005 — with fewer than 3,000 of those, he said, devoted to porn. (City officials believe many adult films don’t obtain the required permits.)

If less than 6% of shoots in LA are porn but officials ‘believe’ that a lot of illegal porn shoots are taking place why doesn’t Hoffman either find an illegal shoot to report on or point out that ‘fact’ is speculation. It might be worth adding that many small independent film shoots without permits and that suggesting permit violations are mostly porn-related is grossly inaccurate.

MacDonald and his staff said that because of the free-speech provision of the 1st Amendment, they do not discriminate against adult film producers as long as they abide by the conditions of their permit.

That pesky amendment again…

Permits for adult films are the same as for any other shoot in terms of parking and street activity, but different in that interiors and exteriors must not be audible or visible to the public.

Another mention of permit restrictions without evidence any violations took place.

The Hayvenhurst residents say they’re all for creative freedom. But to all but the ones who were getting paid $1,750 a day by Califa Productions, what was happening on their street at holiday time just didn’t seem right.

“I was stunned that whoever issues permits for this would be that insensitive,” Johnson said. “If they had been shooting a ‘West Wing’ episode that day, I wouldn’t have had the same reaction.”

What about a “West Wing” episode about a senator getting a blow-job from a porn star? Would the scantily clad actresses bother neighbors then? How about a tattoo’d crew?

As it turned out, Easter was just the beginning.

Not 24 hours after the Califa trucks drove off, a new crew arrived. This time it was Playboy Entertainment Group, working on a reality television show. The Playboy shoot went through the end of the week, with dozens of trucks entering and exiting the cul-de-sac.

Last Monday yet another company arrived, PW Productions — this time to shoot explicit DVD and video cover art for a series of adult films.

Residents circulated a petition that alleged the filming has “introduced unsavory and undesirable elements” into their “otherwise peaceful neighborhood.” Twenty-two residents signed.

So the house seems to be overused. The first valid criticism in the piece and nothing to do with the nature of the shoots taking place - it’d be equally overused if they were shooting cooking shows in there. As for the petition 22 residents signed, how many of the residents in the cul-de-sac does that represent?

Where had the neighborhood gone, they wondered? And who were the neighbors who seemed determined to erode it?

“They don’t wave, they want nothing to do with anyone else,” said Cohen, the paralegal. “Why should we be put out just because they want to make money?”

So waving’s the problem?

Regulations require certification of ownership in order to rent out a home as a film location. According to property records, the house — a 15-year-old, four-bedroom, five-bath, 5,000-square-foot, stone-and-brick traditional — sold last year for $1.65 million to Hamid Banafsheha.

When reached by phone last week, Banafsheha — a 40-year-old electric supply warehouse owner — said he had just found out about the filming from neighbors. Banafsheha said he had rented the home to a couple with two infant daughters.

Again a misleading reference to children which suggests that they’re being exposed to porn production. Hoffman’s missed another opportunity by letting Banafsheha make a questionable claim without following it up. Can he honestly claim not to have known they were shooting porn in his house?

“I’m sorry for all the neighbors,” he said, adding that he had told his tenants to cease and desist. Because he plans to put the home up for sale in a month, he said, “I don’t want the property value to come down — I mean, it’s real estate here.”

A woman who answered the phone at the film site last week and identified herself as tenant Odelia Bustenay did offer a response to the neighbors’ concerns before abruptly hanging up.

“Everything we do here is legal,” she said. “We got permits for everything. If they are upset then they are nosy.”

There’s a joke in the porn industry about the nosiness the business seems to inspire. It goes like this: An old lady calls the police after she finds out a porn film is being shot next door. When the officer arrives, he peers through the window but can’t see anything.

“You have to go upstairs,” she says, leading him to a second-floor bathroom. Still, he sees nothing.

“No,” she said, “you have to stand on the toilet.”

Steven Hirsch, the co-founder of Vivid, which distributes 60 films a year, said he knows that adult productions make some people uneasy. He said that only makes Vivid crews more careful.

“We are cognizant that the neighbors are around when we shoot,” he said. “We are quiet, and we don’t bring a lot of equipment. There aren’t people running around naked, and you can’t look through the fence in the backyard and see what we are doing.”

Hirsch added that the reason this particular house has attracted so many productions is that it’s awfully cheap. Many houses charge upward of $5,000 per day, or almost three times what Banafsheha’s tenants were getting.

Brooke, 22, a tall, skinny blond who said she got rid of her last name long ago, costarred alongside the twins — Lacey and Lyndsey Love — in Vivid’s “The Alphabet” and doesn’t understand why residents got so worked up.

“I’m a human being, and I don’t see what the big deal is,” she said.

“The person in the next house should get a life, because we’re shooting inside and it doesn’t harm them. It was just a normal day. I did what I had to do and went home and had dinner with my family.”

Meanwhile, Film L.A. staffers said that in the wake of the petition, they have flagged the home as overused, with too many productions being done there in too short a time. They do not plan to issue any more permits for the time being.

So we find the only valid point in this entire article, that the house was overused, which was fixed before this article went to press with the consent of the owner.

Larry Flynt Productions, which was due to shoot at the house Monday, has canceled. The neighborhood opposition, the company told the city, had ruined the mood.

Grade C-. Hoffman must try harder

The best of the sex blogs by the bloggers who blog them.

Audio
Audioblog Posts 1 & 2
First Ever Audio Post

Humor / Sex News
Alas Poor Yorick, I Blew Him Well
The Hooters Conspiracy
League of Super Friends with Benefits
My Most Embarrassing Sex Moment

Thoughts on Sex, Sexy Reviews, Sex Advice
5 Senses
Anonymity
Cultural Differences
Masturbation and Ejaculatory Inevitability (onaniajournal.blogspot.com)
More Pixilated Nudity (4thegirlnextdoor.blogspot.com)
Natural Contours - Ultime (sin.typepad.com/shauna_by_night)
Sex Tip - From a Men’s Magazine (seskuality.com)
Sexual Balance (eroticvision.blogspot.com)
You Asked: What Do I Consider Cheating? (cuntinglinguist.blogspot.com)

BDSM and Fetish
Bondage Fantasies (darkside-journey.blogspot.com)
Contemplation of the Lower Navel (sabrinainstockings.com)
DVD: “And For You I Will Come As Well” (Lupus Pictures) (adelehaze.com)
Sexual Healing (aliferestarted.blogspot.com)

Erotic Writing
Climax (erotiterrorist.blogspot.com)
The Dirty Couple in Florida (or what we did on our Spring Break) Part 2 (drtycplinva.blogspot.com)
Fun with the Kama Sutra (thetastetester.com)
Morning Licks (vivianandjack.blogspot.com)
Of Blindfolds and Bedmates (easilyaroused.co.uk)
People Watching (seanandmel.blogspot.com)
Public Masturbation (wanklog.blogspot.com)
Questions About Etiquette (realadultsex.com)
Sweet Slut (can also go in BDSM) (nyc-urban-gypsy.blogspot.com)
Wine and a Wandering Mind (the-sensuous-libertine.blogspot.com)

NSFW Pics / Photos
Alicia Witt Revisited (pornhater.com)
Double HNT (spiritsex.blogspot.com)
Four Galleries of Liza from Galitsin News (sensualarousalblog.com)
Happy Half-Nekkid Thursday! (stilettodiaries.blogspot.com)
Kyla Cole 3 (babelog.sestaluna.com)
Miranda and Steph make love shot by Abby Winters (iloveabbywinters.com)
Naughty Office (internetisforporn.com)
Original Upskirt Photos Just Released (put under news/announcements?) (taratainton.com)
Paulina and Zafrina on Sapphic Erotica (simply-sapphicerotica.com)
Threesome Pic (seska4lovers.com)
Xanthia Nude (eroticandy.blogspot.com)

Join the Sugasm

My already low opinion of Alberto “Torture’s Okay If I’m Scared Enough” Gonzales took another blow when reading about his desire to make ‘mandatory data retention‘ part of the government’s attempt to fight child pornography.

He seems to have lost the plot, and the logic, when it comes to fighting child porn - that the greater crime is the child abuse required to make the material. Though its consumers are sick and reprehensible, targeting them is like trying to stop cocaine smuggling by arresting people babbling their way out of nightclub bathrooms. In making the fight against child porn about stemming its distribution online, Gonzales is saying the official policy is not to protect children from abuse, but to find abusers via evidence of their crimes.

It’s not crime-fighting at all, it’s clean-up. Child porn is evidence of failed policing, not something we should be happy to chase in favor of more difficult, more effective and more rewarding pre-emptive criminal investigation.

Of course, fighting child porn like any other criminal activity doesn’t require additional government power. When the FBI need to know what someone’s looking at on their PC, they can already go to a judge and get authorization for a wire-tap. A need to log every event at every computer is as unnecessary as a drive to open and scan every piece of mail.

However the difficult approach, of trying to save children before they’re harmed by attacking the organizations which produce child porn, not the sites that distribute it (like Yahoo! and Google) doesn’t allow for more comprehensive monitoring of the law-abiding majority and doesn’t allow failures to be blamed on inadequate legislation.

Gonzales is driving for laws that will lessen liberty and cement a view that we can’t prevent organized child abuse, but can only incarcerate offenders and put the victims through therapy. It requires the public to believe that child pornographers aren’t using the mail system, in-person meeting and the phone to avoid the ease with which data can be tapped and stored online. We’re not that stupid and Gonzales clearly is. I’d rather have the original Muppet as Attorney General.

Apologies to anyone who signed up to swap links with me using BLT in the past few months who’s noticed that links haven’t been appearing here since the last redesign. Something seems to have broken the code and I’ve had no joy contacting the brains who’ve built it for answers. I predict this post will prompt an email from someone and lead me to a fix, you to massive prosperity and perhaps all of us to a cheesy medal-giving ceremony like the one at the end of Star Wars. Until then enjoy the majesty of this Ugandan Warthog which, like BLT when it’s working properly, is bacon you shouldn’t mess with.

I’m putting together a sex-blog ‘power’ list, reflecting the blogs people are reading to get their sex and porn information because no one’s done that before and it might be interesting. By asking you to comment this can be about more than links or votes. There are plenty of good blogs that don’t make the front page of Google or Technorati.

To have your say, tell me which three sex-related blogs you read most often either by leaving a comment here or, if you’d rather be less public, by sending me an email. Votes for SugarBank won’t be counted - this is a self-selecting sample and my ego’s big enough already. If you nominate yourself well, that’s your own issue and I wish you luck with it.

There’s no need to be obscure, if you read a blog every day but don’t think it’s worth mentioning please do. I’d like to know who people are reading and perhaps draw some attention to blogs people are missing out on.

If you want to comment on why your like the blogs you do, please include that too. I’ll publish the results if and when I have a decent enough sample. If Mori can predict an election by talking to 2000 people, I think we should be able to do something useful with a couple of hundred votes.

Go!

PSPporn.com is for sale (in a three day auction ending on Wednesday 10th).

It’s such an obvious opportunity for budding gamers, pornographers or Sony that if you don’t see the value of the URL immediately you would probably be better off investing your money in a twelve step program or completing your college education.

Why am I selling? Time. I’m too busy investing my energies elsewhere to properly develop the domain and a little time isn’t enough to get great things done. It’s very hard to buy adult domains that come with in-built branding and this is one of them. A #1 position on Google is there for the taking and it’s likely to raise more than the $7 I paid for it.

Interested parties can see the auction here.

Uninterested parties, check out my buddy (as in guy I don’t know at all) Penn Jillette’s podcast. Man’s a genius and he has a dungeon in his house.

(N.B. If the reserve isn’t met I’ll have to find something very clever to do with this domain, the babelog idea isn’t ringing my ding. Ideas welcome)

If you’re interested in keeping up with some great sex(y) writing that you won’t find online I’d like to recommend the following - which have titillated, taught and teased me in equal measure recently.

The X List: Films that Turn Us On
Edited by Jami Bernad
A collection of really insightful essays into sex on film by a group of people who fear that if they’re honest about panning a bad movie the studio will just quote an obese, red-headed imbecile with a website and miss an invite to the next junket.

The book takes in everything from romantic noir to, less interestingly if you’ve read all the other stuff, classic porn. If more jizz-bizz directors read this book they’d make far better movies. If you watch sexy movies it’ll explain a lot.

Agent Provocateur Exhibitionist: Public Displays and Private Revelations
Enzo Peccinotti
A book of coffee-table erotica which is notable for being a philosophical debate all in itself. Can images which don’t contain people be considered sexually explicit? The window displays featured in Peccinotti’s photographs are as sexual as plastic gets without being a fetish and, since dating a model who was cast for a mannequin and discovering they’re real people, I can’t help looking at this book and wondering who owns the bodies pictures. Beautifully shot, strangely provocative questionably indecent.

My Horizontal Life
Chelsea Handler
Chelsea grew up witnessing her parents kinky sex life and then went on to punctuate her life with a series of one-night stands whose highlights include a nasty incident with skid-marked panties and a too-good to be true turn with a well endowed midget. Part of the growing wave of ’slut-lit’, much of which is pulled straight from blogs, this example’s funny and well written.

The World’s Best Sex Writing 2005
Edited by Mitzi Szereto
Ignore the crappy title which makes this book very hard to distinguish from a ton of other compilations with similar themes, this is the best of them. Taking in writing from books and magazines as well as websites means the material pulled from the web stands up to the offline journalism and isn’t just filler - which isn’t always the case. This is sex-writing, not erotica, though sometimes it is erotic. From Sebastian Horsley on sleeping with 1,000 prostitutes (money well spent), Harry Reems on what happened during ‘Deep Throat’ (no violence towards Linda Lovelace) through an essay on why it’s illegal to buy a vibrator in Alabama (fucktards in power) and an examination of the cutting edge of vaginal surgery it is considerably more interesting than the pages of pseudo-edgy-art-school erotica the title might suggest. Added bonus, unlike a lot of sex books, this one doesn’t read as if written exclusively for women and gay men.

It’s all very pornducational.

Sonagachi is the name of Kolkata’s (formerly Calcutta) red light district. As reported in the April issue of Scientific American, it is where Dr. Smarajit Jana has used a novel combination of techniques to reduce rates of HIV infection from 60% to 5% and rates of all other STD’s to 1%.

In porn HIV is a smaller, serious and deadly, threat and the implications of other STD’s on health are ignored, thanks to a narcotic combination of ignorance, wishful thinking and denial.

Previous discussions about condom-use and safety in porn have focused on logic, morals and aesthetics. Dr. Jana’s insights address economics, psychology and negotiation and have achieved real change on behalf of India’s sex workers.

Can we apply his thinking to porn?

Dr. Jana’s insights:

Coercing people into behaving safely leads to resentment
Dr. Jana saw that women who had received sterilization surgery by population control programs invariably blamed future health problems on their sterilization and poisoned other women’s feelings towards it.

In Porn?
Vivid dropped its condom only policy in part due to requests from performers. Dr. Jana’s insight suggests that performers in titles which perform poorly might look at condom use as the factor which caused those titles to fail and thus contribute to the belief that condoms are rejected by the viewing public (even though much of Jenna Jameson’s and Tera Patrick’s on-screen work has been condom-only and they’re hardly struggling).

Perhaps despite good intentions, condom-only policies are destined to fail due to negative feedback from performers.

People with low self-esteem are not motivated to take care of themselves
Dr. Jana realized that prostitutes who did not care to protect themselves from HIV would act to protect their children from disease. Treating prostitutes as sex-workers selling a service, not pariahs, enabled sex-workers to respect themselves as people divorced of the negative stereotypes attached to prostitution.

In Porn?
The porn industry’s shame over porn makes it hard for performers to conjure positive feelings about the jizz-bizz. The press won’t let anyone who’s ever posed nude avoid the ‘porn-star’ title while many companies in the industry refuse to use the p-word at all (Vivid being the prime example) claiming too many negative connotations, unwittingly reinforcing the stigma. Low self-esteem is almost universal. Appeals to the protection of family would also be effective as most performers have children or lovers they care about.

The ability of services like Adult Industry Medical (AIM) to protect performers is limited by performers desire to protect themselves. Until that’s addressed efforts at education are wasted.

People cannot protect themselves without damaging their income
Dr. Jana saw that prostitutes who insisted on condoms lost customers and then faced starvation - an immediate threat that kills a lot faster than HIV. He saw that the outcome of a negotiation is dependent on the relative strength of the parties involved, i.e. you cannot effectively negotiate with someone who is far more powerful than you are. To balance things out he organized the prostitutes into a workers collective who could act as one.

In Porn?
Performers who choose to insist on condoms do not get booked. Until performers are confident they are part of an organization which will defend their rights, and that all performers play by the same rules, expecting individuals to chance the short-term impact of lost earnings against the long-term impact of HIV is futile.

Porn workers unions have been discussed a lot, but if one was able to supply free condoms, free HIV screening and provide health insurance I suspect the interest from performers (who are almost all uninsured) would be significant. Given insurance premiums, making condom-only work mandatory for inclusion might be required and provide another clear incentive to make the switch.

Money talks
Dr. Jana realized that collective bargaining by prostitutes was useless unless brothel owners saw value in protecting workers. He had to convince them that losing working days to illness was not worth the price of a condom.

In Porn?
Every studio working today will encourage condom use if they can work out how to make it pay. They avoid condoms because they believe that using them lowers sales (despite there being no figures to support this).

For the big studios getting condom manufacturers to sponsor performers, or brand custom lines (as some already do) should be enough. With Vivid selling condoms executives should see the advantage of having performers use and enjoy their product in their movies as obvious.

There’s a more sophisticated argument to be made regarding the cost of illness. STD’s are epidemic in porn but people only care about the big disease with the little name. If studios understood how much STD’s cost them, by seeing how they effect their production and promotion schedules (e.g. all those shoots cancelled due to Herpes outbreaks) it might be enough for them to take a longer-term view. ‘Porn flu’ - gonorrhea - isn’t free and having a healthy rosta of stars has to make commercial sense.

Some studios pay for STD screens on behalf of contract performers already, if a porn-workers union was to provide free or low-cost testing as a benefit of membership, studios would have another reason to encourage participation and lower their outgoings.

There are far subtler ways to analyze Dr. Jana’s work and none of what Dr. Jana has done is novel on its own - but his realization that each piece of the puzzle is dependent on all the others is fundamental. Could a similar aggregate approach be the right way to offer porn-performers a safer working environment? Is a performers union supported by the studios for the benefits it provides them with, the only kind of performers union that can work?

In a few minutes the auction for PSPporn.com will close and the domain will remain unsold.

Okay it’s over. Done. $255. Sold to… well no one at all. Not even close to my reserve.

Bollocks - but let’s make lemonade and see if there’s a backstory here we can learn from. (N.B. never say ‘let’s make lemonade’ on a porn-set, especially if there was any asparagus at lunch).

The last time I listed a domain on eBay three things happened.

• I got a ton of emails asking why the domain didn’t have a ‘for sale’ notice displayed.
• A debate sprang up online over my identity in which people produced proof that I didn’t own the TGP.com domain, mainly because I wasn’t active on adult webmaster message boards (which is still true - most of them won’t give me membership for some reason).
• Bidding closed at over $100,000 (and reached such embarrassing numbers privately that I was mentally shopping for exotic automobiles for a week before I had a change of heart. That’s how good I am with money - give me half a million, I shop for cars.)

PSPporn.com is not as valuable a domain at TGP.com but it’s not bad. The PSP is aimed at the perfect porn demographic, ‘PSP Porn’ is THE search term for the niche it serves, and there are a number of companies making significant money producing or reformatting adult material for Sony’s handheld platform. PSPporn.com is a domain there’s a market for so based on my last domain auction experience I spent 30 seconds this week designing the world’s simplest eBay listing and waited for bids to soar into four-figures and beyond.

What the fuck happened?

I made three basic mistakes which, if you have a domain to sell, or are trying to get into the adult industry without building a brand from scratch using a purchased domain name, there’s something to learn from:

• Not putting out a press release for the auction meant that the bulk of the adult industry was unaware the sale was taking place (amazingly there are people who still don’t read this blog)
• Assuming people understood the value of branding was too generous.
• Porn can be the hardest way to make an easy living (if you got the musical reference good for you - if not, the point still stands)

I was selling a brand, not a seven letter domain. No one knew and those who did bid on a seven letter domain.

Sure it’s a brand built by Sony (PSP) and lust (Porn) but in combination it’s a key to young men with high-disposable incomes who’ve bought a wi-fi enabled gaming device which places such severe limitations on their browsing experience specially formatted content is needed to optimize content. If I had an archive of content people were prepared to pay for I wouldn’t consider selling the domain at all. Knowing that whatever you build online will have an audience from the start is worth a lot.

Which brings me to AdultAmerica.com whose owner, Al Sokol, is taking bids starting at $2,000,000 for the domain. That’s $2M for a domain that hasn’t hosted an active website in 11 years, that no one’s ever heard of, and those who have heard of can’t remember anyway.

That’s not a typo.

Versus $255 bid for PSPporn.com - a brand built by Sony targeted at men in their late twenties with high disposable incomes and an demonstrated love of technology.

If Al gets his money something’s gone very wrong indeed. I’ve got to go off and have a little weep now.

I’ve met Tom Leykis (one of the US’s biggest talk radio DJ’s) and, as you might expect for a man who makes seven figures a year telling guys how to score with women, he’s fat, middle-aged, balding and aggressive.

I downloaded a few of his shows via iTunes today because listening to LA radio from New Zealand is cool, and in my line of work I feel I have to see, and hear a little of everything in order to maintain my ability to be paid to make condescending generalizations about the media. I didn’t think I’d be very amused (I was right on that front) nor expected I’d find anything to blog.

How wrong can you be…

In the recent discussion of violence in porn there’s always been the suggestion that, while the mainstream often degrades and objectifies women, porn’s violence and sexism is unequalled elsewhere. This seems reasonable - until you hear Tom Leykis talking to a caller who boasts of having his ex-wife killed.

Call me the PC police but isn’t this a little fucked up?

Caller: “I made a telephone call had her whacked. No reason to have her around anymore Tom. You’re a God dude.”

Leykis: “Love it Jason.”

Caller: “Man, like I said, no more alimony, no more palimony, no more nothing. The little girl’s living with me and her mom is eating worms Tom.”

Leykis: “I totally love that.”

I saved the call so you can hear for yourself in case you think I’m making it up.

Tom Leykis on killing your ex

What this does for the concept of ‘community standards’ is astounding to me. Apparently Tom Leykis could be quoted for the defense of anything up to and including snuff movies. If no one raises an eyebrow when people admit murder on the radio (and even if it’s a joke you’d think it’d be questioned and investigated) then how can anyone say Rob Black should be doing time for making bad movies?

(Fact checkers - please note the call came from the April 13th Tom Leykis show.)