 Last Updated: Oct 8, 2010 |
Abrams on P*rnExcerpt from: Nathan Abrams, Jewish Quarterly, (UK, 2005) and other articles |
|
Last Updated: Oct 8, 2010 |
Abrams on P*rnExcerpt from: Nathan Abrams, Jewish Quarterly, (UK, 2005) and other articles |
Jewish Dominance in the p*rn Industry
"A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood's seedier
cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps we'd prefer that the
'triple exthnics' didn't exist, but there's no getting away from
the fact that secular Jews played (and still continue to play) a
disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in
America. Jewish involvement in p*rnography has a long history in
the United States, as Jews have helped transform a fringe
subculture into what has become a primary constituent of
Americana. These are the 'true blue' Jews. Smut peddlers
Jewish activity in the p*rn industry divides into two (sometimes overlapping) genres: p*rnographers and performers. Though Jews make up only two percent of the American population, they have been prominent in p*rnography. Many erotica dealers in the book trade between 1890 and 1940 were immigrant Jews of German origin ...
In
the postwar era, America's most notorious p*rnographer was Reuben
Sturman, the 'Walt Disney of p*rn.' According to the US Department
of Justice, throughout the 1970s Sturman controlled most of the
p*rnography circulating in the country ... By the mid-80s he owned
over 200 adult bookstores ... It was said that Sturman did not
simply control the adult-entertainment industry, he was the
industry.
Eventually he was convicted of tax evasion and other crimes and died, disgraced, in prison in 1997. His son, David, continued running the family business. The contemporary incarnation of Sturman is Steven Hirsch, a 43-year-old Jewish Clevelander who has been described as the 'Donald Trump of p*rno.' The link between the two is Steve's father, Fred, who was a stockholder-cum-lieutenant to Sturman. Today Hirsch runs the Vivid Entertainment Group, which has been called the Microsoft of the p*rn world, the top producer of 'adult' films in the US. His specialty was to import mainstream marketing techniques into the p*rn business. Indeed, Vivid parallels the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in its exclusive contracts to p*rn stars who are hired and moulded by Hirsch ...
Jews accounted for most of the leading male performers as well as a sizeable number of female stars in p*rn movies of the 1970s and '80s. The doyen of the Hebrew studs is Ron Jeremy ... [H]e's the nebischy, fat, hairy, ugly guy (an image from his web site opens this article) who gets to bed dozens of beautiful women. He presents an image of a modern-day King David, a Jewish superstud who supersedes the traditional heroes of Jewish lore ...
As probably the most famous Jewish male p*rn star, Jeremy has done wonders for the psyche of Jewish men in America ... Seymore Butts, aka Adam Glasser, is everything that Jeremy is not: young, handsome, and toned ... Within a few years, 'Seymore Butts' -- his nom de p*rn which is simultaneously his sales pitch -- became one of the largest franchises in the adult-film business ... [H]e is today probably the most famous Jewish p*rn mogul ...
Glasser employs 12 people, including his mother and cousin ... Gertzman (Jay Gertzman, author of Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940) explains that 'Jews, when they found themselves excluded from a field of endeavor, turned to a profession in which they sensed they could eventually thrive by cooperating with colleagues in a community of effort' ... The adult entertainment business required something that Jews possessed in abundance: chutzpah .. Of course, the large number of Jews in p*rn were mainly motivated by the desire to make profits ... As Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the ADL, commented, 'Those Jews who enter the p*rnography industry have done so as individuals pursuing the American dream" ...
Sturman ... identified as a Jew -- was a generous donator to Jewish charities -- and the performer Richard Pacheco was once interviewed to be a rabbinical student ... Is there a deeper reason, beyond the mere financial, as to why Jews in particular have become involved in p*rn? There is surely an element of rebellion in Jewish X-rated participation. It's very taboo and [its] forbidden nature serves to make it attractive.
As I have written in these pages before, treyf signifies 'the whole world of forbidden sexuality, the sexuality of the goyim, and there all the delights are imagined to lie ..." (Reel Kashrut, Jewish food in film, JQ 189, Spring 2003) According to one anonymous industry insider quoted by E. Michael Jones in the magazine Culture Wars (May 2003), 'the leading male performers through the 1980s came from secular Jewish upbringings and the females from Roman Catholic day schools.' The standard p*rn scenario became, as a result, a Jewish fantasy of schtupping the Catholic shiksa ...
Extending the subversive thesis, Jewish involvement in the X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire WASP establishment. Some p*rn stars viewed themselves as frontline fighters in the spiritual battle between Christian America and secular humanism.
According to [Luke] Ford, Jewish X-rated actors often brag about their 'joy in being anarchic, sexual gadflies to the puritanical beast'. Jewish involvement in p*rn, by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion ...
Al
Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine, said (on
lukeford.com), 'The only reason that Jews are in p*rnography is
that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don't
believe in authoritarianism." p*rnography thus becomes a way of
defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart
of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very
same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged ...
It is a case of the traditional revolutionary/radical drive of immigrant Jews in America being channeled into sexual rather than leftist politics. Just as Jews have been disproportionately represented in radical movements over the years, so they are disproportionately represented in the p*rn industry. Jews in America have been sexual revolutionaries. A large amount of the material on sexual liberation was written by Jews. Those at the forefront of the movement that forced America to adopt a more liberal view of sex were Jewish ..
Overall, then, p*rn performers are a group of people who praise rebellion, self-fulfilment, and promiscuity. What are we ashamed of? This brief overview and analysis of the role and motivations behind p*rnographers and performers is intended to shed light on a neglected topic in American Jewish popular culture. Little has been written about it."
[Nathan Abrams is a Lecturer in Modern American History at the University of Aberdeen. He has just completed a book on neo-conservatism in the United States.]
"Towering Men and Stout-Hearted Sisters": Book review of Jewish scholar Jay Gertzman's Bookleggers an Smuthounds
Jerusalem Post, March 9, 2000
"A great many of the publishers and peddlers of what was variously called flagitious, p*rnographic, or erotic literature were Jews, and most of those were German Jews who had learned the printing trades in the old country.
This fact of course fed right into the animosity of anti-smut crusaders who constantly decried the 'foreign, radical, corrupting' character of the smut peddlers.
The main protagonists in this battle for the soul, if not the groin, of America were the patrician John Saxton Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and Samuel Roth, a writer, poet and genuine man of letters and an equally authentic purveyor of sleaze. Roth, for example, not only published (and often pirated) works by Lawrence, Joyce, Miller and legitimate classics, but also printed and peddled flip books, p*rnographic playing cards, albums of 'French postcards' and the vulgarities known as 'Tijuana Bibles.'
Just to compound matters, during his various stints in prison Roth wrote works like Jews Must Live, a book of rabid anti-Jewish sentiment that Gertzman says still circulates in anti-Semitic circles today ... Gertzman himself acknowledges towards the end of his book that his uncle once ran the most notorious 'dirty bookshop' in Philadelphia. For that matter, Sam Roth's grandson is none other than Prof. James Kugel, the eminent Bible scholar at Harvard University. If there's a more complicated and surprising tribe on earth, I've yet to hear about it."
"p*rners Must Live." San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 25, 2000
"The story of the Web's most influential p*rnophile is nearly unbelievable: the son of an Australian Christian evangelist, Luke Ford converted to Orthodox Judaism in 1993 - a 'p*rn-again Jew' in Fordspeak - under the theological influence of right-wing Jewish talk-radio demagogue Dennis Prager (whose Web site Ford also runs).
As a result, Ford's site is not really a p*rn site at all. It's a daily chronicle of how devout Judaism and devout p*rnology play themselves out in one man's endless public arguments with himself. The basic premise: how can someone devote his professional life to an industry he believes is, in Ford's own words, 'profoundly destructive and hence immoral ... another form of rebellion against God.'
Ford is a religious Jew, not a cultural one, yet it is cultural Jews - 'non-Jewish Jews,' he calls them - with whom Ford's site is most invested, specifically all those non-Jewish Jews who get it on and buy and sell the getting-it-on in the p*rn industry. Like all of his polemics, Ford's essay on these Jews is a rambling collage of theories, interviews, and uncited historical references that never really coalesce into an identifiable argument.
Ford is less of an opinion maker and more of an archivist-chronicler, his agenda always buried beneath layers of deferral and ambiguity.
In the piece, Ford turns the Jews-run-Hollywood riff into a Jews-run-p*rn riff, listing off the secret Hebraic roots of all the key players - Randy 'Andy Abrams' West, Barbara 'Stacy Mitnick' Dare. He also feeds the age-old anti-Semitic connection that Hitler turned into grounds for genocide in Mein Kampf - Jews as dirty, parasitic merchants of smut, disease, and moral pollution - by emphasizing the high number of Jewish p*rn publishers throughout smut's history."
Jews in p*rnography ] .
2001
"Secular
Jews play a disproportionate role throughout the sex industry ...
Jews accounted for most of the leading male [p*rnography]
performers of the 1970s and '80s ...
If the Torah [Pentateutch] command Jews 'to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,' and Judaism strongly opposes p*rn, why do Jews dominate p*rn? ... p*rnographer Seymore Butts attributes the large number of Jews in p*rn to the desire for profits. Jews gravitate towards money ...
I have not yet met a Jewish guy who wasn't horny as a rabbit,' says [Jewish p*rn star] Nina Hartley, 'Culturally it's OK for Jews to act and for WASPs its different ... Plus, they get to have sex with all these beautiful blonde women ... Where else are you going to get a succession of shiksas [non-Jewish women] to bed you down?'"
Of Fraud and Sex.com . The Industry Standard, November 29, 2000
"Sex.com is one of the more lucrative properties on the Web. InternetNews cited 'some industry experts' as estimating its worth at $250 million. Reuters went with a guesstimate by 'lawyers' of $100 million, and added that court documents indicate that the site's former owner, Stephen Cohen, who had been running the site since 1995, took home $17 million in salary and holds stock options worth $100 million.
In the court case, filed in 1998, Gary Kremen accused Stephen Cohen of stealing the domain name that he, Kremen, had first registered in 1994. Cohen, who all the stories noted has done prison time for fraud, allegedly forged a letter that persuaded Network Solutions (dossier) to transfer the name to him in 1995. Cohen then built sex.com into a destination that attracts 25 million visitors a day, according to Reuters.
All the reporters noted that the judge had ordered Cohen to pay $25 million into a court-controlled fund until damages (if any) are determined, because the court feared that Cohen was hiding his assets offshore."
[Stephen Cohen should not be confused with BENJAMIN Cohen, of England, who, at 18 years of age, became a millionaire with the founding of JewishNet and has since founded cyberbritain (featuring huntforp*rn.co.uk and dotadults.com).
As mere sampling, other premiere Jewish Internet p*rn moguls include Seattle-based Seth Warshavsky, called "the Bill Gates of Smut" by the Los Angeles Times [Ehrman, M. 6-13-99, p. 26; read The Prince of p*rn at wired.com] ; Jonathan Silverstein, the president of Cybererotica [Chairman: Ron Levi]; Peter Asher, the president of Vivid Entertainment Group (the "world's leading producer of adult films and videos" -- founded by Steven Hirsch and David James; read about the VEG p*rn team in Silicone Valley: When p*rn Goes Public at the Industry Standard); and Danni Ashe, one of the major women entrepreneurs in the online p*rn field -- read the The Brains Behind the Boobs, at wired.com]
The Sordid Saga of Sex.com .
wired.com, April 15, 1999
"Never mind the p*rn on Sex.com. If even half the allegations that [Gary] Kremen makes are true, the tale behind Sex.com is the most sordid in the short history of the Internet economy
[Stephen] Cohen was convicted in 1991 for posing as a lawyer in a bankruptcy court in a scheme to bilk an elderly woman's creditors out of $200,000. According to court records, Cohen assumed the identity of several attorneys, forged phony deeds and cashier's checks, and attempted to hide the woman's assets. Cohen was sentenced to 46 months. It was his second conviction. In 1975, he was found guilty of grand theft and check kiting ... Within eight months of his prison release, Cohen controlled the Sex.com domain name.
Cohen allegedly pulled off of the domain heist with a forged letter, dated 15 October 1995, to Network Solutions, the Net's registrar ... In an early interview, before Kremen raised his allegations, Cohen claimed that he had been using the Sex.com name since 1979, as part of The French Connection, an electronic bulletin board he founded for 'swingers, nudist camps, and alternative lifestyles.' BBSs were the primary source of digital p*rn before the Web. Back then, he said, Sex.com stood for 'Sex Communications ...
By the late '80s, Cohen had set up a real-world meeting place for French Connection swingers at a home in Orange County, California. Hundreds of couples met at 'The Club' on Friday and Saturday nights to swap partners. After neighbors complained, police arrested Cohen in 1990 on charges of operating a sex club in a residential zone. Cohen moved The Club elsewhere, and the charges were dropped ...
In late 1995, with Kremen temporarily stymied in his attempts to regain the domain, Cohen and four Orange County entrepreneurs dreamed up big plans for Sex.com. The grandest plan had little to do with the Internet. In January 1996, the group unveiled its bid to buy a Nevada brothel called Sheri's Ranch and transform it into a $100 million 'adult fantasy resort.' Named Wanaleiya, the Polynesian-themed resort would feature 500 exotic women who 'would not hesitate to see to your comfort and pleasure.'"