Adventures in the skin trade

But if those defending the practices within porn were often wrong, so were those fighting the industry. The FBI, more interested in getting to the organized-crime ring behind porn distribution, ignored Traynor, vilified the actors and unwittingly caused everyone in porn to hew together much more closely than they might have otherwise. (There is a long, absorbing narrative thread concerning MIPORN, the FBI's most spectacular failure to infiltrate and bust the distribution ring in the '70s, that in itself is worth the price of the book.) Everyone who talks of the media coverage of porn stars does so bitterly; the women who don't feel victimized find themselves portrayed as victims anyway, whether it's on "Phil Donahue" or in the New Yorker. (Several female porn actors rant about time spent telling their stories to reporters, only to find themselves cut out of the article in favor of more troubled, unstable characters.) And Women Against Pornography -- which insisted that pornography was inherently degrading to women -- struck those within the industry, as Hartley said, as infantilizing those they claimed to help. They didn't exactly stand up for women who wanted to be in porn, either. As antiporn activist Catherine MacKinnon put the group's position, "If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality."

Destined to be either villains or victims to anyone outside their industry, what choice did any of the actors have but to trump up the good in their profession while glossing over the bad? Over and over again through the book, the actors who defend their profession acknowledge that their position in the world is so fragile that if they denounced one aspect of the industry the entire house of cards would fall. Veronica Vera, who testified for the Meese Commission in defense of porn, admits, "I didn't want to be seen as representing some of the very misogynistic sleazy stuff. But I felt it was more important to stand up for free speech than to worry about being seen as defending stuff that I find distasteful."

Is it any wonder, then, that porn stars like Leonard have been so quick to insist that the porn industry had no role in Lovelace's predicament? Like Vera, or anyone else confronted with the need to defend her profession, Leonard didn't have the luxury of nuance. In the context of the crusade to end porn and with the knowledge that any admittance of abuse would be used to characterize the entire industry, her comments make sense -- reprehensible, but nonetheless understandable. And as for the fact that Leonard's quote comes from a far more aware time than the '70s, again one suspects that the porn industry hasn't quite lost its fragility.

"The Other Hollywood" covers more than just these events; it goes on to take in the far more positive story of the making of "Behind the Green Door"; John Holmes' fraught career and involvement in the Wonderland shootings in the early '80s; the rise of stars like Ginger Lynn in the age of video; the formation of Club 90, a support group for women in the industry; John Wayne Bobbit's famous castration and subsequent turn in porn; even the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee video, which marked the beginning of the time when the Internet could make anyone an unwitting porn star (a phenomenon worth a book in itself). But it all comes back to the legacy of "Deep Throat" and Lovelace and Traynor's relationship, and the treatment of women in the industry. Had anyone within the industry or without taken a stand against abuse, perhaps we wouldn't have seen an echo of Traynor in Holmes, who literally sold his girlfriend into sexual slavery for drugs in the '80s. Or perhaps we wouldn't have had any of the countless abuses, large and small, that characterized too much of the interaction between men and women in the industry.

But if the porn industry had been shut down, we also wouldn't have had the wonderfully sex-positive stars like Hartley, Seka and Sprinkle, all of whom found a form of expression that provided more than just a job, and a fulfilling life. Sprinkle gets the best story in the book, one that offers as close to a spiritually perfect understanding of the porn industry as there can be. Born Ellen Steinberg, Sprinkle heard her stage name as a "whisper, clear as a bell, in my ear." Years later, her uncle sent her a picture of a tombstone of an Annie M. Sprinkle, who died in 1881 and was, as Sprinkle found out, unmarried. "It's likely that she died a virgin with unexpressed passion and desire," says Sprinkle. "I believe that it was her spirit that whispered her name in my ear and that she now lives vicariously through me."

What becomes obvious throughout the book is that just as some women are degraded by their experience in porn, others are empowered. Some are both. And some, maybe the majority, fall into an ambiguous middle zone, neither elevated nor debased by their experience.

Steen, the young actress who was raped on her first film, eventually got out of porn and was asked to join Women Against Pornography. Although we are now thankfully long past the MacKinnon-Andrea Dworkin phase of feminism -- though not past the ideas they espoused -- it's still worth hearing why Steen declined to join them, because it so perfectly sums up the profound ambivalence this book inspires:

"Until people can have really honest, fulfilling relationships with each other, this is the way it's going to be. Pornography has always been there, and it always will. Until we're so evolved that we don't need to pay for it, or don't miss it, we're going to suffer from not having it.

"I am not against pornography at all. I'm for it. I'm against people being used -- and you can use people on either side of it."

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