Glasser had his first big hit when he hooked up with Shane, one of several now ex-girlfriend costars. In his mind, they were the "Burns and Allen of porn." Together they entered the porn pantheon in 1994 with "Seymore and Shane: Playing With Fire," in which Shane engaged in her fireman tryst. After the movie's release, the city of Elmont, N.Y., filed suit, asking $172 million in reparations for the indignity of having its fireman debauched, its firehouse converted into a porn set and its station emblem displayed on-screen. (The suit was eventually dropped, and the credited "Marv the Fireman" resigned.)

Over the years, as a pornographer, Glasser had other encounters with the law. In one, at a Los Angeles porn convention in the summer of 1998, Alisha Klass and two other women were charged with obscenity when the women exposed themselves, and Klass united a cigar and her butt in an ode to Monica Lewinsky. "She doesn't remember completely whether she stuck it in her ass or just put it around her ass," Glasser says today. The case was later dropped.

So by the fall of 1998, when he was in a Tampa hotel room with Klass and Chloe, it must have seemed only natural to be pushing the envelope while making porn. That day, someone had brought up fisting, as in the insertion of the fist into the vagina or anus for erotic purposes. The practice, while not unknown in certain parts of the gay and S/M communities, is for many, even in porn, considered extreme.

"We were sitting around talking about what we would do in this girl-girl scene, and I said I would love to do that," Klass recalls. She was Butts' girlfriend, a relationship repeatedly consummated on camera, in "Behind the Sphinc Door" and "Best of Bunghole Fever," among other videos. The brunet has begun some moves into the world of mainstream filmmaking, including a small part in Wayne Wang's recent "The Center of the World" and a rumored fling with Bruce Willis, documented in the tabloids. ("I'm not in love with Bruce," she told the World Entertainment News Network. "It was all fun for me and now it's over.")

Neither Chloe nor Klass was an average gal. Chloe was already a devout fister in her private sex life, and Klass is famous for talents like self-fisting and accoutrements like a tattoo on her rear reading "SEYMORE BUTTS." When it came to fisting, as a stripper Klass had done research. "Sometimes I'd be onstage and put my hand in my ass, and sometimes people were shocked by it and sometimes they liked it," she reports matter-of-factly.

For their scene in "Tampa Tushy-Fest," Klass and Chloe do seem to like it. To begin with, Klass vaginally fists Chloe with one fist. Next up, Klass vaginally fists Chloe with two fists. After that, Chloe anally fists Klass with one fist. And, as a finale, Chloe anally fists Klass with one fist while Klass vaginally fists herself.

To describe Klass and Chloe's performance this way, of course, removes their actions from the context in which they were created. There are plenty of other interesting moments in "Tampa Tushy-Fest": Klass' bong-toking, her substantial "squirting" and her proclamation to Chloe's crotch, "I wanna stick my whole head up there!"

There is orgasmic moaning to consider for consensuality, Chloe's hand instructions to be debated as points of education and, for political significance, the post-fisting moment near the end when Alisha turns to the camera and crows, "Fuck, yeah, that's girl power!"

"It was a really positive, fun thing," Klass says of the fist fest. For her, it was "enlightening" and "empowering."

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In the five years or so preceding, porn makers had already been producing increasingly more extreme porn. Take "The Houston 500," in which porn-star Houston has sex with an alleged 620 men. (There were actually only about 125 men involved.) Or "Girls Who Puke," in which several women have sex and then, as one might surmise, vomit. Before the current "Tampa Tushy-Fest" imbroglio, there was Anabolic Productions' notorious "Rough Sex 1," which was recalled after female stars claimed they'd been physically abused.

To stay competitive with the Web, where anything goes, shock-porn grew in the 1990s under the benevolent shade of Bill Clinton's perceived hands-off policy toward porn. Porn flourished under the benign rule of a president with whom some porn makers felt a certain kinship in the erotic dalliances arena. By the end of the decade, porn sales were growing larger, and the perception by some in porn was that legal risks were becoming rarer.

But most of those in the porn industry still stayed away from certain erotic acts, those themes and images traditionally considered taboo in commercial porn and most likely to garner porn prosecutions. Simulated rape is one; the pairing of S/M practices and sexual intercourse is another. Other classic porno no-no's include bestiality, implied incest, insinuated pedophilia ... and fisting.

With "Tampa Tushy-Fest" in his hands, Butts got to thinking: What was so wrong with fisting? "I wanted people to give it a chance," he cries plaintively now.

"I called up one of my lawyers," Butts recounts, "and I said, 'Can you please refer me to the specific legal reference to fisting? Please just tell me the page?' And he says, 'Well, you know, it's obscene per se.' And of course, I had to get the definition of obscene per se, which means it is likely to be found obscene. Which to me is just utterly gobbledygook! I mean, what the fuck are they talking about?"

What the fuck they were talking about is, in fact, the sanctioned method used to assess obscenity, dictated by a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case called Miller vs. California. According to it, a work is obscene if it appeals to "the prurient interest" as dictated by "contemporary community standards"; if it exhibits "in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law"; and if it lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Then, and only then, is it obscene. Since all pornography, by definition, appeals to the prurient interest, one could perhaps forgive Butts for doubting that a judge or jury would find the taboo practice of fisting any more shocking than a garden-variety porno act like double penetration.

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