3

ARMING THE AMATEURS

War is, after all, the universal perversion. We are all tainted: if we cannot
experience our perversion at first hand we spend our time reading war stories,
the pornography of war; or seeing war films, the blue films of war; or titillating
our senses with the imagination of great deeds, the masturbation of war.

—JOHN RAE, THE CUSTARD BOYS

The most surprising by-product of the Second World War has to be the creation of the modern pornography industry. That may sound like an odd statement, so an explanation is in order. The war brought technological standardization to smaller film cameras and trained a horde of amateurs in their use. After the war, these budding filmmakers, shunned by Hollywood as outsiders, took their new-found technology and skills and made their own movies. Many of them were sucked in by the sexual revolution that was unfolding across all media, and a proper industry for pornographic movies was born. The sexual revolution and the film revolution unfolded in tandem, each influencing and furthering the other.

Before the war, the market for films featuring sex and nudity, known as “blue movies” in Europe, was a cottage industry that catered mainly to brothels.¹ Movies were shot and shipped to private buyers, mostly in England and France, but also to distant places such as Russia and the Balkan countries. As a 1967 Playboy article pointed out, “By the end of la belle époque, no self-respecting brothel on the Continent considered its facilities complete without a stock of these films.”² The movies were also made in the United States, where the main audience from the twenties through the forties was men at stag parties. Social groups such as the Legionnaires, Shriners, Elks and college fraternities held screenings by quietly renting projectors and a few reels of “stag films” from camera stores in the trade.³ Both American and European markets for the films hit their peaks in the years before the Second World War as newly introduced 16-millimetre cameras lowered the costs of producing the movies.⁴ Still, the market was small—Playboy estimated that by 1970, only about two thousand stag films had been made.⁵ Up until the war, film production was haphazard, low-profit and high-risk. In many countries the movies were also illegal, barely tolerated by authorities.

Film historians generally regard France as the birthplace of stag films since the country had the early lead in movie projection with Louis Lumière’s cinématographe, which made its debut in 1895. But evidence of early pornographic movies has been found virtually everywhere around the globe, including Germany, Russia, Argentina and Japan. The movies—black-and-white, silent and usually ten to fifteen minutes long—were typically shown only in the regions where they were made, because producers feared being prosecuted for distributing obscene materials. They featured amateur participants in a variety of settings and were surprisingly graphic for the time, often showing hard-core penetration, homosexual sex and even bestiality. A Free Ride, thought to have been made around 1915 and generally considered to be the first American pornographic movie, featured a man and two women going for a naughty car ride in the country. When the man stopped the car to pee, the women spied on him and became aroused. The man, in turn, spied on them and made sexual advances, culminating in three-way sex.

Despite its carnal content, A Free Ride and many other stag films of the time had surprisingly high production values, suggesting that professional moviemakers were secretly behind them. As film historians Al Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin noted in their book Dirty Movies, “This professionalism was understandable in an era in which film equipment was expensive and cumbersome, hence unavailable to the amateur.”⁶

That changed after the war, when film technology and techniques underwent a boot camp of sorts that greatly decentralized moviemaking from Hollywood and opened the industry for amateurs. The military had a great need for films, which served three key wartime purposes: they recorded enemy forces and weaknesses, helped train soldiers and served as morale-boosting propaganda for viewers back home. Cameras were “as necessary as radar,” as one film historian put it.⁷

Hollywood was drafted en masse—fully one-sixth of workers, or forty thousand people, in the production, distribution and exhibition of motion pictures ended up in the armed services. That figure included directors, writers, camera operators, electricians, technicians and machinists.⁸ Actors enlisted, Hollywood professionals helped trained camera operators for the Army Signal Corps, and feature-film directors including William Wyler, John Huston and Frank Capra shot combat footage and training movies. As with every other industry, Hollywood saw helping the war effort as its patriotic duty.

But while the Signal Corps welcomed Hollywood’s expertise and manpower, it didn’t necessarily want the industry’s technology. At the time, feature films were shot using 35-millimetre cameras—big, hulking monstrosities that rolled on wheels if they moved at all. The equipment was impractical for war conditions, where compactness and mobility were absolute necessities. Hollywood studios also needed to shrink their large film crews into small, mobile, flexible units that could work in the field. The adjustments weren’t easy. “The technical requirements of such a small production unit are rather confusing to those accustomed to Hollywood standards,” said the American Society of Cinematographers at the time. “The first requirement is absolute mobility, to travel cheaply and quickly under any conditions—plane, auto, boat ... Equipment must be reduced to a minimum.”⁹

Sixteen-millimetre cameras had hit the market back in the early twenties, but they were shunned by studios, who felt they produced inferior pictures. The smaller cameras also packed in less film than their larger 35-millimetre relatives, which relegated them to shooting shorter-length footage such as newsreels. In 1925 Bell & Howell designed the Eyemo, a rugged 35-millimetre camera that was a fraction of the size of others like it, but it too saw limited use by studios because of its short film capacity. Lastly, 16-millimetre cameras were usually hand-cranked, which made them impractical for use on sets. Manufacturers such as Eastman Kodak and Bell & Howell therefore marketed their respective Cine-Kodak and Filmo smaller-gauge cameras to amateur users, but sales were poor since the gadgets were still relatively expensive. In 1932 Kodak developed an even smaller and cheaper 8-millimetre camera for the amateur market, but it too sold modestly because shooting film was still too complicated for the average person.

Sixteen-millimetre film cameras were, however, perfect for military purposes. Front-line units trained by the Army Signal Corps were armed not only with guns but Filmo and Cine-Kodak cameras to capture combat footage for later study. Eyemos were modified to sit on machine-gun tripods while Filmos were equipped with gun-stock attachments so that they could be aimed in much the same manner as rifles. B-17s were equipped with cameras to film bombing runs and fighter planes used them to shoot dogfights. The navy was well equipped to screen training films, where gunners used actual footage to prepare for battle. Some navy ships were nicknamed “floating studios” because of their processing and production facilities.¹⁰

Manufacturers repurposed their products and ramped up production to meet the sudden massive demand. While Cine-Kodaks were used to shoot family get-togethers during the twenties and thirties, wartime ads from the company proclaimed them “the fighting Cine-Kodaks.” Bell & Howell, meanwhile, touted its Eyemo camera as “the air corps super snooper.”¹¹ Camera makers also stepped up their innovation and development to meet the military’s needs. In 1943 Bell Telephone Laboratories produced the Fastax, capable of shooting eight thousand frames per second on either 8- or 16-millimetre film, to document the “split-second action of our high-speed war machine.”¹² Since cameras broke down easily in war conditions, the standardization of parts became critical. In 1943 the industry, along with the Army Signal Corps, Army Air Force, Army Engineer Corps, the Navy and the Marine Corps, formed the War Standards Committee to oversee camera production. As one historian noted, “Experienced motion picture engineers who formerly solved Hollywood technical problems now answered military needs.”¹³ The standardization and interchangeability of parts ushered in by the committee helped bring manufacturing costs down, which introduced savings for the buyer.

The military also faced a shortage of people to produce war footage. Experienced Hollywood hands were generally too old to draft, so the task of training new camera operators and technicians fell to the army. In 1941 the Signal Corps opened the Training Film Production Laboratory in New Jersey to train recruits in movie filming and editing, effectively teaching them to shoot cameras as well as guns. Hollywood professionals were brought in to teach intensive six-week courses, even though they were more skilled at filming interior scenes than the exterior shoots that would become the norm during the war. The courses marked the first time the American Society of Cinematographers offered formal training of any kind. Like the equipment itself, soldiers’ skills had to be standardized and interchangeable. The result was the mass production of semi-professional moviemakers. “Today, a motion picture is an integral part of every military unit,” the ASC reported at the time. “This country has a great untapped reserve of capable cinematographic talent among amateurs and semi-professionals—men who though they may not have made a career out of photography, have yet attained great skill with their 16-millimetre and 8-millimetre cameras.”¹⁴

The Signal Corps was at its peak in the fall of 1944 when more than 350,000 officers and men served, six times as many as in the First World War. The Corps trained more than 432,000 soldiers over the course of the war and more than 34,000 officers graduated from fifty courses. By the time the war ended, the Signal Corps had produced more than 1,300 films.¹⁵ In 1945 the military capitalized on all that footage by setting up the Academy War Film Library, which rented and sold original war reels to movie studios.

With the conflict over, the stage was set for a revolution in moviemaking. Better mobile cameras meant that location-based shooting of feature films became much more commonplace. Film-making became decentralized and freed from the confines of studio lots. The war had also matured and standardized film technology, which meant that, as of the late forties, cameras intended for the amateur market were actually affordable to those users. Sixteen- and 8-millimetre cameras were much simpler because they all worked in more or less the same way and used the same parts. Moreover, a generation of war veterans returned to their normal lives as semi-professional, trained camera operators. They had not been trained to shoot movies with big, expensive equipment on large studio sets, but rather with small cameras in on-the-go situations. Many of these veterans parlayed their new skills into simple home moviemaking (shooting backyard barbecues, children’s birthday parties or family vacations), while others sought to go professional.

The amateur camera equipment market boomed and manufacturers reaped the benefits. Bell & Howell, for one, saw its sales increase by 125 percent between 1947 and 1956, with profit tripling over the same time frame. By 1956 professional motion picture equipment accounted for only 3 percent of the company’s sales while amateur gear had risen to 27 percent (military, industrial and educational products made up the bulk of the rest).¹⁶ The lucrative market attracted foreign competitors such as Bolex from Switzerland and sales swelled even more. By 1961 the photographic leisure market was valued at $700 million per year, driven largely by the amateur segment, which more than doubled from 1950 to 1958. Eight-millimetre camera sales also boomed, more than tripling over the same period.¹⁷

Some of this explosive growth was directly driven by amateurs creating their own stag films. A core of small businesses emerged to produce and sell these films through mail order, while camera stores quietly stocked them for rent and purchase.¹⁸ By 1960 the market had shifted to the point where consumers bought more stag films than they rented.¹⁹ A United States government inquest into pornography in the late sixties found that stag films sold at camera stores also “served as a catalyst for the rental or purchase of movie projectors, screens, cameras and other equipment.”²⁰

All the Boobs That Are Fit to Print

The explosion in the amateur camera market coincided with the beginnings of the sexual revolution. The groundwork was laid by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist at Indiana University, with the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), followed by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). The reports were hugely controversial because they touted statistics that challenged the contemporary, mostly puritanical views regarding sex. Among the most sensational assertions made by the reports were that there were gradations of homosexuality (i.e., you can, in fact, be only partly gay), that more than half of all males cheated on their wives and that nearly a quarter of all men found sadomasochism a turn-on.

The reports were a huge influence on Hugh Hefner, a Chicago native and former copywriter for Esquire magazine. Hefner, who had grown up in a puritanical family and harboured an ambitious desire to redefine sexuality, found great inspiration and affirmation in Kinsey’s reports. The budding journalist was overjoyed to find that he was not alone in possessing a voracious and non-traditional sexual appetite, and that perhaps such drives were commonplace.

In 1953 Hefner launched Playboy, a magazine ostensibly intended to act as a guide to the evolving post-war consumerist culture, but which really hinged on the nude pictures of women it featured. Hefner originally wanted to call his magazine “Stag Party,” which would probably have been a more honest title, but he was forced to change it after an outdoors publication called Stag objected. (Its editors obviously didn’t want any confusion between a magazine that featured nude women and one that featured nude deer.) Hefner was himself a connoisseur of stag films and hosted viewing parties in his Chicago apartment, where he would try to vent any embarrassment among guests by adding funny quips to his narration. He had even made his own stag film, After the Masquerade, in which he had sex with a female acquaintance while the two wore masks.²¹

The first issue of Playboy, which Hefner had not put his name on for fear of obscenity charges, sold 54,000 copies, 80 percent of its print run, an astonishing feat for a new magazine. Playboy’s circulation rose dramatically over the next two years, hitting half a million by the end of 1955 and one million in 1956, at which point it surpassed Hefner’s old employer, the twenty-year-old Esquire.²²

Playboy’s success mirrored the rise of consumerism—both were the product of a prolonged period of public denial. Consumers had suffered long and hard, first through the Great Depression, then through the war. As the good times came, so too did conspicuous consumption of all manner of goods: cars, ovens, fridges, television, stereos, plastic goods, toys, processed foods, alcohol and, of course, film equipment. Sex had also been repressed and some of those traditional puritanical forces targeted Hefner, only to be rebuffed by authorities who backed the emerging era of permissiveness. In 1955 Hefner sued the U.S. Post Office for denying Playboy a mailing permit, and won a total victory. The federal court issued an injunction preventing the Post Office from interfering with the magazine’s distribution and awarded Playboy $100,000 in damages. Hefner was effectively given the green light to continue his quest to redefine sexuality.

Kinsey and Hefner paved the way for moviemakers to extend the new sexual liberation to the silver screen. The authorities’ implicit go-ahead to Playboy was extended to director Russ Meyer, whose film The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) became the first soft-core pornographic movie to pass censors and make it to mainstream theatres. Meyer had spent his childhood in Oakland, California, playing with cameras. His parents had divorced in 1922, shortly after he was born, and his mother pawned her wedding ring to buy Russ an early 8-millimetre camera for his fourteenth birthday. By the time the United States joined the war in 1941, Meyer was nineteen and already a self-taught cinematographer. He enlisted and was assigned as a combat photographer to the 166th Signal Photo Company, the photo unit of General George Patton’s Third Army, where he served alongside New York native Stanley Kramer. After the war, the two men took distinctly different career paths: Kramer went on to direct Oscar-nominated films such as Ship of Fools (1965) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) while Meyer shot pictorials for Hefner’s Playboy, then redefined what was permissible in mainstream movies with The Immoral Mr. Teas.

The film, which starred Meyer’s army buddy Bill Teas as a door-to-door salesman who had the uncanny knack of running into nude, buxom women, was made for only $24,000 but reaped more than $1 million through independent cinemas.²³ As Time magazine noted, the movie’s success “opened up the floodgates of permissiveness as we know it in these United States.”²⁴ It also kicked off a soft-core pornographic movie gold rush. Meyer, for his part, gave credit where credit was due. “The real driving force behind the increasing permissiveness of our society is Hugh Hefner. I simply put his illustrations to movement.”²⁵

Attack of the Killer B’s

Meyer was a direct product of the post-war boom in amateur film that spawned an entirely new category of alternative, semi-professional productions: the “B” movie. While the term was initially used in the twenties and thirties to identify bonus attractions tacked on to feature films, in the fifties it became synonymous with low-budget releases made by Hollywood outsiders, many of whom were military trained or used war-seasoned technology. The first genres to gain popularity were science fiction and horror, with films such as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). Heading into the sixties, B movies splintered into sub-genres that were collectively known as exploitation films, since they often “exploited” lurid subject matter, particularly sex and violence. “Grindhouse” cinemas, so named because the first ones were housed in former “bump-and-grind” burlesque theatres, sprang up in urban areas to accommodate the growing number of exploitation films.

Meyer carved out his own sub-genre of exploitation films— “sexploitation,” essentially soft-core pornography—through a string of follow-up hits to The Immoral Mr. Teas that included Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962), Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Vixen! (1968). At one point, he had four films in Variety magazine’s top 100 grossing movies of all time.²⁶ Grindhouse cinemas followed the trend and many converted to showing only adult movies. Before Meyer’s breakthrough, only about 60 theatres in the United States showed films that were considered sexploitation. By 1970 that number had climbed to 750, helped largely by the establishment of the Pussycat theatre chain.²⁷

By the sixties, mainstream Hollywood was feeling the influence of B movies in general and sexploitation movies in particular; the studios were watching how Meyer and the copycat directors he spawned were experimenting with smaller camera technology. “Even Walt Disney was curiously interested in what would happen,” Meyer said.²⁸ They were also watching the steadily increasing box-office returns: Vixen, which had been made for just $72,000, raked in an astonishing $15 million.²⁹

The studios moved to attract this growing audience with more sexually daring mainstream movies, culminating in 1969 with Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy. Meyer also made the full jump to the mainstream when 20th Century Fox picked up his Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1972) for distribution. With B-movie sexploitation directors and Hollywood studios depicting increasingly graphic sex, the stage was set for a film that pushed the envelope by bringing the hard-core action of stag films to the mainstream.

That film was Deep Throat (1972), the story of a sexually frustrated woman who is unable to achieve an orgasm until she discovers that her clitoris is in her throat. Deep Throat featured explicit oral and anal sex and was given an X rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. The hour-long film also produced massive box-office numbers. Shot over six days in Miami at a cost of only $25,000, it ended up grossing an estimated $100 million in combined box-office and video receipts.³⁰Deep Throat established the porno formula of low-budget, star-driven films that has been followed ever since.

Sexploitation and the mainstream porno blitz didn’t kill off stag films, however. In fact, short, amateur-produced films found an entirely new and bigger market in the early seventies when two self-styled “kings of pornography” teamed up to bring peep shows to the United States. Reuben Sturman, a Cleveland native and Second World War veteran of the Army Air Corps, had started out in the fifties selling comic books from his car. He expanded his business until he was a major magazine wholesaler with operations in several American cities. In the early sixties he moved into the burgeoning field of adult magazines, riding Playboy’s success, and by the end of the decade he was the biggest distributor of such publications to a growing number of specialty stores in the United States.

Algerian-born Italian Lasse Braun, a law school graduate living in Sweden, was building his Stockholm-based sex empire at the same time. Braun had filmed his first short sex movie, Golden Butterfly, in 1965 using Kodak’s new Super 8 camera, an improved version of the traditional 8-millimetre. The ten-minute colour film starred Braun himself as a naval officer and a girlfriend dressed up as a Japanese geisha girl. As the director put it, the characters in his film “made love in her boudoir without hiding anything of what makes sex so luscious and irresistible.”³¹

Having already established some notoriety in Europe by publishing magazines and writing erotic novels, Braun formed AB Beta Film in 1966 to produce porno movies. In 1971, with Braun as his primary film supplier, Sturman brought a new product—the peep booth, which consisted of a coin-operated 16-millimetre projector, a small screen and a lockable door—to his adult bookstore customers. Braun linked his stag films together into longer loops, which customers watched for 25 cents per thirty-second to two-minute pop. The booths were extraordinarily successful and transformed the business of stag films. Not only were they rebranded as “loops,” the films also shed their regional boundaries through Sturman’s nationwide distribution network. Sturman became exceptionally wealthy, raking in an estimated $2 billion in the seventies. By the late eighties, his personal fortune was estimated at between $200 million and $300 million while his magazine and video empire grossed about $1 million a day.³²

Film historians refer to the sixties and seventies as the “Golden Age of Pornography,” a time when seemingly anything was allowed at the movies. But this golden age brewed powerful reactionary forces. In 1970 a Congressional panel set up by Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson to study pornography’s social effects made some fairly liberal recommendations: that children should receive sex education and that no further restrictions should be placed on entertainment intended for adults. Incoming Republican president Richard Nixon, however, gave the report a hostile review, denouncing Johnson’s panel as “morally bankrupt” and vowing to fight pornography in all its forms. “So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life,” he said. “Pornography can corrupt a society and civilization ... The warped and brutal portrayal of sex in books, plays, magazines and movies, if not halted and reversed, could poison the wellsprings of American and Western culture and civilization.”³³

As the eighties neared, the Golden Age of Pornography faced a growing conservative enemy. The amateurs who had ushered in the era armed with war-seasoned technology were in for the biggest fight of their lives. Sturman, whom the U.S. Justice Department believed to be the largest distributor of hard-core pornography in the country, proved to be one of the biggest casualties. In 1989 authorities nailed him for failing to pay $29 million in taxes. Sturman was sentenced to hard time; he managed to escape from his California cell but was recaptured eight weeks later and ended up dying in a Kentucky prison in 1997.

The genie was out of the bottle, however. In less than thirty years, a large group of military-trained semi-professional filmmakers armed with new, high-tech cameras had lured pornographic movies out of insular men’s clubs and into downtown theatres in every major city. The same advances that produced Oscar-winning filmmakers such as Stanley Kramer also produced Russ Meyer, Deep Throat and the rest of the pornographic film business. And even better technology— the VCR and later, the internet—that would further lower the cost of filming and disseminating sex movies was on the way. Social attitudes toward sex in the media had also shifted away from conservatism and toward permissiveness. Just as men and women were experimenting with the new-found freedoms brought on by the sexual revolution and its scientific advances like the birth control pill, they were also becoming more open to how they were entertained. To the dismay of Nixon and his fellow conservatives, pornography was here to stay.

Doing It Yourself

One of the reasons people made such naughty uses of film cameras is that they had been primed for decades with still photos. Before the forties, taking your own nude pictures was a risky proposition. If you tried to develop the film, chances were good you’d run afoul of obscenity laws and end up in jail. The only solution was to either invest in a darkroom or find a shop that offered discreet processing of such “special” photos. Luckily, two pieces of technology came along to cater to this need.

In 1932 American chemist Edwin Land founded a company based on a polarizing filter he had invented, which he used to make sunglasses and camera lens attachments. During the Second World War, Land’s company, which he named Polaroid in 1937, supplied Allied military forces with goggles, target finders and other optical equipment. His big breakthrough came in 1948 with the Land Camera, a device that could take a photo and instantly develop it, giving the picture taker a print within minutes. The device and its follow-up models proved to be huge hits. For the average consumer, the cameras—known simply as Polaroids—were the first easy way to take photos, without the additional expense and hassle of waiting for developing and processing. They also provided an easy and safe way to create homemade sexual content.

Consumers were, as porn historian Jonathan Coopersmith puts it, finally free from the “censoring eye of the local druggist or the ogling leer of the film laboratory technician.”³⁴ More to the point, Polaroid “was an enormous breakthrough for the amateur because anybody could shoot whatever they wanted,” according to Playboy’s current photo director Gary Cole. “If you shot pictures of your girlfriend, you didn’t have to worry about anybody else seeing them.”³⁵ (The cameras also proved invaluable to professionals, like Playboy photographers. With nude shoots sometimes taking days to meet Hugh Hefner’s exacting standards, Polaroids helped photographers set up shots and save time and money. “A lot of the initial lighting and posing changes were made at the Polaroid stages before we shot the actual film,” Cole says. “It would save you a whole half day, shooting Polaroid.”)

Land’s company knew about the use of its cameras for sexual purposes, both by amateurs and professionals, and tacitly acknowledged as much. In 1966 the company released a new model called “the Swinger,” a term coined in the late fifties to describe a sexually liberated person. (By the seventies, the word had evolved to mean a person who was promiscuous and/or liked to swap sexual partners.) Television commercials for the camera showed good-looking, nearly nude couples frolicking on the beach, taking pictures of each other. With the sexual revolution in full swing, Polaroid was clearly looking to cash in on the new wave of liberation.

The same held true for photo booths, which were essentially giant, immobile Polaroid cameras. By the thirties, fully self-sufficient booths were popping up in public places such as amusement parks and stores. By the fifties, proprietors were encountering an unexpected problem. According to one historian, “Complaints started coming in from Woolworth’s and other stores that people, particularly women, were stripping off their clothes for the private photo booth camera. Couples started being a little more adventurous in the privacy of the curtained booth.” As a result, many Woolworth’s stores removed their curtains to discourage “naughty encounters.”³⁶

There just seemed to be something about the booths that brought out the exhibitionist in people, a phenomenon that continues to hold true. Brett Ratner, director of such mainstream movies as Rush Hour and Red Dragon, installed a black-and-white booth in his house and had his celebrity friends take pictures whenever they stopped by. He published the results in a 2003 book, Hillhaven Lodge: The Photo Booth Pictures, with some glaring omissions. “There were a lot of middle fingers, a lot of people with their tongues out,” Ratner says. “There was also a lot of flashing ... I didn’t publish those.”³⁷

Booth manufacturers have always known what buttered their bread, and they quietly encouraged such uses. One American manufacturer, Auto Photo, handed out programs at a mid-fifties industry convention that featured a drawing of a woman exposing herself with the caption, “Make sure he remembers you! Send a foto to your boyfriend.”³⁸ Technology makers were happy to reap the benefits of the public’s evolving sexual liberation, but it wasn’t something they were willing to tout openly. “The fact that this was in the sales material says, okay, these guys know about it, they just aren’t talking about it in public,” says Coopersmith, who has written several papers on the role of pornography in technological development. “Even now, many of the firms producing the technology and who benefited do not like to publicly talk about it. You still can’t tell people what you’re doing that openly.”³⁹

Participatory porn took a huge step forward with the advent of camcorders in the early eighties. While the 16- and 8-millimetre cameras developed during the Second World War were great for amateur pornographers with an interest and knowledge of film, it wasn’t until the camcorder that the mass market finally had a viable, easy-to-use video option. The camcorder made filming idiot-proof—just point and shoot, no need to set lighting levels or focus, and no need to get film developed. While the technology obviously had many non-pornographic uses, science-fiction author Isaac Asimov was right when he stated in 1981 that “the age of home video will fundamentally alter our approach to sex.”⁴⁰ The camcorder took the do-it-yourself porn started by Polaroids, photo booths and smaller film cameras to the next level. As had happened with stag films, a market for amateur porn movies sprung up in the eighties, with the back pages of every adult magazine full of ads for homemade videos. The trend further evolved with the advent of digitalization, with amateur porn websites springing up in huge numbers.

The continually evolving ability for amateurs to create their own sexual media, coupled with an ever-increasing amount of purchasable porn, has dramatically transformed our views on sex over the past half century. On the supply side, technology manufacturers—who once refused to publicly acknowledge the role sexual content played in the success of their products— are starting to come around, especially smaller companies that are desperate for customers of any sort. Spatial View, a small Toronto-based company that is developing software to view three-dimensional photos on digital devices, is just one example. In early 2009 the company gave the honour of announcing the availability of its new Wazabee 3DeeShell, which slips onto an iPhone and allows the user to view specially coded photos and movies in 3-D, to adult producer Pink Visual. The adult company put out a press release touting itself as one of the first content suppliers for the shell days before Spatial View itself announced the product. “They wanted to show that they were on the cutting edge of technology,” says Brad Casemore, Spatial View’s vice-president of business development. “They came right after us. They read about it and said, ‘We’d like to give it a try.’ It’s not really a target market for us for a variety of reasons, but when a customer comes to you, there’s not much you can do.”⁴¹