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By Ben Suroeste
NEW YORK – When I first started working in the adult industry, there were several types of phone call I quickly came to dread. As the company’s designated flak-catcher and nerve-soother, they were also inevitable hazards of the workplace.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]Irate spouses or parents discovering their credit cards had been used by someone else in the household to purchase a subscription to a pornographic website were not uncommon at the time. We operated our own merchant accounts (most of the adult-friendly IPSPs didn’t exist yet) and the card service companies [/FONT][/COLOR][COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]regularly [/FONT][/COLOR][COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]passed the testiest of consumers directly to us, especially when their feedback included certain key terms like “lawsuit” or “charge-back” or “pipe bomb.”[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]Stern lawyers spouting rapid fire legalese were very intimidating at first, but substantially less so when I realized it was fairly commonplace for them to be completely full of shit. Besides, when they actually had a point, it was our attorney and owner who would eventually have to deal with the real unpleasantness.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]The worst phone call variety by far, however, was the inquiry from a curious journalist.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]Back then, publicity was not something those of us in the online sector of the porn business embraced. There were exceptions, sure, but in those days, the web-based segment of porn was less an industry than an experiment in amateur entrepreneurship, and most companies didn’t relish the idea of the press taking a look under their hood, as it were.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]At our company, the ownership was divided between a young programmer running his first company, his girlfriend and two other people with no business background whatsoever, one of whom had earned his initial investment capital through means which may have been “extralegal,” as they say.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]As far as the owners were concerned, the less the media knew about our company, the better. This was particularly true of the local media, but the idea of our site or business name showing up in the pages of a national newspaper would not have been cause for celebration around the office, either.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]Back then, online porn as a business endeavor wasn’t a story in which the media was interested. Articles in Wired touting internet porn as a get-rich-quick scheme were still a few years away. For the most part, the media didn’t care about us at all – unless there was some seedy, shady and awful aspect to report, of course.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]The mainstream media’s perspective on the adult industry has changed so dramatically since those days, it’s sometimes hard to wrap my brain around the shift.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]Once, you could read the news for days and not see a single story about porn or the porn industry. These days, if you have a Google news alert set to trawl for articles with”‘porn” in them, you are inundated with links on a daily basis.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]I don’t have to take calls from journalists anymore, which is a plus, but now their coverage is irritating for a different reason: [/FONT][/COLOR]There’s way the fuck too much of it[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma].[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]Undeniably, it’s the height of irony, even hypocrisy, for guy who earns his living in part by writing about porn to bitch about others doing too much of the same thing, but seriously…. An [/FONT][/COLOR]intern quitting her (almost) day job[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma] to try her hand at porn is “news?”[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]If a gossip or pop-culture site runs a similar piece, that’s one thing. It’s easy to ignore and no more than we expect from them. From the perspective of a business-news website reader, however, I’m not sure how edifying it is to hear about a part-time intern who says she quit her job because she “can’t stop masturbating at work.”[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]Of course, this is one porn story which clearly didn’t crop up organically. The ex-intern pulled a publicity stunt here, one which isn’t even particularly well veiled. This particular ex-intern, you see, [/FONT][/COLOR]just happens[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma] to be a contestant on [/FONT][/COLOR]The Sex Factor[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]. What are the odds, right?[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]Clearly, the point of the article about the Wall Street Wanker has nothing to do with her expired employment with Lazard Asset Management and a whole lot to do with plugging a silly reality show. Stop the presses and put Warren Buffet on hold, kids: We have ourselves a [/FONT][/COLOR][COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]serious business story brewing here.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]Prospective investors may also want to keep an eye on the lucrative, if rather unlikely, proposition of a [/FONT][/COLOR]blockbuster gay porn movie starring Justin Bieber[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma] and the [/FONT][/COLOR]latest analysis from Morgan Stanley Smith Pornhub[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma] about game console market share.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma]Who knows? At this rate, maybe [/FONT][/COLOR]Business Insider[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma] will soon cut straight to the chase and re-brand as [/FONT][/COLOR]Business Inside Her[COLOR=#222222][FONT=Tahoma].
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