The o/t: Observer - Sunday October 27, 2002

[Adrian]

Porn.com

Images that would once have sparked an obscenity trial are now only a mouse-click away, making hardcore routine and forcing mainstream magazines to adapt or die. As for the new breed of DIY net pornographers, all you need is a camera and a few happy 'swingers' and you're in business. Just ask Janey and Craig of Stoke...

Ben Hammersley
Sunday October 27, 2002
The Observer

The internet might well be the most fantastic source of information yet devised, glorious in its diversity. But for many Britons the net means one thing - sex, or more specifically, porn. No longer restricted to sticky-carpeted shops and the top shelves of newsagents, pornography is more available than ever before - all on account of the net. Internet users worldwide spent an estimated ?2 billion on online pornography during the past year, ranging from multi-million dollar enterprises in the US to 'amateur' operations in suburban Britain.
Venture, for instance, behind the net curtains of a Stoke semi and you'll find the headquarters of Janeyweb, one of the UK's most popular 'amateur' porn sites. At no cost, you can access hundreds of pictures of the aforementioned Janey and friends; for around ?10 a month, subscribers can download videos. 'My Fetishes' and 'My Orgies' are among the less graphic sections on the site.

The Stoke semi is also the home of Janey and Craig, business and life partners. Their porn career started as an extension of their hobby: swinging. Craig had 'swung' in previous relationships, liked it, and gently brought it up one day with Janey, who he met four years ago in a 'really cheesy nightclub'. They took out an advert on a swingers' site, met some nice people, slept with them, had a good time.

The swinging sites required the couples to post pictures of the woman at least. Janey's were very popular. So many people were emailing, asking for different poses and outfits that the couple started their own web club, using the facility provided by Excite - a then-popular internet portal. 'We had Janey's face blacked out to start with,' says Craig, 'and people were like "ah, she's great, have you got pictures of her doing this or that".'

Excite decided to close this facility to 'adult' content. About to be forced offline, Janey and Craig bought their own domain name, set up a server and started Janeyweb.com, charging just enough in subscriptions to cover costs.

It didn't stay like that for long. Janey quit her job two years ago to work full-time on the site. After they got married, Craig joined her in the small office on the top floor of their new house, bought with proceeds from the site. Today they work seven days a week, adding to the site, answering emails and tweaking the technology. And, of course, inviting people round for sex.

Jealousy has not been an issue, they say. 'Even when I'm having sex with other people,' says Janey, 'he's working the camera. I would never go off for a gang-bang with a group of people without him being present. You just don't do it.'

The idea of having a business dependent on your wife sleeping with other people might make many men baulk. Not Craig: 'I'm a lucky man. I enjoy it, yes - it's exciting. I feel I made a good job of it because I'm married to somebody that...' A lot of people will pay money to watch? 'Yeah.'

For the likes of Janey and Craig, the industry offers an outlet for their desires and a way to make their hobby pay. But for their colleague Adrian Smith, it's purely a business. When Smith, 35, gave up his job as a computer technician in the City a year ago to become a porn webmaster he took a six-month holiday from his mortgage payments. By the time he had to start paying again, his sites - including ones dedicated to British amateur swingers, bondage and foot-fetishist pages - were up, running and very lucrative. 'It's money for old rope really. It's a numbers game,' he told me in the garden of an Oxford pub.

'I'm running all my sites at the moment on about a gig and a half of space [about the same as two CD-roms] which probably costs me only ?150 a month. Our biggest site has 400 members, each paying ?10 a month.'

Smith is part of the Adult Coalition, a group of sites which work together to maximise the returns available, bouncing users from site to site within the group. 'There's five of us in the UK, one in the US and two in Australia at the moment.'

Taking the pictures, and creating the sites, says Smith, is only half the deal. His day, he says, is taken up analysing traffic, graphing 'clickthrough rates' and programming 'dynamic content systems' that will ensure the porn-saturated punter will keep coming back.

The key to success, in a business with intense competition, is to find a niche. Niche traffic is the best traffic of all, says Smith. Your basic fetishes - rubber, leather, and bondage - and your more interesting ones - smoking, nylons, feet - all bring much greater rewards than your dull old gangbangs, it seems. 'What you find with niche traffic is that your conversion ratio goes up. You get less traffic, but you might get two per cent sign up as opposed to half a per cent.'

Catering to different tastes is the key. If you want to stand out from the other estimated 400,000 pay-to-view internet porn sites, you need to target your audience and cater for its own particular kink. Smith says: 'Most of our members come from Germany and the UK. Far East as well. You get a lot of Japanese and Chinese joining up. Not so many from the US, they perhaps have slightly different tastes, which is a pain, because the US is obviously a huge market to crack.'

The US is indeed a huge market - $6bn by some reckonings - but one that is beset with problems for the budding pornographer, not least the power of the religious Right. Someone is always ready to campaign against your site, and some sexual acts themselves are illegal in many states, whether a video camera is present or not.

Yet, despite much effort by state legislatures, internet pornography remains legal in the US: as protected speech under the First Amendment. One recent decision in Dayton, Ohio, by district judge Walter Herbert Rice, overturned the Ohio state law designed to prevent the distribution of 'harmful materials' to juveniles - on the basis that it both violated the free speech laws and was so broadly worded as to ban sites covering subjects as diverse as woman's health and photographs from National Geographic magazine.

Obscene publication laws are not the only problem: a woman from Anderson, South Carolina is facing up to five years in jail or a $250,000 fine for 'mailing indecent and filthy substances' - her unwashed underwear - to the customers of her site.

Back home, a spokesman for the Obscene Publications and Internet Unit of the Metropolitan Police says it is increasingly unlikely that someone will be prosecuted for the production of online pornography. The Obscene Publications Act states that a publication 'shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.' Or in other words, if you see it, does it corrupt you? For 95 per cent of online porn, the police say this is not the case. In fact, a jury is increasingly unlikely to find something obscene. Unpleasant, perhaps, but not obscene: the Obscene Publications Unit says the very minimum they can prosecute for is 'urination or defecation into another's orifices' - and even then, perhaps not. In such cases, the judge must instruct the jury to convict only if they feel they have been corrupted, and not just if they felt a bit queasy.

Over the past five years convictions have become increasingly rare, and internet pornographers have plenty to say in their own defence. Lumping them together with paedophiles, say, is entirely wrong, says Adrian Smith, and trying to ban internet pornography is both a waste of time and a terrible misunderstanding of the way the internet works. 'The adult industry has embraced the internet, and the rest of the world has to catch up, and realise that the internet is global, and that very much in the adult industry we police ourselves. We don't allow animals or children anywhere.'

Smith claims the industry keeps an eye out for the 'really criminal', partly through moral responsibility, and partly through commercial necessity. A new law proposed in the US would prohibit credit card companies from processing payments from any site within six links of illegal content.

This presents a major problem. 'Adult' sites rarely have enough of a trading history to qualify for a merchant account with a credit card company, and so must rely on someone else to deal with the payments. Under British law, companies are not allowed to process credit card payments on behalf of a third party, and so webmasters must look elsewhere. Given that the American credit card payment companies furnish the entire UK porn industry, for people like Smith the removal of child and animal porn from the internet is a matter of keeping his livelihood.

For Craig, who deals with the technical side of Janeyweb, the matter is just as urgent. He makes sure the necessary software is in place to prevent the underaged from accessing the majority of his site. Nevertheless, parents have some responsibility too, he argues: 'If you've got children and you tell them to cross a busy road, you've got make sure they know how to cross that road safely. It's the parents' responsibility to make sure they've got a suitable application installed on their PC if they're going to let their children surf.'

This quest for respectability is more than a matter of staying in business. Smith's operations must be hosted and billed-for overseas, since 'host' companies are wary of doing business with porn sites, because of the Obscene Publications Act.

'It's ludicrous. We have people come to us and say they want to buy a video, but it's illegal for me to put that video in the post to them. But as far as the end-user's concerned, they don't know where the site is. They have no idea whether it's hosted in the UK or US - it doesn't make a bit of difference. Its marvellous, watching all this money pour out of this country,' he sighs.

'What the hell do I tell the taxman? One of the couples I work with, they do have a proper accounting method but apparently they had a hell of a job getting that sorted out. Another guy I know, he's actually gone so far as to set up a dummy website for legitimate business, and he just points all his income from there.'

According to Smith, a legalisation of the industry here would allow for operations as lucrative as those you find across the Atlantic, going from one-man-band operations to multi-million pound companies that float on the stock exchange.

The internet has had a huge influence on the 'offline' porn industry. Having seen his magazine drop from a circulation of 5 million to just over a tenth of that, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione has admitted that there is 'no future' for mass market adult magazines. It's so much easier on the Web, for both the consumer - who no longer has to run the newsagent gauntlet - and for the producer. As Smith puts it: 'It's the easiest industry in the world to get into. All you need is a camera. It doesn't matter how old you are - when you get 20,000 people looking every day, someone somewhere will like that girl.'

Now another revolution is on the way, and this time it's catering for women. Sites such as Suicidegirls (advertising slogan: 'we have naked pictures of that cute goth girl who hangs out at the coffee shop'), Raverporn ('more naked ravers than you can shake a glow stick at') and Supercult are notable not just for having photographs that are gentler and artier than the unsubtle wares of the old-school porn sites, but for the number of women who subscribe. Over half of the subscribers to Suicidegirls are women, there not only for the pictures but also for the community that has grown around the site.

So should we see the transition in porn consumption from a furtive men-only habit to a post-modern lifestyle as a positive re?ection on the openness of modern society? Some might... But it's hard not to feel unease at the increased availability of pornography, both in quantity and explicitness. On Janeyweb, far from the most 'hardcore' site, you can see close-up pictures of oral and anal sex, bondage, ejaculation and penetration, even before you enter your credit card details. It is easy for anyone, children included, to view sites such as Rapedbitch.

Critics of the internet porn industry claim it leads to the break-up of families, and a changed attitude among men toward women. One recent survey by Jennifer P Schneider for the journal Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity - much quoted by the American religious Right - shows the effects found in extreme cases of porn addiction: 'Cybersex addiction was a major contributing factor to separation and divorce of couples in this survey: 22.3 per cent of the respondents were separated or divorced, and several others were seriously contemplating leaving... Among 68 per cent of the couples, one or both had lost interest in relational sex: 52.1 per cent of addicts had decreased interest in sex with spouse, as did 34 per cent of partners. Some couples had had no relational sex in months or years...'

Other critics go even further, claiming pornography, its consumption hugely increased by the net, is responsible for a massive increase in sexual violence toward women. 'When we talk about pornography that objectifies women, we are talking about the sexualisation of insult, of humiliation; we are also talking about the sexualisation of cruelty,' said Andrea Dworkin, feminist writer and anti-porn crusader. 'There is cruelty that says to you, you are worth nothing in human terms; you exist in order for him to wipe his penis on you, that's who you are, that's what you are for.'

Avedon Carol of Feminists Against Censorship does not agree: 'In terms of women being involved in the public discourse,' she says 'boy am I glad for porn. In more than 20 years of reviewing pornography I have never found a photographic or motion picture image of a woman bleeding in any porn shop in the United States or any private collection there or in Britain... No police authority in any country in the world has ever been able to document the existence of a so-called "snuff" movie, where actresses are purportedly murdered to produce pornography. Even child porn, that favourite bogeyman of police and campaigners, is so rare that many porn researchers as well as porn aficionados say they never saw any child porn even in the 1960s and early 1970s in America, before any anti-child porn laws existed there. Not only has pornography in the United States become less violent over time, but it was never as violent as anti-porn campaigners claim.'

She continues: 'Criminologists and clinical workers alike are largely in agreement that pornography is not causal to sex crime and abuse.' In fact, says Carol, the rise of pornography, especially via the net, has had a positive effect on society. 'Women have more of a voice than ever before,' she says.

The very fact that porn exists and that women can watch it in private with their partners gives rise to the possibility that first women's sexuality, and second every other issue in feminine politics, can become part of public debate. For much of the Sixties and Seventies, she says, 'the primary source of intellectual discussion of sexuality was in Playboy.'

Harmful for the viewer or not, running an amateur porn site doesn't seem to be doing Janey and Craig much harm. Even their parents approve: 'Their main concern is that we've got enough money, and are happy with each other,' says Janey.

Both say they do not want to be doing the same job in five years' time. Instead they hope to be involved in managing other people's sites, perhaps moving to America, where the potential for legitimate big business is so much greater.

Even for Smith, whose seven sites offer all sorts of content, the thrill of the erotic has been deadened. 'I don't even look at them now. As soon as I see a picture I'm thinking "do people want to click on that?". He sighs into his pint: 'I don't see the porn side of it at all, which is a shame.'

[Crimpo]

Great lass Janey - typical hand-wringing from the Observer - ah well never mind!