Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: giovannino, scrivici un commento, vah

http://www.corriere.it/esteri/09_gennaio_09/porno_usa_auto_aiuti_a00fd504-de27-11dd-a05b-00144f02aabc.shtml
----
"mai in congiunzione col membro maschile" (Luca Logi / rodewalder)
cfr 
http://raionim.blogspot.com/2008/12/luca-logi-e-i-piselli.html

 
http://www.corriere.it/esteri/09_gennaio_09/porno_usa_auto_aiuti_a00f.
..
avevo letto...sicuramente sono soldi meglio investiti di quelli
regalati ai banchieri senza nessuna contropartita.


Caro amico,
forte degli exempla così puntigliosamente forniti alcuni giorni or sono 
relativamente alla Settima Arte da illustri esponenti della juderia di 
questo forum (che ricordo è molto
lontano dalla nobiltà del Foro della Roma della Repubblica e più vicino al 
Secondo Tempio invaso dai mercanti), dicevo forte degli exempla,
quantunque cattolico, apostolico, romano e gentile posso commentare con 
questo interessante scritto apparso su una testata apparentemente
pubblicata senza imprimatur arcivescovile in lontane terre di oltre 
Oceano... Moltissimi qui lo troveranno di estremo interesse.
http://www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=38
      Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American porn industry
      Nathan Abrams  |  Winter 2004  -  Number 196
            A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood's seedier 
cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps we'd prefer to pretend that the 
'triple-exthnics' didn't exist, but there's no getting away from the fact 
that secular Jews have played (and still continue to play) a 
disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in America. Jewish 
involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States, as Jews 
have helped to transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary 
constituent of Americana. These are the 'true blue Jews'.
            Smut peddlers
            Jewish activity in the porn industry divides into two (sometimes 
overlapping) groups: pornographers and performers. Though Jews make up only 
two per cent of the American population, they have been prominent in 
pornography. Many erotica dealers in the book trade between 1890 and 1940 
were immigrant Jews of German origin. According to Jay A. Gertzman, author 
of Bookleggers and Smuthounds:The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940(Philadelphia: 
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 'Jews were prominent in the 
distribution of gallantiana [fiction on erotic themes and books of dirty 
jokes and ballads], avant-garde sexually explicit novels, sex pulps, 
sexology, and flagitious materials'.
            In the postwar era, America's most notorious pornographer was 
Reuben Sturman, the 'Walt Disney of Porn'. According to the US Department of 
Justice, throughout the 1970s Sturman controlled most of the pornography 
circulating in the country. Born in 1924, Sturman grew up in Cleveland's 
East Side. Initially, he sold comics and magazines, but when he realized sex 
magazines produced twenty times the revenue of comic books, he moved 
exclusively into porn, eventually producing his own titles and setting up 
retail stores. By the end of the 1960s, Sturman ranked at the top of adult 
magazine distributors and by the mid-70s he owned over 200 adult bookstores. 
Sturman also introduced updated versions of the traditional peepshow booth 
(typically a dark room with a small colour TV on which the viewer can view 
X-rated videos). It was said that Sturman did not simply control the 
adult-entertainment industry; hewas the industry. Eventually he was 
convicted of tax evasion and other crimes and died, disgraced, in prison in 
1997. His son, David, continued running the family business.
            The contemporary incarnation of Sturman is 43-year-old Jewish 
Clevelander Steven Hirsch, who has been described as 'the Donald Trump of 
porno'. The link between the two is Steve's father, Fred, who was a 
stockbroker-cum-lieutenant to Sturman. Today Hirsch runs the Vivid 
Entertainment Group, which has been called the Microsoft of the porn world, 
the top producer of 'adult' films in the US. His specialty was to import 
mainstream marketing techniques into the porn business. Indeed, Vivid 
parallels the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly 
in its exclusive contracts to porn stars who are hired and moulded by 
Hirsch. Vivid was the subject of a behind-the-scenes reality TV show 
recently broadcast on Channel 4.
            Nice Jewish girls and boys
            Jews accounted for most of the leading male performers as well 
as a sizeable number of female stars in porn movies of the 1970s and '80s. 
The doyen of the Hebrew studs is Ron Jeremy. Known in the trade as 'the 
Hedgehog', Jeremy is one of America's biggest porn stars. The 51-year-old 
Jeremy was raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Flushing, 
Queens, and has since appeared in more than 1,600 adult movies, as well as 
directing over 100. Jeremy has achieved iconic status in America, a hero to 
males of all ages, Jewish and gentile alike - he's the nebbischy, fat, 
hairy, ugly guy who gets to bed dozens of beautiful women. He presents an 
image of a modern-day King David, a Jewish superstud who supersedes the 
traditional heroes of Jewish lore. No sallow Talmud scholar he. His stature 
was recently cemented with the release of a pornomentary about his life, 
Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. As probably the most famous Jewish male 
porn star, Jeremy has done wonders for the psyche of Jewish men in America. 
Jeremy has also just released a compilation CD, Bang-A-Long-With Ron Jeremy. 
For £7.99 (including delivery), the lucky listener gets to enjoy Jeremy's 
hand-picked favourite porno grooves along with narration by 'the legend' 
himself. As the publicity blurb gushes, 'Out of the brown paper wrappings 
and into the mainstream'.
            Seymore Butts, aka Adam Glasser, is everything that Jeremy is 
not: young, handsome and toned. Glasser, a 39-year-old New York Jew, opened 
a gym in 1991 in Los Angeles. When no one joined, he borrowed a video camera 
for 24 hours, went to a nearby strip club, recruited a woman, then headed 
back to his gym and started shooting. Although the movie stank, with a bit 
of chutzpah and a few business cards he wangled a deal with a manufacturer 
and started cranking out films. Within a few years, 'Seymore Butts' - his 
nom de porn which is simultaneously his sales pitch - became one of the 
largest franchises in the adult-film business. As the king of the gonzo 
genre (marked by handheld cameras, the illusion of spontaneity and a 
low-tech aesthetic meant to suggest reality), he is today probably the most 
famous Jewish porn mogul. Seymore Inc., his production company, releases 
about 36 films annually, most of them shot for less than $15,000, each of 
them grossing more than 10 times that sum. Glasser employs 12 people, 
including his mother and cousin Stevie as respectively genial company 
accountant (and matchmaker for her single son) and lovable but roguish 
general gopher. Glasser currently even has his own reality TV show (also 
broadcast on Channel 4), a ten-episode docu-soap called Family Business, 
whose opening credits show Glasser's barmitzvah photo.
            In search of a buck
            Jews became involved in the porn industry for much the same 
reasons that their co-religionists became involved in Hollywood. They were 
attracted to an industry primarily because it admitted them. Its newness 
meant that restrictive barriers had not yet been erected, as they had in so 
many other areas of American life. In porn, there was no discrimination 
against Jews. During the early part of the twentieth century, an 
entrepreneur did not require large sums of money to make a start in the film 
business; cinema was considered a passing fad. In the porn business, it was 
similarly straightforward to get going. To show 'stag' movies or loops, as 
they were known, all one needed was a projector, screen and a few chairs. 
Not tied up with the status quo and with nothing to lose by innovation, Jews 
were open to new ways of doing business. Gertzman explains that
            "Jews, when they found themselves excluded from a field of 
endeavour, turned to a profession in which they sensed they could eventually 
thrive by cooperating with colleagues in a community of effort . . . Jews 
have for a very long time cultivated the temperament and talents of 
middlemen, and they are proud of these abilities".
            The adult entertainment business required something that Jews 
possessed in abundance:chutzpah. Early Jewish pornographers were marketing 
geniuses and ambitious entrepreneurs whose toughness, intelligence and 
boundless self-confidence were responsible for their successes.
            Of course, the large number of Jews in porn were mainly 
motivated by the desire to make profits. Just as their counterparts in 
Hollywood provided a dream factory for Americans, a blank screen upon which 
the Jewish moguls' visions of America could be created and projected, so the 
porn-moguls displayed a talent for understanding public tastes. What better 
way to provide the stuff of dreams and fantasies than through the 
adult-entertainment industry? Performers did porn for the money. As ADL 
National Director Abraham H. Foxman commented, 'Those Jews who enter the 
pornography industry have done so as individuals pursuing the American 
dream.'
            Secular sex
            Like their mainstream counterparts, Jews who enter porn do not 
usually do so as representatives of their religious group. Most of the 
performers and pornographers are Jewish culturally but not religiously. Many 
are entirely secular, Jews in name only. Sturman, however, identified as a 
Jew - he was a generous donator to Jewish charities - and performer Richard 
Pacheco once interviewed to be a rabbinical student.
            Very few, if any, porn films have overtly Jewish themes, 
although Jeremy once tried to get several Jewish porn stars together to make 
a kosher porn film. The exception is Debbie Duz Dishes, in which Nina 
Hartley plays a sexually insatiable Jewish housewife who enjoys sex with 
anyone who rings the doorbell. It has sold very well, spawned a couple of 
sequels and is currently very hard to buy - perhaps indicating a new niche 
to exploit. Indeed, according to an editorial on the World Union of Jewish 
Students website,
            "there are thousands of people searching for Jewish porn. After 
things like Jewish calendar, Jewish singles, Jewish dating, and Jewish 
festivals comes 'Jewish porn' in the list of top search keywords that 
GoTo.com provide".
            Sexual rebels
            Is there a deeper reason, beyond the mere financial, as to why 
Jews in particular have become involved in porn? There is surely an element 
of rebellion in Jewish X-rated involvement. Its very taboo and forbidden 
nature serves to make it attractive. As I written in these pages 
before,treyf signifies 'the whole world of forbidden sexuality, the 
sexuality of the goyim, and there all the delights are imagined to lie . . .' 
('Reel Kashrut: Jewish food in film', JQ 189 [Spring 2003]).
            According to one anonymous industry insider quoted by E. Michael 
Jones in the magazineCulture Wars (May 2003), 'the leading male performers 
through the 1980s came from secular Jewish upbringings and the females from 
Roman Catholic day schools'. The standard porn scenario became as a result a 
Jewish fantasy of schtupping the Catholic shiksa.
            Furthermore, as Orthodox Jew and porn gossipmonger Luke Ford 
explains on his website (
lukeford.net
): 'Porn is just one expression of 
[the] rebellion against standards, against the disciplined life of obedience 
to Torah that marks a Jew living Judaism.' It is also a revolt against 
(often middle-class) parents who wish their children to be lawyers, doctors 
and accountants. As performer Bobby Astyr put it on the same website, 'It's 
an "up yours" to the uncles with the pinky rings who got down on me as a kid 
for wanting to be musician.'
            As religious influences waned and were replaced by secular ones, 
free-thinking Jews, especially those from California's Bay Area, viewed sex 
as a means of personal and political liberation. America provided the freest 
society Jews have ever known, as manifested by the growth of the adult 
industry. Those Jewish women who have sex onscreen certainly stand in sharp 
contradiction to the stereotype of the 'Jewish American Princess'. They (and 
I'm speculating here) may have seen themselves as fulfilling the promise of 
liberation, emancipating themselves from what feminist Betty Friedan in 1963 
called the 'comfortable concentration camp' of the household as they set out 
into the Promised Land of the porno sets of Southern California. It 
signified their economic and social freedom: they were free to choose to 
enter, rather than coerced into it by economic and other circumstances. Once 
they had lain down, they could stand on their own two feet, particularly as 
female performers typically earn twice as much as their male counterparts.
            Sexual revolutionaries
            Extending the subversive thesis, Jewish involvement in the 
X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire WASP 
establishment in America. Some porn stars viewed themselves as frontline 
fighters in the spiritual battle between Christian America and secular 
humanism. According to Ford, Jewish X-rated actors often brag about their 
'joy in being anarchic, sexual gadflies to the puritanical beast'. Jewish 
involvement in porn, by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred 
of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in 
America by moral subversion. Astyr remembers having 'to run or fight for it 
in grammar school because I was a Jew. It could very well be that part of my 
porn career is an "up yours" to these people'. Al Goldstein, the publisher 
of Screw, said (
onlukeford.net
), 'The only reason that Jews are in 
pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don't 
believe in authoritarianism.' Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling 
Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American 
mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its 
subversive character becomes more charged. Porn is no longer of the 'what 
the Butler saw' voyeuristic type; instead, it is driven to new extremes of 
portrayal that stretch the boundaries of the porn aesthetic. As new sexual 
positions are portrayed, the desire to shock (as well as entertain) seems 
clear.
            It is a case of the traditional revolutionary/radical drive of 
immigrant Jews in America being channelled into sexual rather than leftist 
politics. Just as Jews have been disproportionately represented in radical 
movements over the years, so they are also disproportionately represented in 
the porn industry. Jews in America have been sexual revolutionaries. A large 
amount of the material on sexual liberation was written by Jews. Those at 
the forefront of the movement which forced America to adopt a more liberal 
view of sex were Jewish. Jews were also at the vanguard of the sexual 
revolution of the 1960s. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman 
replaced Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required revolutionary reading. Reich's 
central preoccupations were work, love and sex, while Marcuse prophesied 
that a socialist utopia would free individuals to achieve sexual 
satisfaction. Goodman wrote of the 'beautiful cultural consequences' that 
would follow from legalizing pornography: it would 'ennoble all our art' and 
'humanize sexuality'. Pacheco was one Jewish porn star who read Reich's 
intellectual marriage of Freud and Marx (
lukeford.net
):
            "Before I got my first part in an adult film, I went down to an 
audition for an X-rated film with my hair down to my ass, a copy of Wilhelm 
Reich's Sexual Revolution under my arm and yelling about work, 'love and 
sex'."
            As Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner put it (E. Michael Jones, 'Rabbi 
Dresner's Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos' Culture Wars, May 2003), 'Jewish 
rebellion has broken out on several levels', one being 'the prominent role 
of Jews as advocates to sexual experimentation'. Overall, then, porn 
performers are a group of people who praise rebellion, self-fulfilment and 
promiscuity.
            What are we ashamed of?
            This brief overview and analysis of the role and motivations 
behind pornographers and performers is intended to shed light on a neglected 
topic in American Jewish popular culture. Little has been written about it. 
Books such as Howard M. Sachar's A History of the Jews in America (New York: 
Knopf, 1992) simply ignore the topic. And you can bet that the 350th 
anniversary of the arrival of the Jews in the United States did not include 
any celebrations of Jewish innovation in this field. Even the usually 
tolerant Time Out New York has been too prim to deal with it, although the 
more iconoclastic Heeb plans an issue on it. In light of the relatively 
tolerant Jewish view of sex, why are we ashamed of the Jewish role in the 
porn industry? We might not like it, but the Jewish role in this field has 
been significant and it is about time it was written about seriously.
            Nathan Abrams is a Lecturer in Modern American History at the 
University of Aberdeen. He has just completed a book on neo-conservatism in 
the United States.