Monday, May 28, 2018

BEAVER STREET: A HISTORY OF MODERN PORNOGRAPHY | From Free Phone Sex to Teen Porn Stars


I wrote the following Amazon review for Robert Rosen’s Vanity Fair Hot Type Pick, Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography:



For the purposes of this blog, I’ll elaborate on some references to nympholepsy that are peppered throughout the book. 

Firstly, Rosen related that ‘Free Phone Sex’ began in 1983 and that due to “[...] fear of a newly discovered disease called AIDS, phone sex sweeps America.” Publishers were making $70,000 per week and New York Telephone was making $245,000 per week. In addition to Pentagon employees “[...] spending a thousand bucks a day on free phone sex”, junior high school students were “heavily” into it phone sex too. 

This reminded me of a previous post where I wrote that "In Porn Before Puberty?", an ABC News feature, Winnifred shared that when she was in eighth grade, "[..] boys mostly, were watching porn during school [...] during independent reading, they would do that." In addition, the feature related that nine out of ten children between the ages of eight and sixteen have viewed pornography on the Internet.


Rosen started working at High Society magazine on Monday April 11, 1983, and his first writing assignment was as follows:
“I need a couple of paragraphs of girl copy for this,” the editor-in-chief said with a chuckle. “She’s only seventeen, but she’s really hot, and she can’t wait...if you know what I mean.”
Other quotes from Rosen’s time at High Society include: 
“Look at this girl - she’s beautiful, she’s barely eighteen, and she’s wide open [...]” and “We’re shooting a virgin sacrifice with heavy bondage. The girl is very young, very pretty, and she’s never posed before [...]”
Rosen related that Canada had stricter censorship laws than the States; thus, he had to do some ‘translating into Canadian’. For example, “If a woman had lost her virginity at thirteen - a huge Canadian taboo, though probably the average age for nude models - in print she lost it a “very long time ago.””

Eventually, Rosen got a job at For Adults Only (FAO) where he had to acclimate himself “[...] to the pathological sensibilities of its 50,000 readers [...] What they got for their money was a Freudian journey through a world of fetishistic delights that included [...] young nymph[et]s who “sleep with but-plugs” [...]” (Per Rosen, FAO was edited by Izzy Singer, the author of Teasing Teenage Daughter.)


At Screw’s annual Halloween bash partiers gathered around the stage to watch, “[...] Goldstein [Screw’s publisher] maul the naked breasts of a beautiful, auburn haired woman. “She’s only seventeen!” Goldstein told his jeering colleagues [...] “I met her through a personal ad and I can’t wait to eat her [...]!”

This next excerpt, very interestingly, reminded me of the cameraless documentary The Allure of Schoolgirls (2017). Rosen related that Chip Goodman, the publisher of X-Rated Cinema, and the magazines readers went “berserk” over images of schoolgirls. And Rosen noted in a footnote that “[...] the Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996 [...] made it illegal for sex magazines to publish pictures of models of any age wearing schoolgirl ensembles.” 

Traci Lords


Rosen shared briefly that Trinity Loren “[...] moved back to L.A. on her own when she was about fifteen and soon after found her way into the porn biz.” And that “[...] when Loren was a child, her father probably molested her.” 

However, Rosen elaborate on Traci Lords, whom also entered pornography as a nymphet and was allegedly raped when she was ten by her sixteen-year-old boyfriend.
“Two months after her eighteenth birthday, Traci Lords [...] perhaps the most widely photographed porn model ever, confessed to the FBI and the L.A. County district attorney that she’d begun acting in X-rated films when she was a fifteen-year-old runaway [...] What her confession meant was immediately clear: With the notable exception of her last movie [...] Lord’s entire body of work [...] had been transformed, as if by magic, into illegal child pornography.”
Lords confessed to “[...] using a false birth certificate to fraudulently acquire a passport, using this phony passport to obtain a fake California driver’s license with a false date of birth - November 17, 1962 (making her six years older than she actually was) - and then using both pieces of identification to prove that she was of legal age as she systematically sought work in the porn industry.”

Despite Lord’s confession, the naive mainstream media (unsurprisingly) portrayed her as an innocent and “exploited” victim, which is a phenomenon that we see repeatedly on this blog.

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