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| Linda Lovelace signature |
Those famously infamous in the porn busines led lives of great tragedy, beyond minor jail sentences and drug sentences where redemption can occur. Redemption isn't so easy in the business of sex on the screen. It can impact an individual's life for many years.
The last of the big three porn stars, Marilyn Chambers was found dead in August 2009. Like Linda Lovelace and John Holmes she died, relatively young and with problems.
Marilyn Chambers had once been the Ivory Snow girl, then started her porn career, to the surprise of many in the film industry. She was a star in many films and actually said she enjoyed her career and was able to live out her fantasies during it. She was 56 years old when she died, and investigators are still determining the cause, according to conflicting reports.
Chambers fame came from a film called Behind the Green Door. This was the first interracial pornographic film with a major audience. It gave Chambers notoriety and brought crowds from everywhere to indulge fantasies as well perhaps. Many people were stunned to see a white woman having sex on the screen with a black man. The notoriety brought a run on Ivory Snow boxes that had Marilyn Chamber's picture. In the 1980's she was arrested for dancing nude in a club in California. She also got news for running as Vice President on the Personal Choice Party in 2004 and 2008. She declared during the course of her career that she had wanted substantive movie roles, but no one would hire her after her porn films.
The death of Chambers brings to mind another short and tragic life of a porn star from the same 1970's era.. Linda Lovelace starred in a film "Deep Throat." This film brought politicians and the film industry, along with large members of the public, to see explicit sex on the big screen, as opposed to being shown on the small screens in seedy city districts
The film, "Deep Throat," also had a special feature to it, since Lovelace was shown reflecting her particularly sterling ability, to be able to swallow a long penis down to the very base. This was so uniquely popular that stars such as Vice President Spiro Agnew, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and Ed McMahon were said to have lined up to see it and to get private showings. Jack Nicholson, on the other hand, had particularly cryptic comments after seeing the film, believing the real thing to be far more exciting than the visual.
Lovelace's co-star in the film was John Holmes, who was reported to be super-sized quite personally. The film was said to have had ten million viewers and to have made $600 million. Those 60 minutes of porn material were reported to have been bankrolled by the mob.
Lovelace later wrote an autobiography in which she repudiated her past, but still was held in contempt according to many in the porn industry. She died at the age of 53.
John Holmes discovered he had a few inches on male competitors for penis length (13 inches) and circumference and decided to use this particular characteristic for a film career of his own. His descent was fairly rapid, as he became seriously involved in drugs. He turned to prostituting both himself and a girlfriend, Dawn Schiller. Later he became involved in the "Wonderland Murders" a gangland killing since he had a close relationship with a drug dealer by the name of Eddie Nash who was the kingpin involved. He refused to cooperate with authorities and was acquitted for lack of evidence. His notoriety, however, for the worst in his life, is, however, overshadowed by his official site, which remains a form of enticement for the male who wants to succeed himself in a business where Holmes eventually died from his exploits. Or it may serve as the door to the explicit sex images which made Holmes well known in the porn industry.
Holmes died of AIDs in 1988 at the age of 43, declaring that he had sex with thousands of women and was reported to have made 2500 films. A film was made of his life, and he has been at times a cult figure on college campuses.
The thrill of explicit sex films no longer brings those long lines of people who saw such films as "I Am Curious Yellow" with its detailed sex scenes. Even Jackie Onassis was one of those who saw and commented on the film. Porn stars were rock stars of sorts in their heyday, but the lives of the film stars who made some porn films mainstream were difficult, brutish and short.
These days the porn business is big business on the Internet. Girls and women set up their own sites but are often directed by mega-business operators of an underground network that combs the streets looking for those willing to play their part in building the porn business. It is done in much the same way as the movie business of years ago, only the widespread nature of the business is a major problem around the world.
And some who have been in the porn business and music business, like Sasha Grey, declare that "music is just like the porn business." She discusses how advantageous it can be to use some of the techniques in pornography as part of music videos and how the more explicit the filming, the more the music created, often with tracks, the more popular the music can be.
The biggest hotel giants and other corporations are involved in the distribution of adult entertainment, as CBS reported in September 2014. The Hilton chain is just one of them, offering "adult entertainment" in the private comfort of hotel rooms. General Motors and the Marriott are big players. Furthermore the porn business works hand in glove with all areas of entertainment, especially the music industry. And some women enter the industry because it is a good way of making $1000 in just two hours, with some crossing from the porn industry into music videos as well.
The newest stars of the pornographic films find they can make a lot of money in the entertainment business, with their knowledge of how to pose for explicit films.
But it is in Eastern Europe where many women are recruited for the porn business. Some of the more talented and resourceful of them utilize front operations in the entertainment industry to expand their clientele. A research study from DePaul University in 2010 offers substantial detail about the porn industry in Eastern Europe. The author observes that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are victims of sex trafficking, and that large numbers of people are recruited as either sex slaves or used in filming. They come from around the world, many through forced servitude.
Karina Beecher, the author of the DePaul study on the porn business in Eastern Europe had particular interest in the topic because she is from that region and had researched the topic over many years. She quotes one of her resources as saying that, "Human sex trafficking is the third most profitable criminal activity in the world, surpassed only by drugs and weapons." She joins other advocates against the sex trafficking and porn business for dehumanizing women with pictures and explicit poses that encourages the continuation of the practices that earn billions of dollars for those involved. Those who reinforce the images, by their appreciation of them, and the contextual premises used in advertising and on everything from product placement to music videos, also helps to maintain the business by glorifying the most dramatic and explicit of images on the Internet and elsewhere. The research author also observes that most of the women portrayed in these images are white and blonde.
Although women have been objectified for centuries, the Internet has expanded the practice; and there are now many opportunities for the average consumer to find violent and very explicit pictures and videos of women who pose in the most intimate fashion. The infusion of these images in areas where the public does not expect to find them has brought increased volumes of people as willing participants in the industry or as sex slaves. Some of the women recruited as young girls learn the business well enough to become entrepreneurs themselves, further expanding opportunities as women sometimes will believe they can trust other women. But many young women becomes sex slaves and suffer terrible abuse at the hands of those who have forced them into prostitution and pornography, according to MailOnline in March of 2014 with Eastern Europe central to these activities.
In 2001, according to the author's research support, 21 million users logged onto porn sites, or approximately 1/3 of Internet users at the time. Beecher believes that it is likely many, if not most, of the women are coerced into making the videos or posing for pictures but opens the door somewhat to the notion that some may become entrenched in the business and may be involved as willing participants. She tells us, however, that it is hard to tell whether or not there is coercion involved and uses facial and body characteristics to identify how the woman might feel during the course of any filming.
And while Eastern Europe is a central area for human trafficking, the West Coast of the United States has been underlined as a problem area, with many young women who live on the streets, and look for drugs, find themselves either willing, or unwilling, participants in the porn business.
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| Fringes of downtown Portland a site police frequent because of trafficking and drugs |
While the sex trafficking trade remains of paramount concern throughout the world, much of it happens in Eastern Europe. The notion of how women are objectified by exploitation of women's bodies that helps to fuel the porn business reveals how the greater culture may somehow be partly responsible for the problems incurred by women like Lovelace and Chambers. How many of these budding starlets on porn sites will suffer the same fate and live short, tragic lives is unknown, but those who study the problem assert that without a willing audience and the availability and widespread nature of the porn business through the Internet, the problem will not only remain but continue to grow. And as criminal behavior that is lucrative, it helps fuel the weapons trade, a risk for everyone as tensions occur in every part of the world.
