On occasion, I come across these interviews with these old porn stars like Christy Canyon, or Ron Jeremy and they swoon about the good old days of porn. I don’t think 30 years from now you will see porn stars from 2014 doing that. Most of them will realize that they’re lucky to escape that lifestyle with their lives, or will be so freakishly weird you wouldn’t be able engage them in normal conversation.
I only hesitate to out and out condemn porn, because I can at least remember back to those days of Christy Canyon and Ron Jeremy when porn didn’t seem so abusive, violent, and creepy.
Now as then it’s the women that are the stars, and some of them are obviously attractive, but the difference is now most of the male actors, producers and directors come off as lechers and perverts.
Even more disturbing is that vast majority of modern porn comes off as a choreographed rape or a molestation. Complete turn off for me, but I guess I’m not who they are marketing it to, and I cringe to think who their target market is.
When you start factoring in the human-sex trafficking factor into the mix it definitely tips the scale for me to the condemn side but again I hesitate to do that. I just worry about the sliding scale of what we categorize as freedom of expression in this country. Where do we draw the line as what is freedom to express yourself and what is just wrong.
To be honest with you, that's about the time that I first really became aware of and started watching porn. And I think that maybe you're just not aware of how "abusive, violent, and creepy" a lot of the porn was back then. More than a few of the popular and widely available movies from that time can't even be found anymore, unless they have been severely edited (thanks, Ed Meese). I'm not aware that Christy Canyon or Seka ever got involved in "rape & abuse" movies. But Ginger Lynn, Vanessa del Rio, Erica Boyer, Toni Frances, Kristara Barrington, Kelly Nichols, Samantha Fox (ever watched "Her Name Was Lisa" or "Prey of a Call Girl" from that period?) and many other "golden age girls" all did rape & abuse scenes in movies. "Deep Throat" wasn't exactly romance porn, eh? IMO, the New York porn scene was particularly harsh and creepy... even to a young, horny porn hound like me at that time. New York Live and Studio One weren't owned by
nice boys at all. Even Swedish Erotica had some pretty harsh stuff. And Dark Brothers, Wet Video and anything coming out of Germany or Japan back then was often pretty shocking. But still, I do think what you had back then was more, better and original plots, better scripts, a more professional feel to a lot of the productions (I mean, many were actually shot on film, not tape), etc. And if a girl wanted to disappear after doing a handful of films, she could probably pull it off - not so much now.
But anyway, I think what's happening now is there are so many girls going in & out and it's a commodity/assembly-line, purely profit driven business, whereas in Christy's time (according to her), there was just a relatively small group of performers and people knew each other - sounds kinda
small town, huh?
And as someone else already said, even a fly-by-night girl can be tracked down now (like in the I.D. Section here). Even though the 80's stuff was on video, it doesn't seem like people really have databases that pick up the early, obscure performers the way they do now. So because of that, I'm sure some regret it, depending on what they chose to do afterward. And some just faded back into the woodwork and are now going to PTA meetings in peace.