You think anyone else is looking out for your best interest? Come over here, Baby: I’ll take care of you.

There once was a time when even something God-awful would sell 30,000 units at $79.95 a tape.

Today is the seventh anniversary of my first day at AVN, where I was hired straight out of grade school to be managing editor of AVN.com. It was these occasional flashes of brilliance that made me admire the company so. I had worked on a couple of porn-related things prior to that, and in the [...]

Following yesterday’s shocking discovery that AVN had Photoshopped (do I still need to capitalize that?) its logo onto a building owned by someone else for a press announcement, I wondered how many other Porn Valley institutions engaged in sign-anigans. Was crosstown rival XBiz misrepresenting its status at 4929 Wilshire Boulevard? (Like Ladyhawke, the XBiz building [...]

This week’s Adult Novelty Expo at the Sheraton Universal culminates with the first (annual?) O Awards Tuesday night. The awards will honor companies and products that touched just about everything other than consumers’ hearts in the breakhymen world of marital aids. Categories include Best Product (Powered) and Best Product (Non-Powered) as well as Outstanding Innovation [...]

Tomorrow begins the 340th annual Erotica LA at the L.A. Convention Center. When Gaspar de Portola (and his men) stood atop the Santa Monica Mountains in 1769 and gazed at Porn Valley to the north, they were surely thinking about Tera Patrick’s annual pilgrimage from Van Nuys to what would become Figueroa Blvd. Erotica LA [...]

Like mosquitoes buzzing around a particularly jolly and jowly Bavarian tourist, the porn industry views parodies as a dependable but fleeting income source that needs to be sucked dry while the sucking is good. But how much more can they suck? New Sensations, which last month raised Why?brows by filming a “Seinfeld” porn parody (starring [...]

Photographer Michael Grecco brought a movie camera along when he was shooting the stills for the coffeetable book “Naked Ambition: An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry.” Now, just like the Disneyland ride “Pirates of the Caribbean” became a movie and then a porno – “Naked Ambition” the book is now a movie about the [...]

Something about this week made me long for the rich taste of a Wendy’s Baconator, and I have been passed out atop a pile of their wrappers for the last several days. In an AVN story about how BBW (Big, Beautiful Women) titles are catching on with consumers, writer Nelson X wrote a hilarious but, [...]

A few years ago, the adult video industry’s connection with upstart XBiz was tenuous; Hustler and Vivid did not play ball with AVN’s rival, and only Digital Playground seemed to see the value in advertising with the magazine. But that has changed, and now both AVN and XBiz draw from the same pool of advertisers [...]

Notable events this week: XBiz commissioned a firm to create the glossy State of the Industry: Researched And Revealed! pamphlet which also makes projections of the shape of things to come. Chapters deal with the problems posed by free content online, the dwindling DVD market, and the schism in the industry about what defines a [...]

Used to be you’d know a porn performer by his tiny head or by the way she’d reflexively cringe when you approached her, but no more. Now they look just like you. Or so say organizers of January’s Adult Entertainment Expo, where for the first time fans will perform on a stage at the rear [...]

Somewhere on the campus of the University of Southern California tomorrow (only the elect know), perhaps between 11:15 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. at the Montgomery Ross Fisher Building at University Park Campus and couched in a seminar titled “White Privilege,” (but perhaps not) will be the long-awaited Southern California debut of the documentary The Price [...]

Did you know that “Gram Ponante,” like “Mark Twain,” is a term common to riverboat navigators? Strange but true. That is why it was not a surprise to learn that AVN, commonly held to mean “Adult Video News,” is also the initials of Avascular necrosis, a condition known as bone death. As you know, “waiting [...]