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A leading academic writer on porn is Dr. Joseph Slade, a professor of Telecommunications at Ohio University. He's more interested in the classic stag film, about which he knows much, than modern porn. Dr. Slade just did a chapter for a book on Sex and Rhetoric in which he discussed hard-core video boxes, and how they have contributed to sexual language.

He's  formatting a three volume work, PORNOGRAPHY: A REFERENCE GUIDE, for Greenwood Press. One day he wants to complete a History of the Clandestine Film, on which he's worked for a dozen years. It includes the porn films of most countries, especially German, Austrian, French, and Scandinavian.

Dr. Slade's essays, all superb, include:

"Violence in the Hard-Core Pornographic Film: A Historical Survey." Journal of Communication, Summer 1984. pp.148-163.

"Nazi Imagery in Contemporary Culture: The Limits of Representation." Dimensions, Vol. 11, No. 2. pp. 9-15.

"Flesh Need Not be Mute: The Pornographic Videos of John Leslie." Wide Angle, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1997, pp. 114-148.

"Bernard Natan: France's Legendary Pornographer." Journal of Film and Video 45:2-3 (Summer - Fall 1993) pp. 72-90.

"The Porn Market and Porn Formulas: The Feature Film of the Seventies". Journal of Popular Film. Volume six, issue two. pp. 168-186.

7/30/86 Newsday
By Caryn Eve Wiener

Joseph Slade doesn't defy description. He depends on it, done as accurately and comprehensively as possible.

First, he introduces himself as "a recycled English professor." Then he explains himself as "a communications specialist." He provides his job description: chairman of Long Island University's Department of Media Arts, which instructs students in photography, broadcasting and related fields. "But I used to be a librarian in Dallas," he adds.

Yes, he calls himself a New Yorker, but he actually is a Southerner. Yet when he speaks, it is in what he calls "general American," deliberately without any trace of accent.

The list goes on and on - and so does Slade. But that is hardly surprising. For if Joseph Slade is anything, he is a professional communicator.

But in the midst of this most prestigious assignment, the Park Slope man also has a research agenda of his own. "Are you sure you want to hear this?" he asks, delicately. "One of my projects is the definitive history of pornographic films, which I am working on for the Kinsey Institute. It traces the cultural impact of pornographic films and the history, discussing the technology involved." Because he has already done much of the research in the United States, he will take many of his work with him so he can complete the study in Finland.

The other project he'll be tackling is the study of three members of the Maxim family, inventors who were originally from Maine.

"There's Hiram Stevens Maxim, the inventor of the first true machine gun, and his brother, Hudson, who invented the first practical armor-piercing shell, for naval warfare . . . and Hiram's son, Hiram Percy Maxim, who invented the silencer," he says.

The unifying thread for all of this seeming diversity is technology. Slade believes that, whether it functions as a tool for pornography or for the military, technology leaves an imprint on the American consciousness. His quest to explore mankind's relationships with machines explains, in part, how his own fascination with novelist Thomas Pynchon has led him to become an authority on Pynchon's fictional writings, along that same theme.

From the 4/19/98 Washington Post:

Joseph Slade, PhD, looks like a distinguished professor. His suit is dark
blue. He has a receding hairline and a prodigious salt-and-pepper beard.
And he acts the part. His voice is even. Calm. Rational.

As he stands at the lectern in front of about a dozen fellow academics, he
sounds as if he could be giving a discourse on economic theory. But this
evening he's lecturing on fetishes. He's just handed out a three-page,
neatly typed reading/watching list with titles including "Hidden
Obsessions," "Les Femmes Erotique" and "Latex" (voted best XXX-rated
video of 1995, he notes). He switches on the TV. Two women on the
screen are appreciating each other.

Above the pulsating music, he starts talking about the director's style.

"Mostly he's interested in female desire," says Slade. "The notion is that
woman are so voracious in their sexual appetite that they will mate with
anything."

He remarks on props in the video. A fairly standard collection of fetishes.
The lingerie, the dark glasses, the elbow-length gloves, the high heels.

Slade is director of graduate studies at the University of Ohio's school of
telecommunications. He began his porn studies about 27 years ago while a
doctoral student at New York University. One night he got sick of
working on his dissertation on the poet Edwin Markham, and decided to
go walking in Times Square.

There he saw the light – specifically the garish neon lights of a triple-X
movie house. He watched one hard-core film. Then he watched another.
After a third trip, he wrote a paper about the experience.

Today his curriculum vitae describes him as one of America's leading
experts on adult film, having analyzed more than 7,000 movies at a rate of
about a dozen a month.

Why study smut?

Because, according to Slade, adult movies portray basic human nature.
And pornography has "profoundly enriched American culture."

Besides, it's popular. Erotic or hardcore video titles account for $4.2
billion in business, he says. Did you know that we spend as much on adult
movies as we do on hot dogs?

The professor, who has shown porn clips in his courses, admits he enjoys
this particular speciality. "Originally I became interested in pornography
because it makes you horny," says Slade. "I would never want to pretend
that my interest is wholly sociological or academic."

4/19/01

Pornography - A Reference Guide

Luke's favorite living porn academic, Dr. Joseph Slade, has released a three volume work on "Pornography and Sexual Representation." Each volume costs $110 on Amazon.com.

Dr. Jay Gertzman reviews the new book "Pornography in America: A Reference Handbook" by Dr. Joseph Slade which sells for only $45: "The book should be used in many college courses; it covers almost every aspect of the subject imaginable and is, I think, a better source for learning the field than even de Grazia's _Girls Lean Back Everywhere_ or Green's _Encyclopedia of Censorship_. The sections on court decisions, legislation, genres, social context and theory, history, and distributors are very strong. There is no other book where one can find so much so coherently organized and lucidly treated."

According to the publisher: Above all else, Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide Online is an examination of the First Amendment in America from the cultural perspective of pornography. Joseph Slade uses the development and study of pornography to illuminate the considerable social, legal and cultural issues of privacy and free speech in the United States.

The Preface explains: This Reference Guide is structured around two premises. The first is that regardless of how one may feel about pornography, sexual expression, and representation, it has profoundly enriched American culture. Rather than try to "prove" this assertion, I allow the sources cited to speak for themselves. …

The second premise is that pornography and what we say about pornography constitute our principal ways of speaking about sex, one reason that many researchers prefer the neutral term sexual materials to the more charged word pornography.

5/3/01

I interviewed Ohio University's professor of Communications, Dr. Joseph Slade, Wednesday morning.

I start the conversation by addressing the professor as "Dr. Slade"

Dr Slade says: "I'll make you a deal. I'll call you Luke and you call me Joe."

Luke: "How has pornography enriched American culture?"

Joe: "Pornography serves as a kind of a fresh source of ideas and energy on the margins of a culture and one of the really remarkable things about pornography is how it manages to stay at a distance from the mainstream and continually refresh its outrage, its taboo qualities. A curious dynamic over time leads all mainstream cultures to feed on their margins. Over time, pornography moves towards the center of a culture and serves as an inspiration for new ideas.

"If you were to look at Broadway now, or legitimate cinema or literature, the internet, you'd find that images, words and text that were once considered outrageous are now commonplace. And they are restated, sometimes sanitized, but just as often passed over into the culture at large. Pornography continues to break taboos and remain outrageous, at the margins... That's what interests me.

"You could tick off the examples on your fingers and toes. Henry Miller, Anais Ninn, Walt Whitman for literature that are now accepted and reworked in mainstream literature. The same is true of photography and cinema. Which doesn't mean that everybody thinks this is a good thing. However whatever one thinks of pornography is a matter of taste and tastes change over time."

Luke: "Pornography legitimizes what has traditionally been regarded as sexual deviance."

Joe: "Yes, I think that's true. And it does this in a variety of curious ways. For a long time in our culture, any kind of gay and lesbian discourse...statement, image, or reference to homosexuality was forbidden. It was taboo. And it was regarded as pornographic, whether explicit or not. Those kinds of images and secret forms of discourse served as a bond between communities, some of which were merely imagined. A lot of homosexuals did not know that they had counterparts. And one of the worst aspects of homosexual life was the feeling of isolation. And when you ran across these images and secret movies and typewritten novels that were circulated hand to hand, at least you knew that there were other people out there. So it became a form of communication. And did legitimize it.

"The same thing could be said about birth control. It was in 1986 that Congress finally decriminalized the sending of birth control materials through the mail. For a long time, people who spoke out about the need for reproductive rights, birth control and abortion, and things like that were criminalized as pornographers. They were often judged as obscene by the courts and imprisoned.

"Pornography provides a kind of venue [for serious ideas]... At its best. Let's not kid ourselves. Some pornography is really wretched. But at the same time, and over time, in the aggregate, it does serve to keep causes alive and establish communities among people who would previously been regarded as deviant. The definitions of deviance change more slowly in the mainstream. The American Psychiatric Association changed the definition of homosexuality just a couple of decades ago. But prior to that, it had been absolutely deviant. Now the status of homosexuality per se is much more equivocal. It is on its way to a kind of acceptance or tolerance. Pornography, among other factors, makes this possible.

"You don't know how to defend pornography in that regard because so much of it is disquieting and distasteful and downright icky."

Luke: "Everything you've just been saying is why conservatives and the religious should absolutely hate and oppose pornography."

Joe: "That's right. It keeps ideas that they don't like, alive, and it gives them circulation and legitimates them."

Luke: "Once you see something on film or a written description, it becomes more real and valid."

Joe: "It moves away from imagination and closer to reality. That's one reason why they oppose it.

"That's what a culture is - an arena of discourse. It's where ideas are battled out over time. And it's where the culture generates meaning and attributes significance to certain things. It's a never ending process."

Luke: "Pat Riley says that society will always stigmatize all forms of sexual expression outside of heterosexual marriage because it is in society's interest for men to bond with one woman and help take care of the kids. And the only way men will do that is if there are no other outlets for their sexuality."

Joe: "I think society always has, but it is not necessary that it always will. Religious groups have always tried to control the amount of pleasure their members can enjoy. Any religion can say you can enjoy sex but only for reproduction, or only on Tuesdays. You can come up with any kind of strictures you want. But it is an attempt to control or stabilize the membership of the group, or to define the group."

Luke: "I can't imagine that any civilization will accept pornography as another form of entertainment."

Joe: "Well, I think it will tolerate pornography. A couple of years ago, the Economist predicted that global capitalism, within ten years, would make pornography acceptable. And that within ten years, pornography will take its rightful place in the entertainment world. It would probably be at the bottom of people's acceptance of it, but they will tolerate it. And I think that is already happening as the big corporations like AT&T and Marriott and other communications companies begin to transmit pornography for use in hotel rooms.

"I don't embrace capitalism myself, but various capitalist structures tend to seize on material that once was outrageous, but once the money comes in, it becomes quasi-respectable.

"I enjoy reading your stuff on mob connections and the like...but once you have porn companies going public..."

Luke: "What is your three volume work and why does it cost $110 a volume?"

Joe: "It's designed as a reference work for libraries. I've worked on it off and on for eleven years. It is a series of bibliographic essays in which I list and evaluate every source of information... Just about everything that anyone has ever said that is halfway intelligent on the subject."

Luke: "Have you spent much time within the industry?"

Joe: "Not a lot. When I lived in New York, I knew a few people such as Tina Russell. But I've always kept my distance because it can cloud your objectivity. I never testify in trials. I've been asked many times by police departments. I've been asked to testify before Congress and I've always said no. I want people to know that I am just a researcher and I am not an advocate for either side. I do admire some people in the industry and I dislike some, but I keep those to myself."

Luke: "Would you be willing to have some of these people over to your house for dinner?"

Joe: "Some of them, yeah."

Luke: "I went in as a libertarian and as I researched it longer, the more I hate the industry."

Joe: "I gather by looking at your website that there seems to be a love-hate relationship there. You're obviously interested in it for all sorts of reasons and you find much of it distasteful and so do I. I don't emphasize the distasteful partly because I just haven't had time for it and partly because I've been eager to just collect information. I try to avoid value judgements. I maintain a libertarian position. But I know that there is exploitation, criminal connections, etc."

Luke: "I've just found being around this industry incredibly depressing."

Joe: "I would to. That's one of the reasons I've never wanted to approach that much closer. I've been talking to Veronica Hart and so I may do an article. I might go out and see her on the ground at VCA. That will be my first real foray into the industry."

Luke: "Why a paper on Veronica Hart?"

Joe: "One of the things that strikes me now is that the industry is trying to reposition itself and exercise some control over the market place. There's a consolidation of the industry taking place on the order of what happened in Hollywood where six studios controlled distribution. You can go to the Tenplex near where I live and it is the same ten movies that are playing all over the Midwest. That's because the major studios control that.

"In the adult industry, you have about six major companies, like Vivid, Evil Angel, and VCA, are exercising control over shelf space in the video rental outlets. So there's a shakeout typical of any communication industry. From their standpoint, they're stabilizing the market. At the same time, there's a need to discover what it is that audiences really want. One of the untapped audiences is women.

"I think that Hart, without being able to articulate it fully, is trying to figure that out. How do I work within a market dominated by male taste, and she has no illusions about it being a largely sexist industry, but what can I do to make it more appealing? What is that women want their sexuality to be? And how can I be of service there?

"Again, she doesn't articulate it quite like that but the notion is that she really is interested in female sexuality. She certainly decries the notion that she is a feminist. She simply uses the word feminine.

"She's trying to reposition her films and her audience. She's a pioneer.

"The only other person doing this is Candida Royalle and her string seems to have run out. People are not interested in that kind of soft focus sentimental eroticism."

Luke: "Hart's interesting in the man bites dog category. The main consumers for this are men and women don't spend money on this stuff. That's what makes Candida Royalle such a media darling."

Joe: "Women spend some. I've been watching studies of adult video stores, and women do assist in the decisions. There was a period when women were renting a lot of video tapes, mainly for watching with their husbands and boyfriends, and that has fallen off."

Luke: "Are her movies any good, either as pornos or as movies?"

Joe: "They vary wildly. Some of the early stuff is apprentice work and dull. She did a lot of the Deep Inside Compilations... They're just spliced together sequences and they're not interesting.

"She enjoys working with Michael Ninn. She's doing something for HBO, and an animated series for Playboy. She clearly likes making things. She does best when she has a good script and she's not strong on writing scripts herself. She takes them from other people and some of them have been weak. But more recently, with Ginger Lynn writing as well as starring, some of the scenes strike me as appealing to males as well as females. And the stories are getting edgier. They have a nice erotic edge to them that are appealing."

Luke: "VCA seems to be the home of the over-the-hill porn star, using women who've worn out their one-handed welcome."

Joe: "That's possible. But judging from the steady if small market in classic porn. There are people who really enjoy watching films from the '70s and '80s. And there are people whose imaginations were cindered by Veronica Hart, Marilyn Chambers and Ginger Lynn in their salad days. And they seem to be willing to watch new incarnations of them. I don't object to it. This could be a feminist cause. People object to agism, rejecting someone's sexuality because they've passed 40 or whatever the cutoff date is. I find it interesting to rehabilitate these performers as sex stars."

Luke: "Max Hardcore."

Joe: "I find his work distasteful and misogynistic. There's a hostility there, I won't say that it upsets me, but it is extremely noticeable. I don't find it erotic. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I despise it but it presents an extreme to me. When people get upset at porn, they're often thinking about stuff like his."

Luke: "Speaking of hostility, what do you think of Dr. Robert Stoller's thesis that hostility was an essential element in sexual excitement?"

Joe: "I think transgression is always there. I've always differed from him. I think that some hostility is probably there, a sort of key ingredient to sexuality. Whether it has the proportions that he assumes, I've always questioned. He tends to single it out in the same way that Freud talks about the Id as a driving force. He sees it as more naked and I see it as more sublimated and translated into sexual attraction and appeal. I don't think that it has to be abrasive. A certain amount of hostility might be there but it is translated into the kinetic motions of intercourse.

"The late folklorist Dr. Gershon Legman thought that hostility was always present in sexual humor. Yes, but it takes many different forms. If you were to graph the millions of sexual jokes across the spectrum, you would definitely find a heavy shading towards hostility. He wrote two books on the rationale of the dirty joke. He thought hostility was a source of energy behind humor. Most jokes have an edge to them. Somebody is a butt. Somebody is a victim. Scholars are only starting to talk about this because it wasn't respectable to do this before.

"I like watching Pierre Woodman who makes glossy films for Private. There's a certain element of hostility there. There's a lot of anal sex. His films would be gonzo films except that he always embeds the sex within a story line. He has such high production values.

"Andrew Blake strikes me as an incoherent filmmaker and he's admitted that he just strings scenarios together. I don't find him terribly interesting.

"I watch Michael Ninn's stuff because I like his industrial sets and his techno approach.

"I sort of watch until I burn out or burn out my fast forward button. I've seen seven or eight thousands pornographic films. I started out at the Kinsey Institute. I helped them catalogue their stag film collection. I'm still working on a book on the stag film. It's mostly an anonymous form. One of the early centers was ironically Budapest considering they [pornographers] are going back there now. One of my grad students is working on a paper on Hungarian porn films.

"I've watched most of the world's supply of classic stag films. There are several hundred. I tend to watch them quickly. Every now and then I find something interesting or I am ravished by a particular image or I'm struck by a particular influence of performer or set or behavior..."

Luke: "How do the people closest to you regard your writing and study of pornography?"

Joe laughs. "My wife (Judith Yarros Le) has always been very supportive and perversely proud of it. There was a period when she would watch films or read text or page through photographs with me. But she got bored. She's a scholar also and works on humor. My kids are mostly amused by it. My colleagues are ambivalent. Some think it is great and some wonder why I am interested in it.

"My wife teaches interpersonal communications but like me, her PhD is actually in literature. She's just published a book on the formative years of the New Yorker. And she did a book on Garrisson Keillor.

"When I published my first article on it, I was at the University of New York, and my colleagues split evenly. I had a dean who'd also written on pornography. And she (Felice Flannery Lewis), and Margaret Mead, stood up for me. I got tenure and I never looked back.

"One of my first articles on pornographic films was for one of these odd magazines that drug companies put out to send to doctor's offices. And they reprinted one of Margaret Mead's articles. I got a phone call from her and she invited me to tea at the Museum of Natural History. We had a nice long talk. And she said, 'You really ought to be writing all this down and collecting all this stuff.'"

Luke: "How do you feel about her not taking your name?"

Joe: "I've never thought about it."

Luke: "How do your students address you?"

Joe: "As Professor Slade or Dr. Slade."

Luke: "What do you think about the growing academic fascination with pornography?"

Joe: "It's perfectly understandable. You can be cynical about it and say that it is a form of intellectual colonialism. They've run out of topics, so they've started mining the margins. At the same time, they're looking at pornography as a site for issues that are negotiated - like issues of gender, class and age. But mostly it is where notions of sexuality are given meaning. That is one of the reasons that I called my three volume work, not just pornography, but "Pornography and Sexual Representation." Because it is how sex is represented that contributes to how we think about sex.

"My assumption is that most of what we think we know about sex is just folklore.

"One of the problems with academic investigation of pornography is that so many academics are caught up in various kinds of theories. They try to impose their theories on the material rather than looking at the material first and letting the theory emerge out of the material. I try to avoid that syndrome. I've tried to look at pornography directly."

Luke: "What do you think of Gregory Dark?"

Joe: "He has a sense of humor, raucous though it is. I gather that he's changed his mind on things."

Luke: "Are there any porn films that stand on their own as good films rather than just as vehicles to masturbation?"

Joe: "Bill Osco's Alice in Wonderland was interesting. And Derek Ford's Diversions."

Luke: "Do you ever wake up at 2AM and think, 'I wish that I had never set foot in the world of pornography'?"

Joe: "Sure. Doesn't everybody. I would do the same thing about anything else that I've ever written about too. Just because you get saturated with it and you think that it has probably clouded your judgement. Do I ever feel dirtied by it? No. That's one of the reasons that I've kept my distance. I know very few people within the industry. I look at the finished product. I have the soul of a librarian or archivist.

"Perversity is inherently more interesting than routine goodness. It's liking reading Milton's Paradise Lost. Your interest is on Satan and not on God who's just a lump who sits up on his throne. Satan's human. He's defiant, rebellious, perverse."

Luke: "Is there a pattern to your research?"

Joe: "I tend to compartmentalize it. I'm really a historian of communication technologies. And at the moment I am working on a book on the inventor of the machine gun, which doesn't mean that I am interested in sex and guns.

"I've gone through the various moral panics that have attended the subject of child pornography through this century. I absolutely abhor child pornography. But I am interested in the kinds of cultural responses to it. My impression is that it is almost always hyperbolic."

5/8/01

Ian writes: Hi Luke, I found it interesting to read Dr. Slade describe how he has watched thousands of porno videos, and that he watches them until he 'burns out'. If I like a porno video I want to wank, and find it impossible to stop myself if I am alone. If I don't like a porno video I usually find it too boring to watch, because such videos are made for wanking to, and for nothing else. Citizen Kane or Gone With The Wind they aren't. Once I have wanked to a good porno video I am usually too tired to watch any more. I wonder how Dr. Slade gets over this physiological phenomenon - or perhaps he's differently constituted.

Dr. Joseph Slade writes: I doubt that I am constituted differently. Watching porn films in order to masturbate strikes me as perfectly logical. Academics often watch them for other reasons, however: to think about what particular representations (and the ways those representations are constitued) signify, or what kinds of statements (overt or subtextual) that videos are making about issues such as gender, class, age, and so on. If you are taking notes, it is sometimes difficult to masturbate. Watching porn videos for someone who wants to compile information is not unlike doing the same thing for television programs, which have approxiately the same kind of texture and appeal to certain audiences; both kinds of artifacts, considered in large numbers, indicate patterns of folklore, belief, custom, practice, etc. That is not to say that many people--myself included, do not prefer videos starring a particular person--or type of person--or featuring a particular behavior, fetishized or not. That is one of the sources of porn's appeal: to match fantasies in the viewer's head with those in the scenario. After a while, however, watching in order to gather information--and even to be stimulated--leads to boredom, at least for me.