Exciting News to Share

My history of the adult entertainment industry has just been published, and the book is now available on Amazon.

It’s the first serious history of the industry ever written, and my original idea was to call it, “A History of the Adult Entertainment Industry,” but then, my agent said,  “No, we’re not calling it that.”  So, Stormy’s World: Inside Porn was born.

Click here to go to my new book’s web site.

Why Stormy’s World Matters

It’s always tedious to hear authors talk about why they think their book is important.  Most books sink to the bottom in five minutes, and it’s as though one had loaded all the copies into a carton and thrown it off the end of a pier.  But I hope that doesn’t happen here, for a couple of reasons:

One, the book treats our sexuality as a kind of blank slate onto which desire writes various tastes.  Sure, we’re probably born with our basic hetero, homo, or poly sexual orientations.

But, then, there are also the specifics we aren’t born with:  Do you like fetish? How about threesomes?  And how about the idea, for a guy, of being someone’s slave, and the “key holder” having absolute power over you?

No, I don’t think we’re born with these.  The culture writes them in.

And, two, how does that happen?  Porn shapes a lot of tastes.  Through porn, people discover they love things they didn’t even know existed.  I tell the anecdote of a North Carolina lad who felt that his sexuality wasn’t quite like everybody else’s, but he wasn’t sure how.  And then a friend took him to a gay bookstore in Chicago. He bought a gay s-and-m video — and played it until the tape wore out.  Yeah, he knew then.

Porn Shapes Tastes

So porn shapes tastes, and I think it has had a lot to do with the three major changes in sexuality that have taken place since the 1970s:

—Women on top.  After centuries of being the passive receptacles of male desire, women have taken charge of a lot of the bed scene.  Sometimes, they choose to be submissive, as does Ana in Fifty Shades of Grey.  More often, they choose to be dominant.  So, femdom: that’s a big change.

—A growing “porousness” between the two main sexual orientations, so that we don’t have just plain old binary straight-gay, but lots of interesting combinations and commuting across what used to be an absolute wall.

—Transgender.  This goes way beyond cross-dressing to include men who believe they inhabit women’s bodies and vice-versa.  This is so huge that I am going to write about it separately and have not included it in Stormy’s World.  But it’s definitely new, it’s real, and it’s one of the major themes of our time.

That’s enough for now.  This is a flare.  The book is out there, and I look forward to interesting exchanges about it.