Paul Fishbein
Podcast Transcript Season 1 Episode 12
Interviewer: Liz Goldwyn
Liz Goldwyn: Hello. Welcome to The Sex Ed. I'm your host, Liz Goldwyn, founder of thesexed.com, your number one source for sex, health and consciousness education. My guest today is Paul Fishbein, producer of the Showtime series Submission and Sex With Sunny Megatron, as well as founder of the AVN Media Network, which is the adult film industry's leading trade publication.
Paul also started the annual AVN Convention and Award Show in Las Vegas, otherwise known as the Oscars of porn. I got to know Paul in 2014 through Dr. Walter Brackelmanns, Director of UCLA's Sex and Relationship Therapy Seminar where Paul is a frequent lecturer. Paul's career, and this episode, spans the history and economics of adult films, from studio systems and VHS tapes to online hubs of aggregated content.
Paul tells me how a college kid with no previous knowledge of porn ended up founding such an industry giant, how he's transitioned to making Hollywood product, and why he considers himself a feminist.
Liz Goldwyn: You started the biggest adult industry newsletter upon graduating from college in 1982 with no prior experience or exposure in the industry, is that right?
Paul Fishbein: That is correct.
Liz Goldwyn: How does one break into this?
Paul Fishbein: Well, it wasn't a matter of breaking in. Being a journalism student and wanting to write and, for reasons unbeknownst to anyone in my family, wanting to publish, it was really just an opportunity. I had published magazines from when I was 14-years-old and sold them. It was a wrestling magazine when I was 14 and, when I was in college, it was a general interest-entertainment magazine that was given out free on all the college campuses in Philadelphia. It was advertising supported and I taught myself how to publish.
But what was really happening was I was a movie buff, a film buff, and while in college thought about producing movies or being in the movie business and had always dreamed of coming to Hollywood but, instead, went to Temple University in Philadelphia. And had a job at the end of my college years at Movies Unlimited which was, at the time, the largest single retail outlet for the burgeoning home video industry. You know, the early '80s were the times people were getting VCRs for the first time and these stores were popping up that were, you know, buying, selling or renting movies.
Working at Movies Unlimited and graduating college with another friend of mine, named Irv Slifkin, and us wondering, "Well, we're writers and we're published in daily newspapers,and, you know, we've been writing our whole lives, why are we in retail?" We started to think about what we could do to get out of retail. People were coming into that store after getting their VCRs and the first thing they wanted to know was, "Can you recommend an adult movie?"
Around 1982, when that was happening, I would state clearly that 99.5% of all adults had never seen an adult movie. Up until that point the only way to see an adult movie was to go to a theater or a peepshow in a sleazy adult bookstore, or possibly if somebody had a 16 millimeter or eight millimeter loop. It wasn't readily available. And with the VHS and Beta market starting to ramp up, that's when people were able to see adult films for the first time.
So people would get their VCRs and they'd come into the store and they'd look at us and say, "Can you recommend an adult film?" And I had seen maybe three or four in my life and thought, "That's it! That's what we'll do. We will do a movie magazine about all the new movies that are coming out on video and that way the consumer will have a guide to pick what they wanted to see." So three guys, each put up $300 and-
Liz Goldwyn: $300?
Paul Fishbein: $300 each, three guys. $900. We did a sample issue so we knew what it would look like, and we took ads in men's magazines and we just boldly said, "Send $18 to Adult Video News and we'll give you a one-year subscription. We're going to review all the new movies coming out on video cassette, interview the top stars and tell you all the new things that are happening in adult video." We had no clue and money started to come in.
Liz Goldwyn: So it was a crash course for you in researching all the adult videos that were being produced around this time and getting to know the market?
Paul Fishbein: Yeah. It was a crash course and we started using freelancers that we paid by the review so that we could review everything. And we ramped up and we started interviewing porn stars, and it was a growing business and we were kind of welcomed.
Liz Goldwyn: Well, you got in on the ground floor.
Paul Fishbein: Yeah, we got in right at the beginning.
Liz Goldwyn: And it probably helped really publicize the performers and the films as well. They wanted-- I imagine there was not a newsletter like this.
Paul Fishbein: No, but the interesting thing that happened is when those subscriptions started coming in it wasn't necessarily all consumers, it was these video stores that were opening up, all these mom-and-pop stores, in all these small towns in Iowa, Nebraska and Oregon, were sending in $18 because they had no information and they needed to stock their stores.
So, that's how AVN in the first year went from consumer reports to trade magazine, but we always maintained those consumer subscribers and used to like to say that we were like Variety, in that the industry read it, but if you were a film buff you read Variety or Billboard. The industry subscribed to Billboard, but if you were a music buff and you wanted to see what the top songs were on the charts, you bought Billboard and that's sort of what AVN became.
Liz Goldwyn: This was really the heyday of the porn business. This was when people were buying VHS tapes of pornography, you could watch it at home. This is post the era of only being able to access pornography through magazines and, of course, this is at a time when Hugh Hefner is prolific, Larry Flynt with Hustler, and the AVN Awards, which you started, were literally the Oscars of the industry. Can you talk a little bit about when you introduced the convention and the awards?
Paul Fishbein: So, the awards came first and again, if you follow the thread of a movie buff thinking he's making a movie magazine, we decided that we were going to give out awards and have nominations just like the Oscars; the best actor, best actress, best film, best director and, of course, best sex scene.
And the first year, the year of 1983, at the end of the year we got our freelancers together and we voted and we nominated five in every category and voted and announced the first winners in January of 2004, I’m sorry, 1984. There was no awards show, I just took a train to New York, trophy in hand, and handed it to the director of the best film and took a picture and that was in the next issue of AVN.
It was the following year, during the Consumer Electronics Show, which is where all of the adult people originally exhibited their wares to retailers looking to buy new material for their stores, that we introduced a live AVN Award Show, which was at a bingo parlor in the Aladdin Hotel. A little wine and cheese reception with folding chairs and that's where the first live AVN Awards happened.
But what happened was we invited everybody and we asked a lot of the talent if they would give out the awards and people came to this bingo parlor in the Aladdin Hotel dressed for a night out-- in gowns and suits. All the big stars of the day --Traci Lords, and Ginger Lynn, and Marilyn Chambers, and John Holmes-- showed up and wanted to be there. We realized there was an appetite for an awards show based on the video industry. So, from that point on, we made it a live event and it grew, and grew and grew.
Liz Goldwyn: How many categories were there at the beginning? Because I've actually been to the AVN Awards and it was like a phone book.
Paul Fishbein: Were you there when I owned the company?
Liz Goldwyn: I was not. I was there in Vegas in I believe it was 2013.
Paul Fishbein: Right, because I sold the company in 2010 and left for good in 2011, so I say nothing about the awards shows past 2011.
Liz Goldwyn: But I'm asking how many categories-
Paul Fishbein: At the beginning?
Liz Goldwyn: ... were there when you were-
Paul Fishbein: Probably 14 or 15.
Liz Goldwyn: How divided by sub-genre was it, when you say best sex scene?
Paul Fishbein: At the beginning there was one best sex scene award.
Liz Goldwyn: So it wasn't best blow job, best anal, best ...
Paul Fishbein: No. That came with the large proliferation of material. I mean, the industry grew, and grew and grew for 25 straight years and there were tens of thousands of movies being released each year. So we, at AVN, having all this material to deal with, we divided everything into sub-genres and we sort of created a situation where there were 115 categories and 10 to 12 nominees in each category.
Liz Goldwyn: Makes for a long night.
Paul Fishbein: Yeah, except that we got a clue early on that we had to keep the show into two-- after the first four hour show we realized we had to keep the show under two hours and so what we did was we picked 12 categories or 15 categories to give out on stage and, at the end of the night, we scrolled the winners in all the other categories to make the show entertaining and quick.
Liz Goldwyn: When you originally started the newsletter was it targeted towards a heterosexual audience?
Paul Fishbein: Yes. At the beginning it was, but within that first year we started to add gay content. And when we say heterosexual, heterosexual in the early days of porn included lesbian porn because lesbian porn, especially in the early days of porn, was basically men producing lesbian porn the way they think men want to see women together.
Liz Goldwyn: Exactly. A lesbian porn marketed to men-
Paul Fishbein: To men.
Liz Goldwyn: ... directed and produced-
Paul Fishbein: By men.
Liz Goldwyn: ... by men.
Paul Fishbein: Right.
Liz Goldwyn: This is also the early days of the porn business before the stars were starting to step behind the camera and produce and direct and own their own content, correct?
Paul Fishbein: Yeah.
Liz Goldwyn: They had contracts, much in the same ways of old Hollywood, stars had contracts to studios?
Paul Fishbein: Well, no. Let's dial that back a little bit. Coming out of the theatrical era, into the early '80s, basically it just sort of moved. In other words, migrated. The content was at the beginning still shot on film for theatrical release and home video was sort of the ancillary market at the beginning. Somewhere in the '80s, as people realized cameras were cheaper, they could shoot on video, they could put out product quicker and easier and less expensive, people started to shoot for the video market. And that was the early '80s.
There were girls, men under contract until Vivid, in 1984, started a company that was based on the old Hollywood system where they would have exclusive stars. They took Ginger Lynn, who was emerging as the biggest star of the industry, signed her to an exclusive contract, launched the company based on her and that's sort of how the exclusive contract model began. Vivid did it very successfully for very many years and only a couple of other people who tried to emulate it did it successfully.
Liz Goldwyn: Wicked-
Paul Fishbein: Wicked Pictures and Digital Playground. And those are, sort of the big three. Other people signed only women to exclusive contracts. In fact, Vivid was the only company to sign a man to an exclusive contract.
Liz Goldwyn: Who did they sign?
Paul Fishbein: His name was Steven St. Croix and that's when Vivid was on a roll of trying to win best picture every year because winning our best picture really meant a lot to the company, and he was the best actor in the business. And they were doing features with a lot of plot, so they signed him to an exclusive contract for a couple of years where he could only act for Vivid. But that was only time that happened.
Liz Goldwyn: Tell me about when you started the convention, the AVN Convention?
Paul Fishbein: Well the convention-- okay, so for people who aren't savvy, there's the Consumer Electronics Show, I think everybody's heard of that, and they sort of were defacto dumping grounds for the adult business because when the adult business started and people were putting out movies, they didn't have any place to exhibit, so they immediately went to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, and in June in Chicago, as a place to display, to find customers, to find new customers. Maybe the stores or the new distributors would come there. And so-
Liz Goldwyn: And this is just videos that are being presented there?
Paul Fishbein: Yeah, at the time-
Liz Goldwyn: Not sex toys at all-
Paul Fishbein: No, we're not at the sex toy revolution yet. Videos, VHS and Beta movies. And so in Las Vegas the show would take place at the Last Vegas Convention Center. CES took space at the Sahara Hotel down the street and put the adult people in the Sahara Hotel and then told people if you want to see adult, go there. They segregated them.
In Chicago, it was at McCormick Center, which is the big convention place, and they put like walls up and walled off the adult people so that if you were offended. Because within those sections, people brought girls to sign autographs and sell movies, and so the adult business always felt like they were paying top dollar, they were paying the full fare, but they were sort of the bastard stepchildren.
And, in the mid-to-late '90s, we were entering the Internet business and we were going to purchase an Internet trade show because Internet was starting to happen and the adult sites were starting to happen. And so we decided that we were going to start an adult show-- one more thing happened.
There was a summer convention called the Video Software Dealers Association and it was a big show in the '80s and early '90s. It was every summer and it was with all the studios; Paramount, MGM, Disney would huge displays, like 100 by 100 displays in Las Vegas. And all the retailers would come and then the adult people were kind of put off to the side there too. What happened was Video Software Dealers Association decided to move the show around -- not just Las Vegas-- so they moved to Dallas, Texas where the Dallas Police said that they were going to arrest any people exhibiting adult ware.
Now, this is the mid '90s and there was still a lot of obscenity prosecutions, and there were still a lot of-
Liz Goldwyn: This is like the height of Tipper Gore crusade against language? Or is that a little later?
Paul Fishbein: That's late '80s, but all of it led into that coming out of the bush in Reagan years. Even though when Bill Clinton came that stopped, there was still pockets in conservative areas. And Dallas, big city, was actually considered a conservative area when it came to exhibiting adult video.
So when that happened, all the adult people dropped out of the Video Software Dealers Association. The following year the Video Software Dealers Association was going to be in downtown Los Angeles. We went and we rented the Shrine Auditorium down the street from the convention center where we were going to do an adult AVN convention opposite the Video Software Dealers Association and just let any of those retailers in for free.
And we had a partner, a trade show partner, that we were partnering the East Coast Video Show in Atlantic City in the fall. They came to us and said, "Please don't do that. Please do it with us," so we partnered up with a major trade show company called Advanstar and then we created an adult show that we did during CES, on the same dates, but at the Sands Expo Center down the street from the-
Liz Goldwyn: In Vegas?
Paul Fishbein: In Las Vegas. And by doing that, we started this joint venture with Advanstar. We created an entire adult show at the same time as CES, and we allowed anybody with a CES badge to come in for free. So we had all of the CES crowd plus the adult retailers who wouldn't necessarily go to CES and they all converged on Las Vegas in January and that's when we started the convention and started to, kind of, take over that market.
Liz Goldwyn: And it became extremely lucrative very quickly.
Paul Fishbein: It was lucrative. Well, we had a partner. It was lucrative and it was huge and it ramped up quickly. Then, of course, the AVN Awards were the end event of the weekend.
Liz Goldwyn: You essentially had a monopoly. Because in terms of trade publications or conventions-- for example, in Hollywood you have the Hollywood Reporter, you have Variety-
Paul Fishbein: There were other publications that came and went. There were plenty of people that tried to compete. I think that the one thing that AVN had was the integrity. Most of the people understood that AVN had integrity. They knew that they spent money with AVN and their movies got bad reviews. They knew that they weren't necessarily going to win awards because they've been through it. And others, who've spent no money on advertising and had a good movie, got recognized.
And while it caused me, personally a lot of stress, it was extremely stressful, we did have that integrity and I think that that's what won out over competitors. And there were other trade shows trying to siphon off, but it wasn't necessarily a monopoly, we just did a really good job.
Liz Goldwyn: My experience going to AVN as someone who researches and studies sex, I was able to be objective about the experience, but I still came away feeling overwhelmed, oversaturated and a bit sad, even though I don't come into a situation like that and think that it's titillating. I come into a situation where I'm in a convention center that's based on pornography and I'm approaching it the same way I would a car trade show or a fashion trade show.
Paul Fishbein: Well, let's work backwards, okay? So when you went in 2013 it had evolved into something much different than what the business was at the beginning. If you go back to the story I told you --film buff, journalism and opportunity-- it was a new business and it was always a business. So I can say from almost the very start I never watched a porn film for pleasure.
Liz Goldwyn: But you're still watching a lot of it?
Paul Fishbein: Watching it and fast-forwarding through it and looking at it strictly from a clinical point of view, where I was definitely numbed to it-
Liz Goldwyn: I imagine you must have been on lots of porn film sets for your business?
Paul Fishbein: Well, actually, I was just writing a bit of my history for a project and I just writing about the first time I went on a porn set, and it was shocking, the first time I was on a porn set. But I-- no, I don't think I hadn’t-
Liz Goldwyn: Let's hear about it.
Paul Fishbein: Well, the story is I was in Philadelphia working out of my apartment. It's probably maybe 1984, and a producer named Hal Freeman, who was a very outgoing producer-director, called me on the phone and said, "I'm shooting in San Francisco and I challenge you to come out here and write about this big movie I'm making. I'm shooting on real airplane hanger and blah, blah," and I'd never been on a porn set. And so I flew out the next day to do my first --the first-- on the set piece, the making of a movie called Layover, about, you know, an airplane.
And I walked on set and the first time I saw people having sex in front of me I was shocked. I was like, "I can't believe this," and I was embarrassed, and I stepped away. I didn't think I should be looking. There's lights, and there's cameras, and there's two cameras, and there's a boom operator, and these people are fucking and I'm like really weirded out by it. But I met a bunch of people, they were nice. I did a-- they asked me to do a walk-on as a drunk on an airplane. It's my one acting thing on playing an extra.
It's the first time I was on a porn set and there was a pretty young girl who was trying to fuck this guy in the airplane and the guy couldn't get it up. And this was before the age of Viagra. And he couldn't get it up and she was humiliating him. She was saying, "This guy can't fuck me. Hal, I'm getting tired. This guy can't get it up." She was humiliating him and he was trying, trying, trying and I was, like, taking my notes and I'm writing about this.
And, you know, in the story, I wrote the story and I wrote about that incident and I named him by name and all of that because I was like, "Got to be honest and objective about it," and that guy left the industry, never to be heard of again. I'm not saying that I got rid of him but-- or that my story made him leave, but it was really strange to me.
Liz Goldwyn: Why do you think performers get into the business back then and now? Has it changed at all?
Paul Fishbein: Well, you have to talk to the individual performers. I mean, some were trying to act and, you know, couldn't get acting work so they fell into it. I mean, they all have great stories. Georgina Spelvin who was in The Devil in Miss Jones was just working as an extra and a cook, working as a cook and then they asked her if she wanted the lead role. Marilyn Chambers answered an ad for a film and didn't know it was going to be a hardcore film, it turned out to be Behind the Green Door. She was an actress. She had been on the Ivory Snow box. Ron Jeremy was a school teacher who wanted to be an actor. I mean there are lots and lots of stories.
It's not like today, today where girls and guys turn 18, being in porn is actually a career choice. It was never a career choice. It was an accident, always an accident. Or Paul Thomas, who went on to be a big director who was a porn star. He was on the set of Layover, I met him for the first time, had been in Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway. He was an actor who needed to do fuck films just to make a living, to pay the bills. And so they just fell into it in those days. More so than now where I think it's a career choice for people.
Liz Goldwyn: You said that you've talked some women out of getting into pornography. Why is that?
Paul Fishbein: Well, I always felt that no matter how the industry was emerging, it was still kind of a brutal business. Especially for the girls and especially girls who are 18 and making a decision to make porn films because the one thing you knew is that once you do it and once you sign that release, it's out there forever. And I don't know that girls 18, 19 and 20 are necessarily ready to make choices that are going to affect the rest of their lives.
And, you know, if you're a girl, or woman, who wants to eventually get married and have a family, or go into any sort of line of work, there's a stigma attached to being a porn star or a porn actress that's going to stick with you for the rest of your life, then and now. And you're never, ever going to shed that, so if you're going to make a decision at 18, it's like getting the wrong tattoo. You're going to have it for the rest of your life.
Liz Goldwyn: Had the Internet radically changed the profit margin that you were dealing with?
Paul Fishbein: So, the Internet, which we embraced at the beginning as a new revenue stream for us as a trade magazine, in that there was a new business and it was adult pay sites, and it was a huge business that ramped up even quicker than the video business. It was like the Wild West. The adult webmasters figured out how to monetize the Internet faster than anybody else, so we bought an existing trade show and magazine and got into that end of the business and had a parallel magazine and a parallel trade show.
And that was good at the beginning, but what happened with the Internet was that some geniuses decided that they could grab a larger share of the Internet profits by putting free content on the Internet and then getting all of the people who were going to these free sites to pay for their pay sites. And that started a shift in the way people started to consume pornography when they started to-- when they were able to watch stuff on the Internet, especially when streaming got better, when the quality got better and better. People were able to start watching pornography. Why pay for it if it's free on the Internet?
So the traditional pornographers, the ones who had been in the video business but who had no idea how to monetize the Internet, instead of trying to figure out how to monetize it, started selling their content in bulk to these new entrepreneurs who were coming into the business, who used this existing content as free content to draw people in to their more premium content. And that just started the wave of free content, so now a whole generation of kids have turned 18-- I'm presuming kids don't want porn till they're 18.
Liz Goldwyn: Well, let's be realistic.
Paul Fishbein: I know. I'm doing the politically correct comment.
Liz Goldwyn: Well, I don't think we can be politically correct about this, they're looking at it. Yeah.
Paul Fishbein: No, of course. And I'm saying now there's never been a thought in anyone's mind, a kid's mind, to buy pornography when it's free on the Internet. So those who pay for pornography, whether it's DVDs these days or a pay site, is an aging older demographic or a very small demographic of people that want premium content that fits a certain niche or a certain desire of theirs. But for the most part, most pornography is consumed on free on the Internet.
So that hurt our business tremendously because the bulk of our advertisers were people that were selling the DVDs, they were promoting their new DVDs. And so we went from 150 pages of video advertising a month to 25, supplemented by sex toys, but it wasn't enough to make up for the loss.
Liz Goldwyn: So let's get into this, this young people consuming so much porn. Coming from someone who's been in the industry since you saw the transition from, you know, VHS to online to what's happening now. How do you feel that the consumption, oversaturation of porn is affecting young people and their experience with sexuality?
Paul Fishbein: I think it is and I wish it didn't exist. As much as I'm a free speech advocate and a First Amendment advocate, I always said, "Pornography should be protected by the First Amendment if it is performed by consenting adults and consumed by consenting adults," and that has always been the line that I drew.
Now kids, at any age, with one click can get pornography. I always wanted there to be a firewall. I always wanted there to be a barrier of entry for kids to get access to pornography, but the horse is out of the barn. And, unfortunately, there are sites all over the world just putting their content up for free, there's no barrier of entry and there's not stopping it. So I think it probably has had a profound effect on the way people go through puberty and their development and the way they view sex.
You hear about it, you see it, you read about it. There was just a big article in the New York Times Magazine, a big article about that, that was very, very deep and very, very well-researched. It was shocking, considering I have an 11-year-old daughter who's very Internet savvy and very smart, and who is going to encounter it if she hasn't already.
Liz Goldwyn: What are you going to say to her when she understands what you started and your role within the industry?
Paul Fishbein: I'm going to explain it to her the same way I always did, that it was a business and that it was consenting adults that were performing, and consenting adults that were consuming. It was never intended for children and that it was an art form that just involved explicit sex. I mean, I think-- it won’t-- I don't know how she'll accept it and I don't know how she will feel about it, but I know that I won't have a problem discussing it with her. She's very, very smart and we discuss a lot of intelligent-- a lot of issues, adult issues, in adult ways that I would think are well beyond an 11-year-old's years. So I think she's used to having mature discussions.
Again, she's just on the cusp of puberty. She doesn't discuss any of that with me, she discusses it all with my wife and I respect that. That's her choice. But we have a great relationship. I'm very open with her and we'll discuss it. It'll be more open and more honest than maybe in a lot of households, but how she will accept what I did?
Listen, even today I produce content. I produce shows for Showtime and the Playboy Channel that are adult in nature, TV-MA. And when she said to me, "Why can't I watch any of the shows you produced?" I said, "Because they're all TV-MA and they're all adult," and she goes, "Well, you let us watch Walking Dead. That's TV-MA." "Well, these are more adult. They're about sex, so when you're 18 you can watch all of the shows that I've produced."
Liz Goldwyn: It's interesting that in our culture we somehow deem it more acceptable for young people to look at violent images than we do for them to look at sexually explicit images or even, barring that, have some sort of standardized sex education to go along with this overconsumption of pornography.
Paul Fishbein: I always think we're bad parents for letting her watch Walking Dead. She views it as a comic book. She understands that it's comic book violence. She says things like, "I just need to prepare for the zombie apocalypse. I need to know what I need to do." She looks at it as a joke. Now, she has seen sex scenes in some R-rated films or on television, not hardcore sex scenes. I think hardcore sex is something I don't want her to see until at all possible, as late as possible.
Liz Goldwyn: Like 40?
Paul Fishbein: It's going to be soon if it isn't already, it's going to be 13 or 14. I don't think we, as parents, can prevent it. We just have to learn how to roll with it. We have to.
Liz Goldwyn: And have emotional, psychological conversations about how to process the information.
Paul Fishbein: Yeah. How to process it and how to explore your own sexuality and what the standards there and what context, and in what situations, and how to be careful and protective of yourself, all of that stuff. I mean, we think that we're-- we think we’re prepared. I wouldn't say, “I think we're prepared,” I think we think we're prepared and, of course, you never know. I will tell you that one of the things that I want to mention here and that is overlooked because of where we are today, but there is definitely a transformation in content which, I think, has really been detrimental to society in general.
When the Bush and Reagan administrations were going after people in pornography, and putting people in jail, and arresting people and trying to prosecute people on obscenity, the industry put out pretty vanilla product. And, when I say vanilla, it was real basic heterosexual, you know, really basic stuff, wasn't too hardcore. There wasn't anal sex, there weren't gang-bangs and rough sex, and BDSM and-- I mean, it was very mellow.
Then Bill Clinton came in and it was a very good thing that he disbanded the Obscenity Unit and people didn't have the fear of being prosecuted. And because the video industry was ramping up, more and more new pornographers came into the business and that was the real growth period, from 1992-3-4 into the early 2000s, where more and more people were producing porn, but the content got harder, nastier, more violent, dirtier and it got-- and because people were shooting on videotape, long sex scenes of just violent porn, just, it got really nasty and hardcore and it was-
Liz Goldwyn: Is that in reaction to audience desire?
Paul Fishbein: It probably was people trying to get market share because if everything's the same, then what you do for market share is you try to do something strong-- instead of being creative, what they would do is something nastier or harder and violent. And even though it was all consenting adults performing and consenting adults consuming, nastier, harder scenes and then people got more into harder sex.
The content got really strong and sometimes it was uncomfortably strong, like where I didn't even want to look at it. And spitting, and humiliation, and slapping, and choking and girls gagging and, you know, 100 men gang-bangs and 600 men gang-bangs, and double anal and all this stuff. It just got harder and nastier and less sexy. And so I wasn't into it. I was like, "Ugh, I don't even like it. You guys are reviewing it. I don't have to review this stuff any more."
Liz Goldwyn: In our personal conversations you referred to yourself a lot as a feminist. How does that play into it? How do you define that?
Paul Fishbein: Well, it's-- okay, so I'm a feminist, and I am, and I believe that I am and I always believe that I was and will be. You have to balance that with my belief in the First Amendment and people's choices. And, so, you know, people are choosing this as their living, people are consenting to do this, it's really hard to draw a line and say, "Well, I'm okay with this, but I'm not okay with this." I don't personally like this. This is not something I would watch, this is not something that I would recommend.
In fact, this is something I am not going to watch, right? But who am I to do decide to tell a girl who's choosing, a woman, especially the women today in the business who have really started to own their own careers, that you shouldn't be doing this. Because they've chosen to do this and they're fine with it, or at least they say they're fine with it, who am I to tell them, "Don't do it."?
I don't like it and I don't like the material and I didn't like it as I watched it ramp up in the business and I found a lot of it to be offensive, but I defend it on First Amendment grounds.
Liz Goldwyn: What are you still learning about sex?
Paul Fishbein: Well, I think that in the relationship that I'm now is the most intimate relationship I've ever had. And I think that, as a guy, I always believe that we, men, don't really begin to mature until our 40s. So, when you're young, especially when you get married before 40, it's always about, "What am I missing?" And if you are single in your 40s and you're not 40 yet, it's like, "I got to have a lot of experiences. I got to meet a lot of women. I gotta, you know, I can't settle down."
There's such a huge divorce rate, especially out here in California. I think it's on the guys who don't really mature. I don't really feel like I was mature until my 40s when I met my current wife. So I think when you put that aside and you go, "A lot of that wasn't really important." Maybe it was fun and maybe I'm glad I had that experience, but I've met somebody who I relate to on such a multiple levels in a way that I never thought I would.
After I got divorced the second time I literally said, "I'm not ready to-- I mean I’m not the marrying type. I'm obviously bad at this. I guess I'm not meant to have my own children. I guess I'll just live a single guy and enjoy it and live off of, you know, the fact that I'm successful and try to meet a lot of women," and then when I met my wife it was I didn't think anything of it. I just thought we would date her. I dated her as if we were in high school. It was really slow and took a while. I wooed her and it was really cool because I didn't think I had it in me. And then we came in on such a perfect level that it just worked.
I'm in a relationship for 15 years where we've never had a knock-down, drag-out fight. The only fights we have aren't really fights, it's politics and it's always on the same side, it's just levels. It’s like-- we don't fight. And I have an 11-year-old who's never seen her parents fight, so there's a certain, like, intimacy there that's just based on this perfect as you can get kind of relationship. Especially because in these later years when she came in, I was doing really well. And in these later years, these are the lean years where I'm trying to restart a career. And so, from a financial point of view, we're struggling, especially compared to the way she came into it. So she certainly wasn't in it for the money or she would have left at this point. (Laughs)
So, sort of on a relationship level, I mean the sex is fine, it's not what it was the first year or two years, but it's fine and it's good for us, but we relate on so many levels that make up for whatever lack of newness in the sex.
Liz Goldwyn: Thank you so much.
Paul Fishbein: Cool.
Liz Goldwyn: Thank you.
Liz Goldwyn: That was Paul Fishbein, producer and founder of AVN. If you'd like to learn more about what the adult industry is like for someone in front of the camera, listen to our podcasts with legends Nina Hartley and Lexington Steele. You can also check out Paul Fishbein's original series and documentaries on The Greatest Adult Stars of All Time on Showtime.
Thanks for listening The Sex Ed. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts. And be sure to visit us as thesexed.com. The Sex Ed is hosted by me, Liz Goldwyn. This episode was produced by Aesli Grandi for The Media Mob. Jackie Wilson is our line producer. Jeremy Emery is our sound recordist and editor, and Bettina Santo Domingo is our coordinator. Lewis Lazar made all of our music, including the track you're listening to right now.
Until next time, The Sex Ed remains dedicated to expanding your orgasmic health and sexual consciousness.