Overview

When adult entertainment first appeared on the pop culture radar as an underground film phenomenon, women were little more than starlets, who, for the most part, answered to men. But as pornography evolved in step with technology and consumer demand over the past twenty years, it also reflected the shifting political climate. Greater sexual equality started to appear both in front of and behind the cameras. Not only did female performers take charge for the first time of their careers, but women began running the companies people purchase movies from, opening woman-friendly sex shops and writing thoughtful, analytical commentary on pornography-often from a feminist perspective. In Naked Ambition , adult entertainment industry insider Carly Milne takes readers behind the scenes and on to the frontlines of today's woman-owned and supported adult entertainment industry that has revolutionized both pornography and the traditional feminist movement that has for years often stood in opposition to it. Personal essays by Jenna Jameson, Theresa Flynt, Violet Blue, Holly Randall, Tristan Taormino, Tera Patrick, Danni Ashe, Nina Hartley, Jane Duvall and Rachel Kramer Bussel, among other top women pornographers and pornography supporters showcase this relatively recent but fast-growing segment of adult entertainment producers and consumers.

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The working women of porn tell their side of the story. Few industries have worked as hard to overcome the essential unattractiveness of their business as pornography-er, adult entertainment. The biggest hurdle that porn has to overcome, the charge of sexism, is a hard rap to beat, but this jeremiad makes an admirable try. Milne rounds up a wide spectrum of women who work in all aspects of the biz-from performers to businesswoman-to talk, with varying degrees of honesty, about what they do. The commentary by porn journalists, many of whom seem to have fallen into the industry by accident, is surprisingly unenlightening. An exception is adult-video reviewer Violet Blue, who dives right into the war between the autocratic men running the industry who assume they know people's desires and the feminist academics who attack it all as evil; neither side, she argues, has a clue about what women actually want. There's a shade of backlash here: Some of the porn actresses and writers (especially actress Tera Patrick and men's-magazine sex columnist Laura Leu) take the rote anti-feminist position that it's all just good clean fun and everybody who thinks different is just an uppity bluestocking. More interesting are e-businesswomen like Hester Nash, who runs a vintage adult-photography website, and Joanna Angel, whose tales of her deeply personal punk porn site Burning Angel are neither celebratory nor condemnatory but somehow illuminating. ( I was naked on the Internet and no one in their right mind wanted to date me, writes Angel.) While quite daring, the book does not live up to its subtitle: It illustrates clearly how women work in porn, but at no point does it show how women are actually changing the industry. A reasoned argument for withholding judgment. (Kirkus Reviews)

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