Excellent questions. I'm not qualified to speak to the physical medium (I'm still being kind and rewinding), but I think we can all agree that the big question regarding pornography's future is in regards to its content. The blatant mioigynistic degradation that is the rule nowdays has always been implicit, but I think if you timetraveled a boxed set of 'Gag Factor' back to 1988 the pornographers of that time would be absolutely speechless. I doubt they could even have concieved this is where the genre would be 15 years down the road. And so it probably is with us in 2003. This shock bar raising that's going on right now has tremendous inertia behind it. Obviously a sick national (or international) sexual id has been tapped into and mostly by accident. Gregory Dark was a true trailblazer, but as nasty as his stuff was, it pales in comparison because he treated his filth as depravity. The current gangbang-throatfuck-bukkake crowd sees it as business-as-usual. This is what is so horrific about the whole spectacle. There is no emotional or moral or passionate bearing in any of it. The girl hangs her head upside down and gets throatfucked until she vomits not to push envelopes but because it's what's expected. It's assemblyline, souless depravity with no point of reference because it's running rampant. This is the main reason why AdultDVDTalk is such a ridiculous place. It's blindeye, self deluded hypocrisy that verges on absurd farce, all fueled by a cynical cover-your-ass conservatism.
My personal feeling is that talk in the industry of "self-censorship" is a pipedream and that something is going to have to give: either the ugliness will become an inflammatory political campaign issue and/or a girl is going to be killed or seriously injured in this bar-raising. I seriously doubt the audience of angry young males will suddenly tire of the freakshow and begin to yearn for sensuality and artifice again. Dream on.
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