All Porn All the Time
![handle is hein.journals/nyuls31 and id is 703 raw text is: ALL PORN ALL THE TIME*
AMY ADLERt
I want to begin this symposium by making a controversial assertion: In the
escalating war against pornography, pornography has already won. I make this
claim not to take a side in the porn wars, but rather to observe, bluntly, the new
world in which we live.
Because of shifts in our culture and, most prominently, shifts in
technology-the subject of this conference-pornography has been transformed.
Once a widespread but sequestered industry, pornography is now ubiquitous in
our society in a way that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. Teen
girls now clamor to be porn stars, while media outlets like MTV and VH1 fea-
ture porn stars like Ron Jeremy as pundits.' Porn star Jenna Jameson wrote a
New York Times bestseller.2 Large corporations, such as Marriott and AT&T are
now porn distributors.3 So changed are our cultural standards governing display
that much of what we take for granted on television or in advertisements would
have been considered pornographic just two decades ago.4 Pornography is so
commonplace that for many it is merely an annoyance-more spam to clear out
of our email inboxes each morning. Porn, at least soft-core porn, is arguably
now at the heart of mainstream culture.5 These changes are so dramatic that I
* These remarks are based on my Introduction to the Symposium, held at N.Y.U. School of Law
on April 3, 2006.
t Professor of Law, NYU School of Law. For helpful comments I am grateful to Matthew Benja-
min, Marjorie Heins, Andy Koppelman and Lenn Robbins. Charlotte Taylor provided superb
research assistance.
1. For example, Ron Jeremy appeared on the cast of VHI's The Surreal Life Fame Games: Sur-
real Sex. See http://www.vhl.com/shows/dyn/surreal life-fame-games/106207/episode.jhtml
(scroll down to Video and follow Surreal Life Fame Games: Surreal Sex hyperlink) (last vis-
ited Feb. 5, 2007). MTV's website offers a mainpage featuring Ron Jeremy.
http://www.mtv.com/#/movies/person/84815/personmain.jhtml.
2. JENNA JAMESON, HOW TO MAKE LOVE LIKE A PORN STAR: A CAUTIONARY TALE (2004).
3. Andrew Koppelman, Does Obscenity Cause Moral Harm?, 105 COLUM. L. REV. 1635, 1657
(2005). The New York Times estimated in 2001 that porn was at least a 10 billion dollar industry.
Frank Rich, Naked Capitalists, N.Y. TIMES, May 20, 2001, Mag., at 50. For a comprehensive ac-
count of the rise of the por industry, see FREDERICK S. LANE III, OBSCENE PROFITS: THE
ENTREPRENEURS OF PORNOGRAPHY IN THE CYBER AGE (2000).
4. See, e.g., Don Aucoin, The Pornification Of America, BOSTON GLOBE, Jan. 24, 2006, at Cl
(Not too long ago, pornography was a furtive profession, its products created and consumed in the
shadows. But it has steadily elbowed its way into the limelight, with ... aspects of the porn sensi-
bility now inform[ing] movies, music videos, fashion, magazines, and celebrity culture.)
5. In fact, I have argued that something more surprising has happened-a soft-core version of
child pornography has also become mainstream in our culture. See Amy Adler, The Perverse Law
of Child Pornography, 101 COLuM. L. REV. 209 (2001); Audio tape: N.Y.U. Review of Law &
Social Change Colloquium, Problems of Censorship in a New Technological Age, Apr. 3, 2006
(on file with the N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change) (remarks of Amy Adler).
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Reprinted with the Permission of New York University School of Law](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/nyuls31&div=38&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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