Great review of an extremely interesting new book!

The Other Hollywood

Roderick Edward "Legs" McNeil is beholden to the priests and nuns of Cheshire, but not in a way he anticipated as a kid growing up in this safe suburban town.

"I'm Catholic," explained McNeil, 48. "And being Catholic guarantees a great sex life, because the dirtier sex is considered--the dirtier anything is considered--the more enjoyable it becomes...."

McNeil's newest book, The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry--the result of eight years of research--rips the G-string off the Pandora's box of America's sexual obsessions. The porn film industry, he reports, is a $10-billion-per-year enterprise that has infiltrated mainstream American culture and made a lot of "family values" Americans obscenely rich in the process.

That $10 billion surpasses all of Hollywood's annual box office receipts; and it doesn't include revenues from porn magazines, Internet sites, cable adult channels, sex devices, etc. Nor does it take into account the following assertion by U.S. News and World Report : "Americans spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, off-Broadway, regional and nonprofit theaters, the opera, the ballet and jazz and classical music performances--combined."

Since Americans of all social strata are spending this money, the hypocrisy that surrounds sex in America is all the more baffling. Why the floods of moral outrage when even the most inconsequential "erotic" moments creep into the mainstream, as when Janet Jackson "accidentally" bared her breast at a Super Bowl? This hypocrisy, McNeil said, was bluntly summed up by one porn star: "You masturbate to us with one hand and push us away with the other."

McNeil's book, written with assistance from Los Angeles-based researcher Jennifer Osborne and New York Post crime writer Peter Pavia, doesn't try to chronicle the entire warp and woof of America's sex obsession. It focuses instead on the porn film industry--the hetero side, that is....

Buy this book at Amazon

January 12, 2005 in Books | Permalink