Page 11 - AVN July 2015

WE’VE GOT ISSUES | | By Sharan Street
Adult Content
Mainstream looks at ‘Hot Girls,’ hot tech
coverage of the adult industry often
Anybody who monitors mainstream
encounters two counterbalancing
weights: lightweight listicles about porn
star secrets and heavy-handed screeds
about the ways online porn warps young minds.
The last couple months, however, Google alerts
involving key words like “porn,” “adult” and “sex”
have yielded more diverse fare.
Part of this was a flurry of articles on the
documentary Hot Girls Wanted, some interviewing
adult performers and others written by them. Among
these were pieces penned by A-list starlet Casey
Calvert on HuffingtonPost.com and performer-
turned-writer Aurora Snow on DailyBeast.com. AVN
wanted to hear more, so we solicited comments from
a group of newbies, all under 21, and also asked Dr.
Chauntelle Tibbals to interview industry veterans
about steps they take to make young performers more
comfortable. (For more about Dr. Chauntelle, also see
pages 46 and 48.)
But that wasn’t the only noteworthy attention
given the industry. On a recent episode of the CNBC
show The Pitch, which places a hopeful entrepreneur
literally in an elevator with a potential angel investor,
one participant was Suki Dunham, the co-founder of
OhMiBod.
In the show, Dunham enters the elevator and gasps
when she recognizes Shark Tank heavy Kevin O’Leary.
She recovers and makes a play for his bankroll,
explaining that OhMiBod is all about making sex toys
“approachable and pleasing to the mainstream” and
blurting out (just as the time-out buzzer goes off)
that she is seeking a “$500,000 investment to bring
this product line to the next level.”
O’Leary peppers her with questions, and fans of
Shark Tank can guess where he focuses his attention:
on whether or not she has a patent. When she tells
him that OhMiBod has a sub-license, that’s a turn-off
for the patent-loving O’Leary.
O’Leary sniffs a bit at the $129 price tag on the
vibe, noting that there are doubtless many less costly
models. It seems Mr. Wonderful has never shopped
for a high-end vibrator, because the blueMotion’s
price point is well within that ballpark. Not even
Dunham’s assessment of the company’s profitability
is enough to entice O’Leary. “We’re probably going to
approach $7 to $10 million in revenue. This is one of
our best-selling products now,” she says.
Though he may not know his sex toys, O’Leary
does know the value of proprietary technology. After
the encounter he offers more advice: “I think what
she could do to take her to the next level is to build
something that she owns, that’s unique, that only she
can sell, to keep her margins high. I mean, she clearly
knows the industry.”
Dunham shared her own thoughts after the fact
as well, telling an interviewer that she should have
emphasized the riches to be found in the wake of the
Fifty Shades of Grey sales wave. “People’s minds are
being opened to this industry, which offers a lot of
market potential,” Dunham said.
And just what is that market potential? Take a
story posted in June on MarketWatch.com. In a piece
headlined “‘Fifty Shades’ of Green,” reporter Charles
Passy quotes stats that describe the global sex toy
market as a $15 billion industry. The story itself is
fairly superficial, but it did link to something more
interesting at StatisticBrain.com/sex-toy-statistics.
Though it’s a year old, the data still represents post-
Fifty Shades of Grey stats. Maybe O’Leary should take a
better look at the numbers before he encounters his
next adult industry entrepreneur.
Speaking of “Adult Content,” that was the title of a
recent episode on the HBO show Silicon Valley, which
follows the travails of a high-tech startup company.
When things get bumpy for the heroes of the show—
the Pied Piper team—they make a bid to work with
a “porn giant” called Intersite. Part of the process is
attending an “adult conference,” which looks more
like a United Nations meeting than a webmaster
gathering. Though a small part of the episode, it’s
worth seeking out just to see the name cards in
front of the attendees, which poke fun at the porn
industry’s penchant for micro-niches with names
like Fingered Teen, Let’s Try Fisting, Blackmailed
into Gay, Porn Hospice and Non Consensual Santa.
As the audience looks on, the CEO of Intersite
unveils “the future”: a group of sex toys pumping,
rotating, gyrating and buzzing, as if controlled via
long distance, next to a pair of VR googles—giving an
oblique nod to those in the industry who are looking
to incorporate VR and apps in their products.
Some of the items are easily recognizable, like the
AutoBlow 2 male masturbator and Jopen’s Vr10, with
its signature purple hue. Not letting the opportunity
pass, both Autoblow and Jopen sent out PR about the
product placement. Said Jopen CEO Susan Colvin,
“We are delighted the Vr10 made an appearance
on Silicon Valley. Vanity is the pinnacle collection
for Jopen. We are honored that HBO featured this
product in action with its rotating shaft.”
Both humorous and dead-on, the show also gives
a welcome nod to the adult industry’s impact on
technological innovation. As stated by Zack Woods’
character, Jared, “Adult content has driven more
important tech adoption that anything. The first
fiction ever published on the printing press was
an erotic tale. And from there it was super 8 film,
Polaroid, home video, digital, video on demand.” Nice
shout out, Silicon Valley. The industry needed that.
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