Agents of Destruction

LOS ANGELES—I wonder if anyone outside the porn industry will realize the significance of what happened yesterday, and the rottenness it revealed. It’s all too obvious to me, of course. Emboldened agents staged a coup in the banana republic of porn. A collection of vain malcontents and misfits is coming apart at the seams and descending into tribal warfare among a few relatively powerless relics of the past. What the agents did last night was intended to be an expression of their power, but it was actually a sign of their desperation and the fact that no responsible entity exists to keep them in their place.

But it did happen, and nothing can take it back. We are witness to an attempted hijacking of an “industry” by the one group that has no right to control labor—agents—and the commensurate silence of the producer class, which just wants its workers delivered on time. If anything, labor in porn is like the parcels in Amazon’s delivery pipeline; the only thing that matters, and the thing that creates value, is efficiency. Rob Black would use the death camp trains as his allusion, I’m sure, but I don’t go there, because, let’s get real, actual death is not awaiting anyone.

But professional death surely is, but no one cares about that. I have seen the lurching efforts to paint a veneer of “professionalism” onto porn, and have probably even had my hand in perpetuating the illusion, but illusions can only last so long. Sooner or later they have to evaporate in the light of day. What you see now is what is left when the mist clears.

What it means and portends for AVN is of more immediate interest to me, and in that regard the events of yesterday could not be more calamitous. That no one will admit it makes the situation even worse. When denial of that magnitude sets in, it’s only a matter of time.