What’s Past is Prologue

Trying not to look back in rancor.

This is the third time I’ve written this column. It’s not the third time I’ve started, written a few paragraphs and then decided to take another tack. It’s the third time I’ve written an entire full-page screed and then discarded the whole mess and started over. That doesn’t happen to me very often (although, judging by a few printed faux pas in the past, it probably should happen more often than it does).

I’m one of those writers who writes because she can’t not write, and so-called "op/eds" are among the most enjoyable — if sometimes challenging — things I do every month. I took a page from my father’s book long ago and decided everyone is entitled to my opinion, and I think editorial commentary often brings out the beast … er, best … in me. It certainly keeps my mind agile.

This column has proven to be the most challenging to date. How does one encapsulate 100 issues chronicling the birth of an industry? It isn’t easy, especially since the industry progressed from infancy through childhood and into an awkward adolescence (in which it remains, and probably always will) within a few short years.

For about nine years now, AVN Online has documented the development of the digital side of the adult industry. I think the magazine has done an admirable job. It’s interesting to skim through the morgue (that’s what we media types call a library of back issues) and see how the industry and the magazine have evolved. They have grown in ways both predictable and surprising. It makes me wonder: When future archeologists uncover AVN Online’s morgue (by then, probably worthy of the other meaning of the term) what will they infer about the industry it covers? Will they see it as a bunch of yahoos determined to engage in unadulterated chicanery, a group of victims of political and societal hypocrisy and senseless oppression, a small-but-intense army fighting a sometimes misguided battle for personal liberties, or what? Depending upon how things shake out between now and then, the digital adult entertainment industry’s history may be viewed as a seminal moment in the development of technology and tolerance, or it may be relegated to the “tempest in a teapot” section of history’s footnotes. Depending on the direction of mankind’s next move, industry denizens could be either heroes or villains.

As an industry, adult is a little of both now. There unquestionably are some episodes and people in which the industry should take pride. For example, if the rest of society would just give credit where it hates to admit credit is due, the adult industry would receive at least a few pats on the back for its rapid proof and deployment of new technologies and its efforts to curtail child abuse and prevent children from accessing hardcore material online. (Unfortunately, some bad apples continue to spoil the barrel in the latter two areas, and that reflects badly — and very publicly — on everyone else.) On the other hand, there are some individuals and business practices everyone should hope never to see again. I’ll leave the names out of it, but among the business practices that immediately spring to mind are credit-card “cramming,” affiliate-commission shaving, wholesale intellectual-property theft, unhealthy competition and other willful subterfuge. (Seriously, people, there’s enough revenue to go around for those who are willing to work for it. There’s no need to steal from each other and the public at large.)

It’s the mission of any trade publication to provide its industry the information, advice, analysis and commentary that allow industry members to engage in commerce profitably, safely and ethically (not, as some aggravatingly assert, to help individual businesses shamelessly promote themselves). Because it cleaves to its mission with a vengeance, over the years AVN Online has exposed the bad right along with the good. One tends to forget how much the industry and the magazine have overcome to get where they are … until some zealous cheerleader decides it would be a great idea to publish a retrospective. At times like that, one can only grit her teeth and repeat the immortal words of George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Please, I beg you: Let’s not.

—Kathee “Methuselah” Brewer

(This column originally appeared in the October 2007 issue of AVN Online.)