Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography

Robert Rosen

Headpress (2011)

Robert Rosen spent sixteen years in the porn industry from the period when phone sex began. He worked for many of the leading men’s’ magazines under the name of Bobby Paradise and even made an appearance in a porn photo set. He met most of the people who were big in the industry, both actors and publishers, and kept copious notes on the industry and his part in it.

When the Bell telephone group was broken up the companies could become carriers of other peoples’ information or providers of content. When Bell divested itself of the phone infrastructure for Dial-a-Prayer, Dial-a-Joke and others a quick thinking publisher, Chip Goodman, bought one of the massive call handling systems and set it up for phone sex. It worked brilliantly and the phone sex lines were the main profit makers of many publishers from then on. One of Rosen’s first tasks for High Society magazine was to write scripts to be voiced by the actresses, then played on the sex lines.

He had a gift for writing what the publishers and editors wanted to see. At this point people could still read and a gentlemen’s magazine would have “articles” – beautifully illustrated sort-of adventure fantasy stories which would inevitably lead to removal of clothing and getting down and dirty. There was a certain amount of taste involved, as one of the magazines’ biggest sales points was Canada. It had more serious (and ever-changing) censorship laws. Thus it was OK in Canada to show a penis within a millimetre of a vagina, as long as there was a definite gap and no penetration was actually pictured. Anything too risqué was blotted out with a large black dot. This was reminiscent of the Japanese laws that genitals were not to be shown but all sorts of rape, bondage and transgressive acts were OK. In Japan genitals were hidden by strategically-placed vases of flowers. The magazines Rosen worked for showed genitalia but were more soft-core than, say, Screw, which was regarded as the lowest of lowbrow. Rosen’s pay was not great but he needed the job and was capable of turning out large amounts of work.

As he moved further up in the industry he showed some doubts that this is what he really wanted to do, but it paid the bills. He is non-judgmental about pornography – as he points out, it has been around since a Cro-Magnon man painted a man and a woman on the wall of a cave in the Lascaux area having sex. He also points out that the industry has driven a lot of technical innovation – publishing, photography (movie porn started with Thomas Edison, according to Rosen), phone sex, internet, and others. There is a fascinating short chapter at the end of the book about the history.

Throughout the book we can see his changing attitudes in little ways – “intercourse” becomes simply “fucking”, for instance. He obviously adapted well to the industry and its standards. He compares the standards of magazines like Swank and High Society with the crass exploitation of Hustler and Screw. They had less use for writers, more for photographers, and of course a never-ending stream of models.

Rosen includes many little anecdotes in the story that make it more human than just a dull history:

“How about an article on techniques to improve your masturbation?” I suggested. “Absolutely not” said Badner. “Our readers are already masturbation experts. They don’t want to be reminded”.

There was opposition to the magazines and initially it was directed at their most profitable area – the phone sex lines. Parents in Utah sued the magazine for damaging their children’s’ “values and character” and causing long term damage that would require (expensive) psychiatric help for years. Generally such cases were simply ignored by the industry. There was also little love lost between the competing magazines. Each had staked out a territory with a particular type of porn and that was how it should stay.

Some journalists and other staff managed to escape the porn trap and pursue other careers. Mario Puzo wrote The Godfather. Chip Goodman’s father had set up Marvel Comics as well as some early men’s’ magazines. Being a “pornographer” was just too lucrative compared with sporadic work as, say, an actor. It didn’t stop the dreams though. One of Rosen’s office co-writers and a part-time actor asked him

“Do you know what I’d like to do, even though it means I’d never work again as a legitimate actor? I’d like to pose in full Nazi uniform shaving a girl’s head and pussy with a straight-edged razor”. “Ah”, I replied. “Beaver Barbers of the Third Reich”.

We can see that Rosen was now well entrenched in the job and its required way of thinking.

He seems to have had a certain admiration for actor Ron Jeremy. I always wondered why this short, fat, hairy actor should be so popular with directors. Rosen explains that apart from having a twelve-inch penis and being able to ejaculate pretty much on command Ron had “a preternatural habit for painlessly indoctrinating “virgin” starlets into the pleasures of anal sex”. The other actors who succeeded like this were known as the Nasty Nine and were the big names in the porn industry, never out of work for long. Many would-be actors, though, couldn’t handle the work in front of a crew, cameras and lights and failed miserably.

Who did this sort of work? Rosen gives an insight - “people become porn stars because they’re good at it; because they have no other options; because they have nothing to lose; or because they’re desperate, either economically or emotionally or both”. He could probably have said the same about himself.

Around 1977 Rosen noted a change in tactics by the quality magazines. They were losing money to the sleazy “split beaver” porno mags and they decided if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. Quality dropped, the stories disappeared, and the magazines were now filled with sleaze. Although Rosen seems to have felt no shame about it Chip Goodman, the publisher, tried to distance himself from the industry. As managing editor of For Adults Only Rosen had to work on a magazine that gave its readers “lesbian sphincter frenzies, older women who “face sit for charity”, young nymphs “who sleep with buttplugs”, men who orgasm while watching women anally expel glass eyeballs” and so on. Rosen says they “trod a fine line between arousing and sickening”.

The latest bit of nonsense from Canada at this time was a ban on armpit fucking, because it was degrading. It seems to have been an idea that the Americans hadn’t even thought of. They were too busy exploring incest in articles like “Yo Mama’s Pussy and Other Family Favorites”.

There was a new range of young starlets emerging to meet the industry’s insatiable demand for fresh flesh. Dancers would do a couple of videos, get a boob job on the proceeds, and then go on tour as strippers or dancers and use their movie fame and their boobs to make huge money. For many it was their only way out of poverty. One succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, but brought low many people in the industry when the scandal of underage porn actresses broke. Her name was Traci Lords.

Rosen tracks her career as witnessed by the people who knew her. A victim of sexual abuse from the age of 10, Traci worked her way from dancing to porn (while she was still underage), to legitimate film work and even a hit record. Very few have been able to duplicate this.

Various governments and pressure groups had been trying to have the porn videos and magazines banned, but each time they were defeated by the First Amendment. President Lyndon Johnson, to relieve the pressure on himself from the Vietnam War, started a commission of enquiry into the industry. They worked at a leisurely pace and the Presidency was eventually won by Richard Nixon while the commission was still deliberating. Nixon nobbled the enquiry by appointing a radical Christian and founder of the Citizens For Decency movement to the board. The final report said basically that the more people watched porn the more they became inured to it, and it was harmless. Nixon’s nominee presented a different more rabid attitude and Nixon rejected the report..

Nixon was soon caught up in the Watergate scandal and took any opportunity to divert attention. One opportunity was the release of Deep Throat, which was promptly banned in many states on obscenity grounds. It didn’t work and many people just watched the film and decided it wasn’t so bad, and spoke up in its defence – including a number of prominent actors and actresses. A flood of similar films followed, but the groundwork had been laid for the anti-porn movement. They got their chance under Ronald Reagan. His friend, fundamentalist Christian Edward Meese, set out to destroy the industry. Once again he ran foul of the First Amendment but started working in other directions. Discrimination against women and racketeering laws were widened. Threats were made against large chain stores that sold men’s magazines, threatening Federal prosecution. A new committee was formed and their report, “Not surprisingly, …. described a pornographic universe consisting almost exclusively of violent sex, child sex and animal sex ….”

Rosen believed at first that it would all blow over, especially when Meese was revealed as having a major role in the Iran-Contra scandal. It didn’t. On her eighteenth birthday Traci Lords confessed that she had been fifteen when she made her first porno film. That meant that possession of any of Traci Lords’ videos or photo shoots would make the holder guilty of having child pornography. Swank magazine, where Rosen currently worked, went into a frenzy of destruction of any Lords material and frantically set about removing any mention of her from the forthcoming issues.

Lords had used fake birth certificates to get false drivers licenses for ID. Her model releases in which she affirmed she was over 18 used false names. Rosen believes she deliberately set up the porn industry to further her career, and did very well out of it in a deal with Aaron Spelling to make a film of her life.

The episode gave the anti-porn crusaders the excuse they wanted to make inroads into the industry. This time they used the guise of the Child Protection Act. Lords was never charged with any crime, and Rosen believes she was being used by the Justice Department to set up the industry. She in turn may have been using the DoJ as well as the industry to set up her future career. Chip Goodman’s reaction however was to fill each issue with as many young-looking girls as possible, all carefully vetted for age. His magazines, like all the others, reached new sales heights on the strength of the DoJ free publicity. Of all the people charged over the scandal only one was ever convicted, and that under the Racketeering Act. All other cases were dismissed or the defendants found Not Guilty by the juries. Perhaps there are some sensible people in the U.S. after all, people who do not believe they have a right to impose their opinions on others. Many of the cases were fought on the basis that Traci Lords, although a minor, was not the victim she purported to be. Rosen believes that in the end all she did was give the industry a new concept to exploit – the “barely legal” teen girl.

Two new factors entered the picture, both of which were predicted to wipe out porn. AIDS was on the rise and unprotected sex was now portrayed officially as dangerous. Rosen quotes an Alabama Pentecostal mailout that asserted “Only Jesus can save you from the scourge of AIDS. And if you don’t take him into your heart today you’re going to die alone and in agony, before being banished to burn for eternity in the Lake of Fire”.

Rosen was then assigned to edit D-Cup, a new sleaze magazine. As he studied the competition he realised just how acclimatised he had become. His publisher complained that Rosen’s models were too attractive. He wanted ugly or at least homely women, provided they had huge breasts. Rosen complied and turned D-Cup into a high seller but after twelve years in the job he began to wonder how much longer he could take it. The pressure was on when the flood of photos of British models started to arrive. Like their American counterparts they just wanted to pick up some easy money. Most were unsuitable for the new British Page 3 Girl format, but many did more provocative photo sets for the American market.

The other factor was the growth of porn on the Internet. There was a huge resource there and it was readily available on a paid access basis. It was phone sex all over again. The Internet was also beyond the control of government. After a while every aspiring starlet had her own web page and the supply of models for the magazines began to dry up. Some magazines moved into cyberspace but their profits here didn’t cover the shrinking profits on the magazines. The magazine industry collapsed.

Rosen finally gave up in 1999 to concentrate on a John Lennon biography.

This book is his “investigative memoir” of those times. That he can still write such a detailed and highly readable book after 192 months of sheer smut says a lot for his abilities, considering he often wondered what he had become under his long exposure to the industry. The book is funny, sad, disgusting and hopeful in equal measures. It is only lightly illustrated with collages of magazine covers, but it’s enough to give you the general idea. The porn magazine industry was worth billions at its height and he was not only there to see it, he took an active role in it and made a good living from it. He still manages to remain fairly non-judgmental about it and although he gives the governments and the anti-porn activists a serve he manages to do so without any overt hatred. His insights show he learned a lot during the period and now he passes his knowledge on in this book.

Generally reviews appear on the Synergy website with a single cover image. In the digital and print edition, reviews appear with multiple images and with expanded content.

This review will appear in Volume 4 No. 4 of the digital and print edition of Synergy.

We recommend you download the free digital edition (or buy the print edition) to get the most from Synergy. The print and digital editions of Synergy also include a large selection of articles and features not found on the website. If you have a limited download quota you can view the digital edition via the Issuu viewer on the digital edition page.

If you came to this page directly (and missed our menu), click here to go to the front page of Synergy Website or use the following link: http://www.synergy-magazine.com