Bangkok Haunts

enforcement authorities, further adding to the risk for a consumer—a risk of shame, or arrest.
    In 1975, the Sony Corporation released the videocassette recorder to the broad market, and within 10 years, about 75 percent of all American households owned a VCR. Once the venue had moved from theater to the privacy of the home, the adult entertainment industry was never the same. For example, a single film, “Deep Throat,” generated more than $100 million in sales, thanks in large part to the popularity of VCRs, Frederick S. Lane III writes in his book “Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age” (Rout-ledge, 2000).
    But even with most Americans owning VCRs, people still had to take a trip to the video store, risking some embarrassment. Pay-per-view television and the Internet removed the final barriers.
    Cable and satellite programmers allow people to buy a variety of sex-based programming, from Playboy, on the lighter side, to the Hot Network, owned by Vivid, and the Erotic Television Network, distributed by New Frontier, on the more explicit end of the spectrum. Consumers could watch movies of people having sex without ever leaving home.
    What investors and bigger corporations soon discovered was the vast audience for pornography—once the privacy barrier was eliminated. Twenty percent of all American households with a VCR or cable access will pay to watch an explicit adult video—and 10 percent will pay frequently, according to the distributors New Frontier and Vivid. That interest explains, in part, why the production of pornographic films has grown tenfold in the last decade. There are now nearly 10,000 adult movies made every year, according to an annual survey of the films produced in the Los Angeles area.
    Last year, there were 711 million rentals of hard-core sex films, according to Adult Video News, an industry magazine that is to pornographic films what the trade publication Billboard is to records. It even has its own film awards—modeled after the Oscars.
    But video rentals have reached a plateau over the last two years. The future is pay-per-view at home—driven by the easy access and good technical quality of digital television—and pay-per-view from the Internet, driven by the technological innovations of new cable and phone lines that carry far more images, more quickly, to a computer screen.
    “Videos changed the way people could view porn because they were able to watch in the privacy of their homes,” said Barry Parr, an electronic commerce analyst with International Data Corporation. “Internet pornography takes that a step further—they can do it with absolute privacy.”
    The number of people visiting sex sites on the Web doubled over the last year, outpacing the number of new Internet users. Some of the more popular sex Web sites attract in excess of 50 million hits, or visits, a month, according to the ratings services Nielsen/Net and Media Metrix. About one in a thousand people who visit a site will subscribe, for fees averaging $20 a month, according to some of the leading Web pornography providers and Flying Crocodile Inc., a company based in Seattle that tracks and services the sexual-content market.
    At the same time that technology was making it easier for people to view pornography, legal obstacles were falling. The 1973 Supreme Court case Miller v. California established a threshold for defining illegal pornography; a major test was that it had to be considered obscene to the “average person, applying contemporary community standards.”
    Initially, the case helped prosecutors clamp down on publications and movies. But that proved to be short-lived. If “Deep Throat” could sell $100 million worth of copies, then what was the community standard?
    “The court may have handed off the determination of obscenity to the local community, but the standards of local communities had fundamentally changed,” writes Mr. Lane in “Obscene Profits.”
    When Mr. Peterman was prosecuted for distributing obscene material in Utah last year, he became one of the few video retailers in the nation charged with such a crime in recent years. In a state long regarded as a bastion of family-values morality, more than 4,000 people signed petitions supporting his prosecution.
    But Mr. Peterman showed that he had 4,000 regular customers for sex videos. His lawyer argued that Mr. Peterman was not violating community standards, because people in Utah County bought