THE GRAYING OF NAUGHTY

By SHARON WAXMAN

LOS ANGELES -- The pornography industry, that multibillion-dollar-a-year symbol of airbrushed American carnality, is aging. The advent of Viagra, the maturing of sexually aware baby boomers and overall improved health and beauty are all contributing to the graying of naughty.

The biggest change is in the sexual desirability of women old enough to be the viewer's mother. It has been fueled in part by pop culture's embrace of the sexy 40-something women of "Desperate Housewives" and "Stacy's Mom," the 2003 hit song about a teenager's mother who "has got it going on."

The mature-woman genre represents one of the fastest growing areas of video pornography, say leading distributors and retailers, and next month it will be inaugurated as a category at the AVN Awards, the Oscars of the skin trade.

DE'BELLA - or Debbie (photo left), as everybody calls her - decided late in life to become a porn star. This year she turned 50, time, she knew, to chase her dream. "I decided I wanted to do something different. 'Why not do movies? Have some fun, and get paid for it?' "

"I love sex," she explained, biting into a Burger King special before embarking on her scene for the day at a rented house in the San Fernando Valley.

Most of the movies are like the one De'Bella is shooting on this particular day in the Valley, a gonzo shoot - meaning it is more or less plot-free sex for 40 minutes or so. De'Bella's dark hair is up in a chignon, pinned with a couple of rhinestone clips. When her performing partner, Rod Fontana, 54, shows up - he's tall and gangly with a shaved head - she smiles sweetly and shakes his hand. They have never met before.

"What's the premise on this one?" he asks. "Pizza boy?"

Whatever. Within a few unscripted minutes they're mostly unclothed, panting and moaning for the camera, engaged in sexual contortions and obviously unbothered by visiting onlookers.

The director, Urbano Martin, points his camera strategically, scarcely disguising his boredom. "I shoot specialty films," he explains during a break in filming, adding that he has been in the business for 17 years. "Fat women, old women, hairy girls - all kinds. We feed the niche."

The market for beautiful, airbrushed young women "is oversaturated," he says. "This is more normal people, more meat on the bone, like what you have at home."

De'Bella is not one of those otherworldly California creatures untouched by time. She looks like what she is, an attractive 50-year-old, with eyelids and cheeks that have succumbed to gravity and concentric circles of rippled skin on her belly from childbirth, three decades ago, and from dropping 38 pounds this year.

Other mature stars are retired pornography performers who have been lured back into the limelight, like a 40-something former star known as Lisa Ann, and 35-year-old Tiffany Mynx or the performer turned director Devinn Lane, who has started a Web site to recruit women for her hardcore short films.

WHO watches this stuff? By far the most avid consumers of older-woman pornography, producers say, are young men fulfilling boyhood fantasies of teacher lust or yearning for the attractive mothers of their friends. Some, it has been suggested, may be tired of what one producer, Oren Cohen, has called, in a recent AVN article, "the young, helpless teen thing."

David Joseph, 38, De'Bella's boss and the president of Platinum X, said: "It's totally an erotic thing people are attracted to. There's a huge market out there for older women. I'm trying to understand it myself."

And if women performers traditionally last just a handful of years before losing their sizzle, there are male performers who have been stars for as long as there has been a thriving sex-film business in the Valley, ever since the shotgun marriage of video and sexual liberation in the 1970s.

Ron Jeremy (photo above), perhaps the industry's best-known male star, is 53 and still appears in sex movies. Randy Spears, 45, has been performing in them for 20 years and is still going strong.

At 66, Dave Cummings (photo left) bills himself as the oldest pornographic-film star working, though he is a relative newcomer to the business. Married for 22 years until his wife left him, as he put it, "for someone with hair," Mr. Cummings has four grandchildren and a thriving film career.

The dirty little not-so-secret weapons of aging male performers are erectile aids like Viagra and Cialis. Mr. Cummings said he prefers Viagra, but uses it rarely, for instance when he is scheduled for back-to-back sex scenes or "when I'm working for a producer who's very demanding." De'Bella's recent partner, Mr. Fontana, said he used only herbal stimulants.

Like a lot of experienced actors in the business, Mr. Cummings directs as well as acts in his movies (don't ask: mirrors are involved), and they frequently play on dirty old man fantasies, with titles like "It's a Daddy Thing," "Sugar Daddy" and one just three months ago featuring a 19-year-old woman and a group of older sex-film stars. Mr. Cummings is on the cover of the DVD, leaning on a walker.

excerpted from:
"Graying of Naughty"
By SHARON WAXMAN
© New York Times Dec. 31, 2006