ABOUT Naked Ambition
When porn first appeared on the pop culture radar, it surfaced as an underground phenomenon that took over movie theatres in red light districts across the globe. Titles like "Deep Throat," "Behind The Green Door," "Misty Beethoven" and "Insatiable" became household names, as did women like Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers. The 80s brought the home video revolution, and – constantly adapting to new technologies – porn went right along with it, launching a number of powerhouse video companies that furnished the world with smut they could view in the comfort of their own home. This was also when toy companies as we know them today truly started appearing on the map, bringing "sexual aides"
to the masses. And then there were the 90s, which brought along the Internet revolution, another charge led by the adult industry as companies and stars alike flocked to the World Wide Web, some becoming multi-millionaires almost overnight. Soon after the writers followed, bringing forth a batch of sex positive females whose mandate was to make sexuality and pornography comfortable for the everyman. And while the history of the adult industry’s steady climb into meteoric popularity is certainly interesting, it’s the women behind it that make it more interesting.
In the beginning, women were little more than the eye candy that helped drive the eyeballs to a product – you saw them in adult magazines, on box covers and naked on your TV screen, and for the most part they answered to men. But as porn evolved with the times in terms of technology and consumer demand, it also adapted more sexual equality both in front of and behind the cameras. Not only are the female performers taking charge of their careers, but women are running the companies people purchase movies from, opening stores that porn purveyors patronize, and writing thoughtful, analytical commentary on America’s most favorite pastime since baseball. And this generation of women in and around the adult industry is helping shape and change society’s views on sexuality.
For well over a decade now, women sex writers and pornographers have brought strong women to pornography and pornography to strong women, changing the ways we look at both pornography and women’s thoughts on it. Women such as Susie Bright and Annie Sprinkle helped open the adult film field to other women, including women viewers, allowing for a new interpretation of what’s erotic and what’s taboo. This first wave of women pornographers lead to a cultural revolution in the 1990s, when younger women took inspiration from the sex pioneers of the 1970s and 80s thereby setting off a new wave of women pornographers that reaches all the way up to today.
No book before has charted the evolution of this body of work, much less in the voices of those women responsible for it. Thus, Naked Ambition charts this course by inviting 31 of the leading women involved in adult entertainment and the proliferation of it to share their ideas, experiences, histories, and passions so that we might better understand the profound influence that porn – a social force that feminists and others on the left for a generation espoused as dangerous and degrading to women – had in helping liberate a newer, younger generation of women into claiming their sexual selves on their own terms.