12 August 1 -7, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents “I loved it. It was very different than I ex- pected, very different from the exotic danc- ing world, which is not much of a family,” Starr says. “The porn industry was very much like a close-knit, small community that was very, for lack of a better term, fam- ily-oriented. Everybody kind of comes to- gether and shares ideas. It’s very creative, very innovative and very supportive. And that was the kind of environment that I wanted to be in.” When Starr was cutting her teeth in porn, social media was pretty much a nonentity. “What we had was MySpace, and not ev- erybody did it. It was just kind of it was there, but it wasn’t required,” she says. “Fast forward to today, your online presence is such a deciding factor of even how often companies hire you.” Starr has collaborated with major pro- duction companies Brazzers, BangBros and NaughtyAmerica over the years. While she still enjoys working on set and the efficiency and regulations that come with it, she says that 70% of her income comes from inde- pendently produced content on platforms such as OnlyFans. In addition to the boost in income, she values the convenience of being able to work from home. “Porn is filmed by big production compa- nies, mostly in LA, Vegas or Miami,” she says. “I’ve got to hop on a flight and go there and be on that set and be in a hotel room. And you’re there all day, you know? For something like OnlyFans, I’m right here in my home sweet home in Dallas. I don’t have to leave my house. I ordered some profes- sional lighting on Amazon and you can use your iPhone, for God’s sake. [...] You can set up a very professional-looking production right in your own home.” While Starr speaks fondly of her experi- ence with porn studios, it’s no secret that not all porn stars have the same warm feelings. Mia Khalifa, who was once the most searched- for adult film star in the world, made headlines in 2019 for speaking out about being under- paid. She claims to have made $12,000 from over a dozen shoots in 2015 and has not seen a single penny since. Claims of poor working conditions, im- proper vetting of talent and even sex traf- ficking are other common concerns that surround the porn industry. Starr says that the convenience and prof- itability of OnlyFans has led production companies to step up their game in terms of how they treat actors on set. “These subscription-based platforms have given the talent so much control over the direction of their career,” she says. “Pro- fessional companies have had to take a deep look at how they treated talent, how they handled talent, what they paid talent like. Now if you work for a professional company, in my experience, it feels like a lot more red carpet is rolled out for you. They’re so much more cognizant of making you comfortable on set. There’s much higher rates being paid, because they had to compete with that. You know, otherwise, they just never get anybody back on a professional set.” Many of Starr’s films have been released on DVD, but she chuckles when we ask her what her sales are like these days. “It’s Blockbuster, right?” she says. “Like, it just died out. We’re past that. I wouldn’t even know what to tell you.” Starr’s dry dismissal of her home video stardom lines up with the current state of New Fine Arts’ DVD selection. Given porn’s compa- rable commercial standing to mainstream me- dia, it’s safe to assume that the decline of adult DVD sales has mostly to do with the general decline of DVDs. Films of all kinds largely exist digitally or on streaming platforms. Even Pu- entes concedes that it’s hard to find a high- quality DVD player these days. And yet the video section of New Fine Arts remains and, according to Puentes, it isn’t go- ing anywhere. In this modern age when there’s a never-ending supply of porn online, who is still going to the store to buy it? One demographic seems obvious enough. Some customers are just old-fashioned and set in their ways. “I have a lot of guys that don’t like to do streaming because they don’t want their in- formation online,” Puentes says. “They have to log on, get internet. A lot of older guys don’t want to do all that. They don’t want to download it to their phone. They don’t want to get a virus or for someone to look at what they’ve been watching [...] They would rather just have their movie and watch it when they want to watch it.” Collectors make up a significant amount of DVD sales, with customers dutifully keep- ing up with their series of choice. “They like a good production company or an actress or a writer,” Puentes says. “Brad Armstrong was a Wicked director. He made some good movies, like all-male parody movies. And some just like plots. Some guys collect because of the girls. They like a cer- tain type of girl and collect all of her movies. [...] The guys that come in here are pretty much the same. They know what they want. They’ve got a list. [...] They do the research.” Vintage collectors come in looking for classic older films, like Deep Throat or Deb- bie Does Dallas. That’s no dice at Puentes’ store, unfortunately. “You gotta remember that those movies were made on a film reel that they had to convert to VHS and then that switched to DVD,” he says. “It’s really hard to find who still has the masters of all those. [...] Once in a while, we might get a box of older movies from the ‘90s. [...] There were some from the ‘70s, ‘60s and older ones too. But those are really hard to come by now. Nobody has those. One of the big companies kind of just bought out everybody.” Lately, Puentes has seen a new crowd of customers checking out the DVD section: people who can’t access online porn after Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law requiring viewers to upload an ID. Given the liabilities that come with this, most sites, for lack of a better phrase, pulled out of Texas altogether. While many people are using methods like VPNs to get around the ban, others are venturing out to stores like New Fine Arts to see what they have to offer. “We just started seeing some more guys come in here,” Puentes says. “Some of them are just getting started with just one or two movies and stuff like that. [...] You gotta imagine…my store was half DVDs and now I’m making the same amount of money. Pushed it back 200 feet, then 1,000 feet and still making the same amount of money and for cheaper prices.” Though VHS is dead and DVDs are on life support, the adult industry is still blazing the trail for filmmaking technology in ways mainstream media wouldn’t dare to attempt. Let There Be (Flesh)Light F or those who don’t know, a flesh- light is a male masturbatory aid that simulates vaginal, anal or oral sex: a rubber hole, to put it more plainly. An in- creasingly common trend is for porn stars to have their own line of toys specially molded after their own anatomy, allowing fans to feel closer to them, so to speak. Fleshlights are one of many tools being utilized by the porn industry to create more interactive experiences. New Fine Arts sells about 20 or 30 of these fleshlights that go for a couple hundred bucks and, according to Puentes, they’re highly popular. These toys are being combined with other emerging technologies to make porn more immersive than ever before. “I carry some of their toys, and they come with a coupon for online streaming,” Puen- tes says. “It’s kind of a way to get people to watch some content while they’re using it. ... We have some interactive toys where if you have the Oculus [a virtual reality gaming headset], you can put the movie on and the girl is talking to you and the toy is going to move [in sync] with her.” Starr has worked hard to keep ahead of the game. She has her own customized fleshlight, Kiiroo’s best-selling FeelRachel, which is advertised as allowing the user to “experience [Starr’s] erotic content in real time.” “It’s a very viable option to partner with these companies,” she says. “And it provides your fans with just another extension of feeling close to you. And you know, who doesn’t want that?” She’s also dipping her toes into the new frontier of AI content. “Having an AI personality, whether that be an AI creation of your voice or of your image, is accelerating so fast,” she says. “Companies are coming in and saying, ‘Hey, record so many hours of your voice and x- number of megabytes of video and pictures so we can create an AI likeness of you that can literally be watched.’ It’s no different than you filming and they can sit there and watch and it looks just like you.” As we check out the private viewing rooms at New Fine Arts, Puentes tells us that they offered a virtual reality room at one point, but that it didn’t really stick, just like with the other industries that tried to make it a thing in the early 2000s. He believes that this isn’t a coincidence and that trends in the porn industry can predict the direction of mainstream entertainment. “A story I heard back in the day is that be- fore DVDs took off, [media companies] wanted to see if porn companies kept it,” he says. “If the porn companies kept it, that meant it was gonna take off.” The correlation is certainly there. Ev- ery time there’s been a major paradigm shift in the media, porn was ahead of the curve. The oldest known adult film, a French striptease reel called Le Coucher de la Mariée, was created in 1896. Later on, the accessibility of porn on VHS played a role in the downfall of Betamax and it later helped secure the victory of Blu Ray over HD DVD. You can even thank porn for the invention of e-commerce, which was origi- nally developed for adult video sites. Now, porn is keeping pace with emerging technologies like AI and the Oculus, and these seem to be sticking much more than ’90s arcade-style VR did. “The sex industry has had to learn to pivot, move, change, innovate and create,” Starr says. “We always find a way.” The DVDs at New Fine Arts are never go- ing away. The stubborn old guard, the col- lectors and even younger customers who think adult movies from the 2000s are “retro” (yes, really) will always have a place to get their fix. But if the porn industry is forging ahead with more interactive and immersive expe- riences, it’s worth paying attention. When it comes to the next big film and media trends, they always seem to be on top of things. Culture from p10 courtesy Rachel Starr Dallas-based adult film star Rachel Starr has been keeping pace with the industry for 17 years.
