10 August 1 -7, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Sex Still Sells The Dallas adult film industry adapts with the times and keeps coming first. By Carly May Gravley N ew Fine Arts has some- thing for everyone, even those who don’t want to admit it. The cult favorite Dallas chain sells a wide variety of toys, lingerie, raunchy gag gifts for bachelorette parties and pipes and bongs (for tobacco, of course). If it’s too risqué for Target, New Fine Arts has it. Martin Puentes, the general manager of the W. Northwest Highway location of New Fine Arts, has worked for the company for more than 20 years. When it comes to the business and entertainment aspects of the industry, he’s seen it all. For one thing, Puentes is one of the few people in the world who can have porn play- ing in his office and not get fired, and he of- ten does. It’s strictly in a professional capacity, of course. He can’t help customers without proper knowledge of his inventory. Whether in his office or on the shelves of his store, he’s seen every porn-related fad come and go, from celebrity sex tapes to vir- tual reality. When we dropped by the shop to talk to him, there was one trend in particular we were curious about: the gradual decline of the store’s DVD section. “We used to have like half a store full of movies, DVDs and VHS,” he says. “Now it’s probably about 20 feet.” The reduced video section to which he’s referring is limited to a small corner but still has hundreds of titles representing every sexual preference you can think of, from head to toe. (Literally — we found a 12-vol- ume series dedicated solely to foot jobs.) Adult entertainment aficionados may recognize some familiar faces (and bodies) among the compact selection of DVDs, such as Jenna Jameson and Alexis Texas. These stars were huge in the 2000s and, according to Puentes, are among the last of their kind. “There’s no stars now. There’s no big names,” he says. “All of these major stars are making their own content. [...] OnlyFans is really big right now, so they’re making money for themselves.” Production companies that used to keep the store stocked have also moved online, if they even exist at all. “There’s no more Vivid. There’s no more Wicked,” he says, referring to major adult video studios. “I mean, there’s still Wicked, but they’re not putting out movies like they used to. They’re only going to streaming. That’s where most of the movies have gone, to streaming.” But perhaps the saddest and most telling display of this downward trend is one shelf of New Fine Arts’ dwindling video section labeled “New Releases,” which Puentes says hasn’t been updated since last year. New Fine Arts isn’t the only store whose DVDs are being pushed to the back. Paris Adult Book Store has operated out of its Harry Hines storefront since 1978. The key to longevity is adaptability, and Paris has done so by pushing its DVD selection back to a corner that’s hardly visible from the front to make room for smoking paraphernalia. Many sex stores seem to be jumping on that revenue stream. Media platforms come and go, but nicotine addiction is forever. The aging, seedy Lido Adult Theater in West Dallas looks like a scene straight out of Taxi Driver or Boogie Nights. While most sex stores have private video arcades, it’s not ev- ery day you come across a full-blown the- ater, and the Lido has two, a “straight one” upstairs and a “gay one” downstairs. Both theaters are considered seedy hookup desti- nations. The business leans into this with a sign that reads “DON’T FORGET THE LUBE” next to the entrance. Customers who show up in pairs get a discount. Despite the Lido’s old-fashioned charm, its home media section has also been re- duced to a handful of shelves. The area sur- rounding it is now dedicated to a much more expansive selection of bondage gear. All of this paints a rather bleak picture of the state of physical adult media and indi- cates that streaming and the internet have achieved total market domination. But if there’s one thing we learned on our guided tour of New Fine Arts, it’s that physi- cal media in the porn industry is doing just fine. You just need to broaden your defini- tion of “physical media.” Natural Porn Killers I t’s impossible to overstate how mas- sive the porn industry is. Society’s shared dirty little not-really secret is raking in the kind of money that puts it on par with mainstream entertainment. Transparency Market Research estimates that the global adult entertainment industry is worth roughly $278 billion as of 2023 and is expected to surpass $700 billion by the end of 2024. About $12 billion is generated annually in the United States alone. Some other stag- gering statistics reveal that 12% of all websites are pornographic and 35% of all downloads are related to pornography. According to a market analysis from Git- nux, the film subset of this industry releases around 400 movies a year and generates $20 billion in revenue. Furthermore, two of the 10 most visited websites in the world are pornographic in nature, with PornHub in sixth place with over 5 billion monthly visits and XVideos in ninth with around 4 billion, as of April 2024. Both beat out mainstream heavy hitters like Amazon and TikTok. You can go on any given porn site and find videos with hundreds of millions of streams, the kind of numbers major pop stars are pulling with their music videos on YouTube. If you’ve seen a trending video on a site like PornHub or XVideos, it’s pretty likely that a lot of people you know have seen it too. It just won’t be widely discussed like the latest releases from Marvel and Netflix. Whenever the porn paradigm shifts, no- body feels it more than performers and con- tent creators. Dallas-based adult film star Rachel Starr has been keeping pace with the industry for 17 years. She got her start at the age of 23 after being scouted at an exotic dancing gig. Carly May Gravley ▼ Culture The aging, seedy Lido Adult Theater in West Dallas. >> p12
