The Golden Age of Porn Valley

Sascha Cohen talks with Molly Lambert about her new podcast “JennaWorld: Jenna Jameson, Vivid Video, & the Valley.”

By Sascha CohenNovember 9, 2025

• Gender & Sexuality

• Film

FORMER HUSTLER MAGAZINE editor Evan Wright once jokingly called pornography “indigenous Southern California folk art.” A new podcast from Molly Lambert asks what it would mean to take this idea seriously. In JennaWorld: Jenna Jameson, Vivid Video, & the Valley, porn is art, commerce, and political battleground all in one. Lambert, who grew up in North Hollywood, acts as historical tour guide of the adult industry, from its experimental beginnings in the theaters of New York City to its heyday of production in the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. Much of late 1990s and early 2000s pop culture (music videos, hamburger commercials, magazine advertisements) was downstream of pornography’s aesthetic contributions. Lambert suggests that we cannot truly understand sex and fame in Y2K America without understanding the “Queen of Porn” herself, Jenna Jameson.

While other millennial commentators look back at the raunchy early aughts and see only women’s objectification, Lambert treats the era with curiosity and affection. Her work reveals an obsession with L.A. lore, Hollywood sleaze, men behaving badly, and women vindicated by time. She is deeply interested in the mythologies of public lives; her previous podcast, HeidiWorld: The Heidi Fleiss Story, follows the titular Fleiss, madam to the stars. In both projects, Lambert alternates her own narration with the voices of actors who play an assortment of industry moguls, starlets, and lowlifes. JennaWorld explores how Jameson, the daughter of a Las Vegas showgirl and a cop, pioneered the now-ubiquitous parasocial relationship between entertainers and their fans. In Lambert’s telling, Jameson is canny and resilient, a woman who used the media to her own advantage and not the other way around. JennaWorld blends curated biography and showbiz gossip with nostalgia for a bygone past when people were less averse to sex on screen.

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SASCHA COHEN: Tell me about your casting process. Both this podcast and your previous one heavily feature L.A. comedians.

MOLLY LAMBERT: Lauren Servideo, the actress and comedian who plays Jenna, is actually a New York person, but she’s somebody I thought was really funny and cool, and I had a vision of her playing Jenna. Other than that, it was looking through my own mental Rolodex of who I thought would be good for these different characters. It’s been really fun to cast people and build out this world.

What draws you to stories of sexually transgressive women and entrepreneurs who make money off of sexuality?

It was a core interest of mine, subconsciously. Your body is the one thing you’re born with and that you own in this country. Why can’t you monetize it if you want to? But also, why should you have to monetize it and make yourself a brand in order to make a living? Jenna and Heidi were both very ahead of the self-branding trend that feels mandatory now for people in almost every profession.

We think of porn as inherently degrading to women, but we don’t think about it that way with men.

People having sex on film is not inherently degrading. Seventies feminists argued about whether porn could be, not necessarily “empowering,” but sort of neutral. People like Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem were on the anti-porn side. But a lot of early porn performers were proactively saying, “No, I’m doing this, and I get paid; it’s a job, and sometimes it’s hard and sucks, because that’s what jobs are.”

The empowerment thing seems like a red herring to me. We don’t ask if most jobs are empowering, like being a garbageman.

Being a garbageman could be exploitative or it could be a good job, depending on whether you’re overworked, or on whether you’re paid minimum wage. One of the things I said in HeidiWorld was that working jobs like driving for Amazon, where you have to pee in a jar, are exploitative jobs. Attempts to drive sex work back underground by keeping it illegal and criminalizing it are what makes it so dangerous.

You say that Jenna bridges a gap in porn history, from photography and magazines to VHS to eventually digital media. She was called the “most downloaded person online.” I wonder if, during this evolution of tech, somebody like Jenna gains more control over her own image, or less?

There are definitely upsides and downsides. When adult content first moved from physical media to the internet, it was a good thing for sex workers. The internet was seen as this place where you do all the stuff you were doing without having to engage with your fans face-to-face. You could say, “Here’s my stuff, and fans can interact with me, but I don’t have to worry about getting followed back to my hotel room at the end of the night.”

But now, with things like data collection and surveillance, online porn feels scarier.

It’s a different kind of scary. Now, some of the big issues are AI porn, face swapping, and filters, which are all deeply unethical. One of the ideas of the podcast is that you want human beings doing this work. AI is not generated automatically from nowhere—it’s scraping people’s content and building this Frankenstein monster of real people’s bodies.

There have been two periods of “porno chic,” when people were openly admitting to watching porn. The first era was in the 1970s, with Deep Throat and Linda Lovelace. And then, when Jenna was dominating the genre, the Y2K era. What do you think was special about those time periods, when there was more social tolerance of porn?

In the seventies, it was the novelty of being able to see these movies in theaters for the first time, which had thus far been completely illegal. Adult movies had just been shown underground, like stag films, which were authorless and shown at bachelor parties and men’s clubs. And then, when nudity on film became legally acceptable in 1968, when the Hays Code was repealed, the first sex films were art films. Andy Warhol made one [the following year] called Blue Movie.

Somebody would review a film and say, “This movie is incredible. You have to see it.” And these movies, like Behind the Green Door, would become box office hits. So I think the reason, like anything in America, that people paid attention and gave porn a little respect was that it was making a lot of money.

Do you feel like there was another turning point in the early 2000s?

First, there was the period of intense popularity in the seventies, when you had these crossover stars, like Marilyn Chambers, who’s kind of a proto-Jenna, doing interviews and saying, “I like what I do. I’m an actor.” She was in a David Cronenberg movie, Rabid, and was auditioning for mainstream Hollywood movies.

Then in the 1980s, in the Reagan era, there was backlash to pornography being mainstream and legal, and legislators worked hard to find loopholes to prosecute it. There was a cultural reframing of porn as bad. After Linda Lovelace became a cautionary tale, mainstream media latched on to a lot of the more tragic stories.

There’s an episode of JennaWorld about a porn star [with the stage name] Savannah who was very famous in the early 1990s and who killed herself. Those stories were always framed as “See, we told you, there’s no way to do this without it ruining your life,” without thinking about how societal judgment might impact the people who are doing this kind of work.

They’ve mixed up the cause with the effect.

Yeah—and so Jenna was kind of this nineties reset. There was the nineties third-wave feminist thing—in tandem with Madonna putting out a book of soft-core pornography—of women saying, “I’m publicly being sexual, because I’m a sexual person.”

Jenna was the perfect person for her time. She drew attention to the labor aspects of the job, how there were work days and lighting people and sound people, and how porn is this smaller, more blue-collar film industry. She went up against a lot of people who were not necessarily open to hearing her. She talked to men in the media who said, “Obviously, something’s wrong with you, and something bad happened to you, or you wouldn’t do this.” But she became very good at holding her own, and arguing with people like Howard Stern and Jerry Springer and Bill O’Reilly.

How did porn evolve during this era?

If the 1970s saw the transition from people making film to making videotapes (something the movie Boogie Nights depicts), then the 1990s is really about the transition from videotape to DVD and then, in the 2000s, to the internet. I see it as the second big shift in the industry. I definitely have a lot of fondness for that 1990s–2000s era. Porn is always ahead, predicting what’s going to happen with the rest of media.

The labor aspect is often underdiscussed, but maybe the art angle is too. In the first episode of JennaWorld, you refer to porn filmmakers as auteurs or artists, but do we often think of porn as too lowbrow to be art?

It is this kind of lowbrow but also avant-garde film industry. A lot of the people who were making porn were people who wanted to make mainstream films, wanted to be in Hollywood, and were shut out for whatever reason, but could break into porn, and found that in porn they could write and direct movies. Akin to indie film directors, a lot of weird, interesting, outsider-art people have made porn.

You also say that it’s easy for us to understand mainstream Hollywood film as fantasy, but we struggle to extend that interpretation to porn. Why is that the case?

It goes back to this idea of porn being kind of authorless, and people thinking it was filmed spontaneously and not really thinking about the camera angles and production, which is almost to its credit—that people feel, “Wow, this is so great, it must just be spontaneous.”

A lot of film theory is about erasing the fact that there’s an entire camera crew and all these people involved. Even auteurism makes it seem like it’s just the director, this all-powerful person making a film, when it’s really a collaborative art form. That’s not as true anymore, because now people shoot at home on smartphones, but still, people are setting up lighting rigs or ring cameras. There’s a lot of work that goes into making it seem like there’s no work going into it.

You mention that we don’t give porn viewers enough credit to think critically about what they’re watching. I often see the accusation that men are choking women during sex because of what they see in porn. To me, this seems like a simplified understanding of how people consume media.

Yeah, the fearmongering that happens now is the idea that people are going to see these extreme sex acts, and if they see them, they’re going to want to do them, and if they do them, they’re going to do them wrong. We need people to be more aware of how media works. You wouldn’t do a stunt that a stunt performer is doing, right? Why would you think you could do these extreme sex acts with no preparation and not knowing what you’re doing?

One of the feminist arguments in the seventies was that porn shows extreme BDSM. Well, it shows that kind of stuff because it takes place in a fantasy. It’s a fantasy about power dynamics. In the seventies, lesbians who were into sadomasochism were saying, “Some of us like to be submissive, and some of us like to be dominant, and it’s not because of what gender we are.” The real issue is that straight men are socialized into being dominant in every aspect of life. I’m sure there are lots of straight men who don’t want that.

The amount of “femdom” porn, I think, proves it.

In the 2000s, there was this discovery of MILF porn as a huge sector that had gone underexplored. Because the people making porn for so long assumed, Well, everybody wants to see a dominant man and a submissive woman. Then companies discovered that the content getting watched from their tube sites was MILF porn: older woman, younger man. There was a market for that. It reflects some kind of larger acceptance; sometimes women are in roles of power too.

There are so many different permutations of what people want. Is this in any way reflective of who is making porn?

Because porn is seen as so lowbrow, there’s not the same barrier of entry to directing as in mainstream Hollywood, so almost every performer is given the opportunity to direct at some point. As a result, you have a lot of women directors. At the recent Adult Video News Awards, the majority of Best Director nominees were women. And I thought about how that’s never happened at the Oscars, and probably never will.

And that contradicts the myth that porn is controlled and produced by men.

Yeah. And that’s because, as media moved from DVDs to the internet, the money really went out of porn. At the point when Jenna was at her peak, porn was making more money on DVD sales than any other part of the film industry. And then, when YouTube was invented and people could stream videos for free, they immediately stopped paying for porn. Like a lot of things, when it stopped being profitable, it became more diverse and more progressive, because the people who are left really want to make porn and are interested in it as an art form. That’s one of the main goals of the podcast, to double down on it as an art form and say, “It might not be your kind of art, but these are films. This is art in its own way.”

There is a big push now, as part of Project 2025, to recriminalize porn. To drive it back underground, not necessarily by outlawing it but by making it more difficult for the people making it and the people consuming it. They’re very explicitly against trans porn. There’s always been a real queer sensibility to the porn industry. A lot of the people in it are queer or pansexual, or outside the traditional nuclear family.

We could interpret the rise of incest porn as almost like a satire of the nuclear family.

Totally. But now, the type of porn that people are making is becoming less transgressive because of conservative pushback.

Which caused all these new rules about what creators are allowed to post on the different subscription sites.

Yeah. And I think trying to regulate people’s fantasy lives is a fool’s errand. The fear is about women rebelling against women’s roles. The fear of, What if women don’t stay at home?

And, What if women are sexually insatiable?

Exactly. Porn has this exaggeration of gender roles that feels very camp to me. It’s like in wrestling. It’s a performance.

Jenna had always been out as a bisexual, and has now come out as a lesbian. So this idea of things being done for the “male gaze”—I keep saying, we’re going to have to take “male gaze” away from people, because everyone has been using it wrong.

Any time power is played with in a sexual way, it’s assumed to be misogynist.

There’s this underlying assumption that only men are interested in watching sex. But a lot of the people who got into porn in the 2000s were women who had grown up watching it and wanted to make porn that they thought was good. Sasha Grey was the Jenna of the 2000s. She wanted to make very extreme porn.

The newest boom in porn has been OnlyFans, and I think people understand at this point that it’s very hard to make a living in the United States, so you might have to have a side hustle. Something I picked up on from talking to porn performers was that they all have podcasts now, and they all have merch lines, and you can’t just make money off of physical media now, so you have to do all these other things to build a job.

Did Jenna do some of that?

She did a lot of that—she had a clothing line, and a studio called ClubJenna that made some of the biggest-selling porn DVDs of all time. Everybody who came after her really is in that model of performer and activist. Jenna’s legacy, too, is that porn stars have a lot of female fans. Women see themselves in porn stars and see them as avatars for exploring their personal fantasies.

Now that porn has moved out of Southern California and “Porn Valley” no longer exists, do you think that something has been lost, either as a physical place or in the popular imagination?

Yeah. It was a golden age in some way. The Valley is suburban on the surface, but it’s always been a weird place underneath. Growing up there, you develop this pride in it. It’s where a lot of working-class people live, and a lot of film workers and musicians. It’s always been a backlot for the entertainment industry, and so much stuff is filmed there that it stands in for every part of the country.

It’s like with a lot of things—once, there was a place where everything happened, and now it’s dispersed all around. But if you go to a porn convention, it still has that family feel, which I think Boogie Nights captured very well. People are just hugging each other, and there’s camaraderie. I think being up against opposition brings people together.

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Molly Lambert is an American journalist, podcaster, and social activist. She was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the San Fernando Valley.