Editor's note: This is the first in a two-part series examining the role of pornography on Dartmouth's campus and in today's youth culture. This article will focus on how two College alumni lead conflicting careers concerning the adult entertainment industry.
It is in living rooms, hotel rooms and dorm rooms across the country. Once confined to seedy movie theaters and red light districts, adult entertainment has transformed into a mainstream, multi-billion dollar corporate industry. For the technologically-savvy internet generation, sex has always been only a mouse click away, and increased access has resulted in a decreasing stigma.
To grasp the reality of the disappearing taboo connected with pornography on campus and its possible effect on students, one need only compare today with past generations.
When Vivid Entertainment co-CEO Bill Asher '84 attended Dartmouth, he drove with his Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers and occasionally his girlfriend to a small porn movie theater in White River Junction, Vt., to watch adult videos. But he was one of a very small minority.
"We didn't tell people we were doing that," Asher said. "Maybe I was cut out to be a pornographer."
Now an undisputed innovator in the adult entertainment industry, Asher attributes his professional success to his years at Dartmouth.
"I'm in an industry where no one I'm aware of has an Ivy League degree," Asher said. "It helped me because I had a very traditional background. So I could do traditional business."
But it wasn't just having any Ivy League degree that helped -- Dartmouth differed from other top academic institutions, Asher said.
"People at Dartmouth have balls," Asher said. "Dartmouth was unique because people got outdoors, they played sports, they drank, they did stupid things. You went out and surfed on top of cars while you drove down the freeway. Naked."
The College encourages a student to "be an individual, have fun, try things, break the mold, do things a little differently," he said.
Which is precisely what Asher did in his career.
Vivid Entertainment, which is the world's largest pornography distributor and is often referred to as the Microsoft of the porn industry, has spearheaded the movement toward increasing pornography's social acceptability. With Asher at its helm, the company has required male porn stars to wear condoms, alleviating actors' concern over AIDS. It also signed the elite in female adult talent to exclusive contracts, reviving those of the Hollywood studio system, and started selling their professionally-staged films in mainstream retail outlets like Virgin Megastore and Tower Records.
"We try to get it out there so it's not just porn; it's part of a fun lifestyle. It's a fun, sexy, silly thing," Asher said. "Hopefully we've had some impact on making people more comfortable with it."
Asher said, laughing, that he is "not sure I'm exactly the model that [Dartmouth] would want students to follow."
Nonetheless, Dartmouth "was the only reason I was successful," Asher said. "If I ever get a tattoo, I'd have it tattooed on my chest. Work hard, play hard."
Robert Peters '71 also indulged in a work hard, play hard lifestyle during his college days, but his Dartmouth experience led him to approach the adult entertainment industry in a drastically different way.
Pornography lacked social acceptability during both Asher's and Peters' college tenures, but while Asher went on to help transform public perception of the medium, Peters work has the opposite purpose: to keep pornography out of the mainstream.
"I'm sure Bill Asher would think there's nothing wrong with his business or values," Peters said. "In my opinion he belongs in jail. I honestly believe he does."
As the president of Morality in Media, a national, interfaith, not-for-profit organization, Peters pushes for the enforcement of obscenity laws and for upholding standards of decency in the media.
"My goal is to reverse the flood tide of commercialized obscenity and push it as far as possible back into the gutter where it belongs," Peters said.
The "play hard" aspect of his time at Dartmouth caused Peters to lead an increasingly dissolute lifestyle which continued into the years after college. He drank, smoked and continued to indulge in a pornography addiction that began when he was 10 years old, he said.
Peters said if he hadn't started drinking he could have gotten a job and graduated from Dartmouth without debt. But by his senior spring, he was broke. To make ends meet, Peters worked over spring break cleaning rooms in New Hampshire residence hall.
"If I came across pornography and I found it attractive, I'd take it," Peters said. "I'm sure some guys were upset when they came back from spring break and their pornography was gone."
Peters said he is not proud of his behavior and explained that "when people are 'hooked' on porn, they are never satisfied with what they've got."
Peters' dissatisfaction continued, and when he attended law school at New York University after graduation, he also started frequenting the porn outlets on 42nd Street.
"I was smoking two, three packs of cigarettes a day, drinking myself into the ground, going up to 42nd Street on a regular basis," Peters said. "And that was my lifestyle. It took me about a year-and-a-half to stop smoking. It would be seven years before I stopped going up to 42nd Street."
After a religious reawakening and a seven-year effort to break his pornography addiction, Peters began his work for Morality in Media.
A basic level of morality is necessary for a good society, and a culture permeated with pornography can't maintain that basic level, according to Peters.
"It is the antithesis of morality. Pornography represents moral anarchy -- sex with children, sex with animals, sex with excrement, torture, gang bangs, group sex, gang rapes, adultery, sticking boards up people's rear ends," Peters said. "If you're going to maintain a level of morality in society you can't let the pornographers win. [Or] you're going to have a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah."
Peters said that today many young people no longer see the difference between Jenna Jameson and Miss America, and is fearful of other effects today's growing culture of pornography might have on America's youth.
Either today's generation "has become numb to this stuff" and will not let it affect their sexual lives, which is Peters' hope, or they have integrated it into their sexual lives.
"In your generation every form of media you touch has pornography. And how is it affecting you?" Peters said. "I don't know the answer to that. I really don't."
