Porn industry events definitely draw the guys

This guy's nickname was Moe. He and his computer chip-engineer buddies stood in the hallway at Mandalay Bay, ogling porn starlets as they paraded into the Adult Video News Awards with their hanging-out cabooses in see-through "dresses."

"We're just window shopping," Moe told me Saturday night. "Just burn the image into the ROM portion of the brain."

Moe and friends came to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show.

They didn't want to cough up $83 to watch porn stars pose for fan photos next door, at the Adult Entertainment Expo in the Sands Expo Center.

I can tell you and Moe what you missed. Basically it looked like a traveling Adult Superstore, but with 5,000 guys sidling up to starlets wearing little.

At one point Saturday, the room thinned, and I went into the hallway to find about 60 guys had left the porn women to watch a playoff football game on TV. The analogy is: The same thing would have happened if women ditched a shoe convention to watch an episode of "Sex and The City."

The obvious trend in adult products: packaging and products that appeal to women and mainstream stores. The UniRam was like a ThighMaster with a toy attached, so a woman can exercise her thighs at the same time she's uh ... though it looked a little intimidating to me.

Prettier was an already successful line of vibrating rubber duckies from a company created by Tony Levine, who once helped create plush toys while working for Mattel. Levine's own Big Teaze Toys company is now adding elegant "vibromasseurs" in simple, perfumelike boxes.

"You can open this in front of grandma," said Pamela McKee, publicist for Big Teaze. "It looks like it could be cologne" inside the box.

One of the few women who attended the expo without performing at it was UNLV's Lynn Comella, an assistant professor in the Women's Studies Department. She scrutinizes women and the sex industry. Comella said some new products come in Apple-like packaging to appeal to women.

"They're part of what I would describe," Comella said, "as a new wave of sex toy entrepreneurs who are really looking to bring elements of quality and sleek design and innovation to the sex toy industry. These are words you don't usually hear in the sex toy industry: sleek design and innovation."

But as Comella pointed out -- and as the porn industry is painfully aware -- porn is in trouble. Web sites are stealing so many porn film scenes and uploading them on free sites that DVD sales have dropped. Recently, Larry Flynt craftily called for a government bailout of the porn industry.

Ron Jeremy, the George Washington of porn, told me religious zealots complain that the Internet is proliferating porn, and yet:

"Meanwhile, the Internet is putting out of business a lot of the businesses they hate."

For example, two guys stood on a sidewalk outside the Sands center and harshly screamed unintelligible stuff about Jesus through a handheld PA system at CES and Adult Entertainment Expo conventioneers.

"Sex does not bring joy!" was about the only sentence I could make out from the Jesus guys. That message was not selling on Saturday.

Anyway, so Moe and his engineering buddies missed out on the expo but trekked over to Mandalay Bay and caught the parade of porn stars heading in and out of the red carpet, which was out of public view. I can tell you and Moe what you missed there, too.

Rapper Flo Rida -- who used to lived on Lake Mead Boulevard in Las Vegas for a few years -- said it was "a dream come true" to perform a craft he loves, on stage with porn stars.

"I brought a couple of my guy friends out from the 'hood, and they definitely don't want to leave," he said.

Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction posed with a model named Lindsay but bid fond farewell to her, so he could pose with a porn star named Kirsten Price, because Lindsay was apparently so five minutes ago -- literally. Price told someone in the media, "Dave Navarro is like a 25 on a scale of one to 10."

And "VH1" star Flavor Flav acted like a buffoon.

Porn star Penny Flame said it's a falsehood that porn women earn fortunes in films. They pocket more by stripping under star marquees. But Flame -- whose mom is her accountant -- doesn't earn much because she's a "terrible stripper."

"I go around: 'Hey, you want a lap dance?' He's like, 'Oh, I only have a dollar.' I'm like, 'Oh, your life sucks! Let me buy you shots!' You don't make any money like that."

She loves her career, though. From the excitement in her voice and in her eyes when she told me this, plus the offer she made me in jest, I believed her 100 percent.

"If it's not fun, why do it?" she said.

Flame started at 18. At 25, she has had gonorrhea three times -- "not a bad ratio" considering her partner-number, she said -- and she keeps her five previous Adult Video News Awards on a mantle.

"I like to intimidate people when they walk into my house," she said with a big playful smile. "I like them to see how awesome I am."

Doug Elfman's column appears on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 702-383-0391 or e-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He also blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.