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American Prestige

E336 - The Political Economy of Porn w/ Molly Lambert

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

History, Politics, News

4.8705 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Subscribe now to skip the ads and get all of our episodes. Danny and Derek welcome to the show Molly Lambert, creator of the JENNAWORLD podcast, to talk about the rise of the modern porn industry and its roots in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. They discuss the medium’s origins in underground stag films and the porno chic era; the shift to home video and the corporate studio model; breakout stars like Ginger Lynn Allen and Jenna Jameson; porn as an outsider industry mirroring Hollywood; gender, labor, and power in late-20th-century media; the relationship between pornography and evolving feminist politics; porn’s role in the VHS–Betamax war; and how the internet, OnlyFans, and content platforms have affected a formerly professionalized industry.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening to American Prestige.

0:02.7

To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at Americanprostagepod.com.

0:08.3

Find the link in our show notes.

0:13.0

That's kind of conversation to your soul.

0:18.8

That's conversation between your soul and the night. Next conversation. Hello, Prestige Headson, I'm

0:21.6

Danube

0:25.6

David.

0:31.6

Hello, Prestige Heads, and welcome to American Prestige.

0:35.6

I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade, Derek Davison, and I and Derek are extremely excited to welcome to the podcast

0:42.8

today. Molly Lambert. Molly is the host and creator of Jenna World, Jenna Jameson, Vivid Video,

0:49.5

and the Valley. And we've invited her to talk about that, but also check out her recently

0:53.3

released podcast series on Heidi Fleiss, titled Heidi World, the Heidi Fly Story. And I have been a fan with, and of Molly, for a very long time. When I first moved to Seattle, I remember listening to a little podcast called Girls with Hoodies. And Molly, I don't think I've ever told you this, but you got me into dark rides, which is something that I had never heard about before, but I first heard on that

1:14.6

podcast, which is watching people go on amusement park rides. And I've been watching those things for

1:19.3

like a decade. And they're like, they're so perifics. They're ASMR avants la-lette. But thank you

1:25.3

for that, bringing dark rides into my life.

1:29.2

Hey, thanks for having me.

1:34.5

And I really, really enjoy this series on Jenna Jamison because it does, I think,

1:39.4

what the best podcast series do, which is that it expands beyond the subject to really tell the story of a world and a place.

1:41.2

And that world is the world of porn going back. I mean, you go back really

1:46.3

far. You go back to the teens and the 20s at points. And the place is the San Fernando Valley,

1:52.4

specifically in Los Angeles more broadly. So maybe the first question I'd like to ask is,

1:58.5

how did you get into this story? What made you want to do

...

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