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When was the porn industry seen positively? It’s a categorically sleazy business.
Depends by whom and how you define the porn industry. Playboy was mainstreamed through the 1970s. The 1980s saw somewhat of a reaction due to AIDS and the Traci Lords scandal that revealed that some (many?) pornstars were underage. Val Venis was a wrestler on children's TV, with a pornstar gimmick, in the 1990s. By the 2000s, Jenna Jameson was a celebrity who could be at a Holywood party without people particularly noticing. Nudity and simulated sex has long been common in Holywood films, with fairly artificial distinctions from "real" sex, and even then, softcore "porn" indicates that the difference was supposed to be a blurry line of genre/artistic merit. Wild Things circa 1950 would be regarded as a pornographic film, albeit one with high production values, yet it was a mainstream movie in the 1990s.
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The culture used to be different. Today, the arguments that porn addiction is a big problem among young men which causes impotence and has wide-ranging negative repercussions (although I’m not sure the evidence from scientific research actually bears this out clearly, but anyway), that porn actresses have an unusually high suicide and drug addiction rate, that porn companies are exploitative and are closely intertwined with international human trafficking networks etc., that the expectations of teenage boys regarding sex are warped by online porn all find acceptance in mainstream discourse today. They aren’t even controversial.
But this wasn’t always the case. I wouldn’t say pornography was ever portrayed positively in mainstream discourse, but at least It was more tolerated and given much more leeway than today. Naivete and lack of foresight were probably part of it, because people generally didn’t assume that high-speed HD online porn will ever be freely available on touchscreens and become a widespread source of addiction. The industry was portrayed as just another branch of the entertainment industry which was actually doing a great job regulating itself voluntarily, it had mainstream crossover ability, it became normal to put porn actresses in music videos and invite them on talk shows etc. I remember there was even a time when Bill Clinton was photographed with a bunch of porn actresses at some PR event after his presidency and so on. The industry was also peddling a lot of BS about appealing to normal people’s tastes and becoming legit, creating “couples’ porn” (whatever the heck that is supposed to be) etc. Also, the idea that women should be able to live without sexual shame was getting normalized.
And again, this was all before the Culture War turned hot. Mainstream discourse used to feature less rage and negativity, the overall mood in society was less negative and dire, much more laid back, and there was no sense of malaise.
See e.g. the Friends episode where Phoebe discovers that her twin sister is a porn star. This is played for laughs, with the only shame being (some) men's enjoyment of porn and implicit inability to get the real thing. The idea of this being truly scandalous would be about as out of place in the Friendsverse as a serious episode about fighting communist infiltration or one of the women being kidnapped by cruel Native Redskins.
Indeed. Also, accessible online porn did not practically exist at the time of this TV series. Having a porn career and keeping it largely discrete was still feasible.
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