Modern-day female performer Chanel Preston once described the look to me as “The Brawny Paper Towel Man”- pretty fine for a lumberjack. These films were overwhelmingly male-oriented-1972’s Deep Throat was about a woman who could only orgasm through the penile stimulation of her clitoris, which was located in her throat-but in trying to fit in with the era’s women’s lib/sexual revolution, they required reasonably attractive male performers to ape the style of their Hollywood counterparts.

Modeled after Hollywood features, they were released publicly in movie theaters and targeted a wide national audience, from suburban couples to bohemian sexual revolutionaries. From there, he served as a character actor in the pornographic films of the time, which really were films. In 1978, Playgirl found his nude photographs fit to print. When he first entered the porn business, after stints as a special ed teacher and a struggling mainstream actor, he resembled something approximating the 1970s masculine ideal-hirsute and physically fit, with a Selleckian mustache and a sizable penis. Ron Jeremy did not always look like this.