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Somewhat Deadly
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Here is a short article with mind-boggling porn stats (editorial from the Charleston (WV) Gazette
Porn
U.S. sexuality booming
Friday August 17, 2001
BACK in 1997, U.S. News & World Report printed a cover story on a remarkable sociological trend:
"Last year," the business-oriented journal said, "Americans spent more than $8 billion on hard-core videos, peep shows, live sex acts, adult cable programming, sexual devices, computer porn and sex magazines - an amount much larger than Hollywood's domestic box office receipts and larger than all the revenues generated by rock and country music recordings."
But the trend has skyrocketed since then. New York Times commentator Frank Rich recently wrote:
"The 4 billion that Americans spend on video pornography is larger than the annual revenue accrued by either the NFL, the NBA or Major League Baseball. But that's literally not the half of it: the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually in the United States when you toss in porn networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, Internet Web sites, in-room hotel movies, phone sex, sex toys and that archaic medium of my own occasionally misspent youth, magazines."
Hollywood released 400 regular movies last year, Rich pointed out - while little "adult" studios cranked out 11,000 X-rated sex videos. Such films are rented by Americans more than 700 million times a year. In addition, 70,000 sexual Web sites charge fees to viewers, and prosper financially.
The advent of home video players and the Internet allowed Americans to enjoy sexual entertainment in the privacy of their homes, unleashing the porn boom. Clearly, the national psyche is changing.
After the Bill-and-Monica scandal broke, many conservatives were annoyed because mainstream Americans showed little outrage at the former president. A possible explanation, Rich said, is that millions of Americans no longer share "religious right" taboos against sex. He added:
"Two of the country's more prominent porn purveyors, Marriott (through in-room X-rated movies) and General Motors (through its ownership of the satellite giant DirecTV, now probably to be sold to Rupert Murdoch), were also major sponsors of the Bush-Cheney inaugural."
(Last week, federal agents broke an international "kiddie porn" network that had 250,000 subscribers - but that's a different topic, perhaps a manifestation of mental illness. Forcing tots into sex is child-molesting, a vile crime.)
As for the upsurge in legal, consenting-adults sex, where is America heading? What does it all mean? We can't guess.
In Scandinavia and much of Europe, sex has been uncensored for so long that the endless nude lovemaking scenes are generally regarded as boring. Relatively few people bother to watch them.
Maybe America is going through an orgy of rebellion against its puritanical past and will become like Scandinavia when the excitement fades.
Write a letter to the editor.
Return to Today's Editorials
Search here for related stories
Porn
U.S. sexuality booming
Friday August 17, 2001
BACK in 1997, U.S. News & World Report printed a cover story on a remarkable sociological trend:
"Last year," the business-oriented journal said, "Americans spent more than $8 billion on hard-core videos, peep shows, live sex acts, adult cable programming, sexual devices, computer porn and sex magazines - an amount much larger than Hollywood's domestic box office receipts and larger than all the revenues generated by rock and country music recordings."
But the trend has skyrocketed since then. New York Times commentator Frank Rich recently wrote:
"The 4 billion that Americans spend on video pornography is larger than the annual revenue accrued by either the NFL, the NBA or Major League Baseball. But that's literally not the half of it: the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually in the United States when you toss in porn networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, Internet Web sites, in-room hotel movies, phone sex, sex toys and that archaic medium of my own occasionally misspent youth, magazines."
Hollywood released 400 regular movies last year, Rich pointed out - while little "adult" studios cranked out 11,000 X-rated sex videos. Such films are rented by Americans more than 700 million times a year. In addition, 70,000 sexual Web sites charge fees to viewers, and prosper financially.
The advent of home video players and the Internet allowed Americans to enjoy sexual entertainment in the privacy of their homes, unleashing the porn boom. Clearly, the national psyche is changing.
After the Bill-and-Monica scandal broke, many conservatives were annoyed because mainstream Americans showed little outrage at the former president. A possible explanation, Rich said, is that millions of Americans no longer share "religious right" taboos against sex. He added:
"Two of the country's more prominent porn purveyors, Marriott (through in-room X-rated movies) and General Motors (through its ownership of the satellite giant DirecTV, now probably to be sold to Rupert Murdoch), were also major sponsors of the Bush-Cheney inaugural."
(Last week, federal agents broke an international "kiddie porn" network that had 250,000 subscribers - but that's a different topic, perhaps a manifestation of mental illness. Forcing tots into sex is child-molesting, a vile crime.)
As for the upsurge in legal, consenting-adults sex, where is America heading? What does it all mean? We can't guess.
In Scandinavia and much of Europe, sex has been uncensored for so long that the endless nude lovemaking scenes are generally regarded as boring. Relatively few people bother to watch them.
Maybe America is going through an orgy of rebellion against its puritanical past and will become like Scandinavia when the excitement fades.
Write a letter to the editor.
Return to Today's Editorials
Search here for related stories
