C U R R E N T  F E A T U R E  S T O R Y

by the Editors of Religion Today

October 24, 2000

Money Lures Prominent Companies 
To Sell Sex

Some of the most recognizable mainstream corporations are getting involved in the pornography business.

...General Motors, the world's largest company, now sells more graphic sex films through its DirecTV subsidiary than does Hustler pornographer Larry Flynt, according to distributors of the films, The New York Times (see link #1 below) reported.

...EchoStar Communications Corp., the No. 2 satellite provider, makes more money selling sex films than Playboy does with its magazines, cable, and Internet businesses, records from the companies show.

...AT&T Corp. the nation's largest communications company, runs a sex channel (see link #2 below) called Hot Network to subscribers of its broadband cable service, and owns a company that provides sex videos to nearly a million hotel rooms, the newspaper reported.

...Other companies selling the kind of X-rated fare that used to be seen mostly in adults-only theaters include Time Warner, Liberty  Media, Marriott International, On Command, LodgeNet Entertainment, and the News Corporation, the Times reported. The companies don't market the products much, and mention them only in vague euphemisms in their annual reports.

...Board members of these companies are "among the American business elite," according to the Times.

...New technology that brought anonymity to customers has vastly expanded the pornography business. Years ago, a person would have to venture into a seedy part of town to find hard-core films or bookstores, which frequently were raided by police, further adding to the risk of shame or arrest.

...The introduction of the videocassette recorder in 1975 by the Sony Corp. changed everything. Within 10 years, 75 percent of American homes owned a VCR, and once entertainment moved from theaters to the privacy of the home, the industry changed radically. Twenty percent of American homes with a VCR or cable access now pay to watch explicit sex, the Times reported, and 10,000 adult movies are made every year, according to a survey.

...Pay-per-view television and the Internet removed the final barriers to shame, making pornography easier to order than pizza. Selling sex films in hotel rooms, homes, and online has become a $10 billion industry, according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass.

...Thirty years ago, the value of hard-core pornography in the United States was between $5 million and $10 million, according to a federal government study.

...About 1.5 million hotel rooms, 40 percent of all rooms in the country, are equipped with television boxes that sell X-rated fare, and half of all guests buy the movies, generating $190 million in sales a year, according to estimates by the hotel industry.

...At home, Americans buy or rent $4 billion a year worth of graphic sex videos from retail stores and spend an additional $800 million in less-explicit sex films, according to trade organizations that track such things. Sex videos comprise 32 percent of the business for general-interest video retailers that carry X-rated films.

...About one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visits one of the more than 60,000 sex sites on the Web at least  once a month, according to two Internet rating services. The sites generate about $1 billion a year for credit card companies, search engines, and people who build Web sites.

...Religious and civic groups have castigated companies (see link #3 below) such as AT&T, which offers the hard-core Hot Network to its 2.2 million digital cable subscribers. "I don't think many people understand what it means to take away the barriers to this kind of material, such as AT&T is doing," said Mark Regier, who manages a mutual fund for members of the Mennonite faith.

...Only one small chain, the Omni Hotels, chose to remove the sex films, and received phone calls and letters of thanks from 50,000 people as a result.

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