Dirty money: The business of porn

By COREY TAULE

ctaule@postregister.com

For years, the business of porn has been associated with well-known figures such as Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt or Playboy magnate Hugh Heffner.

But porn has gone mainstream. "Boogie Nights," a movie about the porn industry starring Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds, was one of the biggest hits of 1997. The New York Times now reviews adult movies.

And Ron Jeremy, the world's most famous porn star, endorses hot sauce produced by a small Maryland company whose owner, Jon Yuspa, correctly figured the actor would attract attention. He came up with the idea after watching Jeremy on what was then the nation's top-ranked television show, "The Weakest Link."

The show, Yuspa said, ran on ABC, which is owned by the Disney Corp.

"Obviously, they have no problem with it," Yuspa said. "So we have no problem with it."

That a major American corporation has ties to porn isn't unusual these days. Corporate America has embraced porn, albeit from a distance. Large, publicly held companies don't like to talk about porn, but they are willing to profit from it.

So when you think about the business of porn, think Bill Marriott, son of the founder of the famous hotel chain bearing his name. Or media baron Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, who cashes checks that come from the sex trade.

Even American corporate icons AT&T and General Motors were, until recently, in the business of peddling porn. Until it sold its interests, GM, through its cable business and something called "the Hot Network," sold more explicitly titled films per year than Flynt.

Flynt

As Janet LaRue, chief legal counsel for Concerned Women for America, told the Federal Communication Commission, "Profiting from porn is a dirty ring around the white collars at AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, EchoStar Communications, GM's DirecTV, Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, Radisson, VISA, MasterCard and American Express."

Estimates on the size of the porn industry are as fluid as the Internet itself, but nobody doubts that yearly profits run in the billions.

This includes a CableOne package that features such alluring choices as "Chesty McHooters 9," "Juicy Jet Booty 7," "Bounce Your Boobies! 8" and Men Not Required 9" in the comfort of your own home, for $8.95.

Most motel chains offer similar titles. Entertainment industry analyst Dennis McAlpine told the Public Television show Frontline that 5 percent to 10 percent of the adult movie revenues are pure profit for the hotels.

In 2002, Adelphia Communications Corp., the nation's fifth-biggest cable provider, filed for bankruptcy. Three years later, part of its recovery plan involved selling its viewers the raunchiest porn this side of the Internet.

All of this makes Phil Burress fighting mad.

President of an Ohio anti-porn group, Citizens for Community Values, Burress wants to take adult movies out of the nation's hotels. His group developed a Web site, cleanhotels.com, that provides contact information for motels that eschew porn. And Burress is hoping the federal government will put the squeeze on LodgeNet, which supplies adult content to nearly 2 million motel rooms across the country.

Burress said a private investigator hired by his group found that one room at a Marriott, which has come under fire because presidential candidate Mitt Romney served on its board of directors and reportedly said nothing about the business offering porn, offered more than 110 titles.

Murdoch

Of course, people have options here. Nobody forces anyone to pay $13.99 for an adult movie in a motel. And parents can put passwords on the adult package offered by CableOne to ensure their children don't view the content.

But most in the scientific and therapeutic communities say that porn is addictive.

That means people such as Murdoch and Marriott are making a killing by hooking people on porn.

"They've got caught with their hand in the cookie jar," Burress said. "Money got in the way of their decisions."

By the numbers

Pornographic Web sites: 4.2 million

Pornographic pages: 420 million

Daily pornographic search engine requests: 68 million (25 percent of all requests)