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Editorial

Porn is as American as Apple Pie

    Question. Which of the following two forms of entertainment - Broadway shows or adult tapes/DVDs - is consumed by more Americans each year?
    Why pornography, of course.
    For the fiscal year ending May 26, some 10.95 million tickets were sold to Broadway productions, which grossed a total of $643.4 million. Impressive numbers, for sure, but not when compared to the 759 million adult tapes and DVDs that were rented in 2001 or the $3.95 billion worth of adult rentals and sales for that same year.
    It’s a no-brainer, obviously, that porn is at least as popular as Broadway, if not more so. So why the stacked comparison? Because in making the ludicrous claim that adult isn’t part of the American mainstream, a clearly out-of-touch reporter for the Web version of a respected financial periodical pointed to the Great White Way as an example of what he contended was real mainstream American culture.
    Get real, will ya buddy?
    Porn is squarely in the American mainstream (even if not everyone, like our head-in-the-sand journalist, will readily admit consuming it. When pressed, though, this hypocrite conceded that he privately watched porn for the same basic reason everyone else does, with one hand on the remote and the other.... Similarly, after essentially calling Jenna Jameson a "whore" and a "slut" during his broadcast interview with her in August, conservative bullyboy Bill O'Reilly, as reported on AVN.com, quietly and off-camera, asked Jenna to send him some of her tapes. How do you spell d-i-s-i-n-g-e-n-u-o-u-s?).
    Broadway shows, on the other hand, are arguably an elitist New York City phenomenon that the average American could care less about (it’s no coincidence that the gotta-sing, gotta-dance financial writer is based there. Remember those posters from the '70s that depicted NYC as essentially being the center of the universe?) I mean, how many Americans can name the current Tony winners? Or even know what the Tony’s are? And what about the costs of attending a Broadway show? Up to $100 a pop, as opposed to the mere fraction of that to rent or buy say, the latest Ass Worship, Balls Deep or Lady Fellatio.
    No, porn is as much a part of mainstream American culture, if not more so, than The Producers, Metamorphoses or even Mamma Mia. As American as apple pie, adult is arguably also more of a national pastime these days than even baseball (especially since, at press time, those poor overpaid prima donnas were set to go on strike Aug. 30). Again, compare those 759 million adult tapes and DVDs rented in 2001 to the - about one-tenth of that figure - 72.7 million major league baseball tickets that were sold in 2000.
    As Senior Associate Editor Tod Hunter wrote in our August cover story, The 25 Events That Shaped The First 25 Years of Video Porn, back in 1972, "Adult stopped being a dirty little secret and became part and parcel of the entertainment mainstream when Frank Sinatra unspooled Deep Throat (starring Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems) for Vice President Agnew at Sinatra's residence, Johnny Carson joked about the film on The Tonight Show in the early '70s, and reporters Woodward and Bernstein dubbed their informant 'Deep Throat.'"
    "Sometimes the connection is covert and in-jokey like Annette Haven turning up as a porn performer in Brian De Palma's Body Double, or porn performers dancing on stage at music awards shows," Hunter continued. "Today, the radio waves are filled with references to adult (including pretty much every Howard Stern radio show and Disney-owned ABC Radio's Porn Stars Are People Too), Jenna Jameson is a household name, Serenity is presenting Wild On... programs on E! Entertainment Television, and Ted Koppel's reported curiosity about who this Ron Jeremy person was wound up leading to an entire Nightline program on the subject of porn. AVN devotes an entire page to mainstream appearances from the adult side in Media Circus every month."
    Equally as important as porn’s uh, penetration of the cultural mainstream, if not more so, is its corporate connection.
    Adult is now big business, not just for the Vivids and the Wickeds and the VCAs, but for such blue-chip Wall Street mainstays as AT&T; and General Motors, who are reaping the financial rewards of the boom in satellite and cable porn.
    AT&T;'s cable division, AT&T; Broadband, includes several adult pay-per-view channels, including Playboy's Hot Network. GM, meanwhile, owns the DirecTV satellite service that pipes porn into millions of homes. And major hotel chains such as the Marriott, Westin and Hilton all offer in-room adult videos.
    It was once said that what was good for General Motors was good for America, meaning that if GM thrived, so would the U.S. economy. So if porn is good for General Motors, doesn’t that mean that it’s also good for America? Of course it does.
    It’s one thing if adult stars show up on Howard Stern or Ted Koppel. It’s quite another if the engines that power our capitalistic society (and grease its political wheels in Washington) start making profits from porn, boosting the price of their shares. And by so doing, they’re weaving adult into the mainstream American fabric more than ever.
    Forty years ago, conservatives weren’t decrying porn, but rather rock 'n' roll, as a degenerate phenomenon that would tear at the moral fiber of our nation. These days, rockers have gone so mainstream that a select few have even played gigs for U.S. Presidents.
    Porn hasn’t become quite that openly accepted, but give it time. Barring the Taliban or some fundamentalist Christian counterpart taking over our government, adult, like rock 'n' roll, is here to stay. And it’s taken up residence on Main Street U.S.A.

- Mike Ramone



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