Dog Bites Man

And conservatives consume porn faster than liberals:

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

OK, here's the issue with this.

It's not about moral hypocrisy. People have confessed one faith while worshipping at the altar of others for millennia.

It's about economic hypocrisy. I get the sense that conservatives would like porn to be kept under the covers, errrr, so to speak, in order to monopolize the market on it.

If we lived in a truly free market enterprise society, then porn would likely be the second largest business, right after alcohol and other narcotics (I'm including cigarettes).

Period. Look at, even as tightly regulated as those markets are, how much is spent in America alone.

Porn could be the stimulus package, errrrrrrr, so to speak, that would help America recover its economy.

So what really keeps porn off the free market? Morals?

We send soldiers overseas to kill for us, yet the Bible tells us not to kill, but nothing about looking at naked men or women.

We open shops and businesses seven days a week (mostly) even though the Bible says to keep the Sabbath holy.

Indeed, about the only two outright bans on any sexuality in the Bible are the story of Onan's masturbation and the commandment that states, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," and even that was less a moral statement than a statement not to screw around with your neighbor's wife (a social commentary).

So how is it on the one hand, conservatives can claim moral higher ground in preventing the distribution of pornography, and on the other hand, utilize it so dramatically?

Errr, so to speak.

The only logical reason I can come up with, errrr, so to speak, is to monopolize the market on it, to prevent those who might limit the supply conservatives have enjoyed from obtaining it.

You know, teenagers.

Which brings up an entire other can of worms regarding the attitudes of this nation towards horny teenagers and sex.

But that, I'm afraid, is probably best left to another column. Or to Bristol Palin.

A Handshake Deal Is Reached Around The Table

Now, I'm against most bailouts, but this industry is in hard times:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment industry.

“The take here is that everyone and their mother want to be bailed out from the banks to the big three,” said Owen Moogan, spokesman for Larry Flynt. “The porn industry has been hurt by the downturn like everyone else and they are going to ask for the $5 billion. Is it the most serious thing in the world? Is it going to make the lives of Americans better if it happens? It is not for them to determine.”

Francis said in a statement that “the US government should actively support the adult industry's survival and growth, just as it feels the need to support any other industry cherished by the American people."

Look, boob jobs ain't cheap. This is clearly an industry that is desperate for assistance. It needs to be firmed up and a hard injection of capital is probably just what the doctor ordered after his examination.

Sales reports do seem to indicate that things are sagging in porn. Market penetration is way off, and their assets simply aren't what they used to be. Of course, prior years' results could have been artificially inflated, but my suspicion is we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

The hole is deep, my friends. I've studied reams of data which suggest that at least half the adult stars blew their chances to sock away a little for retirement and will have to press their noses to the grindstones in order to make ends meat.

In the true spirit of American capitalism, these pioneers of prurience have opened wide and bared their assets for the shot, just the shot, at a peak market.

But as we all know, markets have their ups and downs, and no doubt right now, porn is at its bottom. However, with a brief respite, and this stimulus package, I have no doubt that as interest rises, this market too shall begin to swell and grow.

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(showing Memeorandum the luv)

Porn

I need to get something off my chest.

Recently, I posted what some have called "pornography" in conjunction with a story about tons of stolen uranium in the DR Congo, and how you didn't hear about it on American news programs, specifically because those shows felt the coverage of yet another untalented American Idol contestant's inability to stay away from a camera and to get paid for taking her clothes off and having sex was infinitely more important.

In other words, I posted a pornographic picture of Antonella Barba licking a penis, because it infuriated me that the news would spend ten minutes on this story, but not two on the uranium. I heard more about the opinions of Americans about the treatment of Antonella as opposed to some other bimbo named Frenchie from some other season.

I posted this picture not gratuitously. I did it to prove a couple of points. In addition to the one I've outlined already, I posted it because I felt that the smarmy treatment these pictures were getting, the lurid non-descriptive descriptions, deserved to have Americans smacked across the face to wake them up.

Termed "engaged in sexual acts," if I recall correctly, which could be anything from kissing to full out sex with an entire herd of horses. I refuse to buy into to the psychosis of America when it comes to sexuality, even if it means I am uncomfortable with some of the imagery I see (particularly on some GLBT sites, but that's my own emotions and not a reflection of their content). And if by making a few people uncomfortable, so be it.

This comes up, because Mike's Blog Round Up at Crooks and Liars had featured this story, until a handful of public (and presumably, more private) complaints forced Mike to revisit the post and find that, indeed, I had posted that picture, at which point he made the editorial decision that C&L should not be associated with porn, and took the feature down.

Fair enough. I'm not going to criticize his decision, altho I will point out that other sites undoubtedly have had even more pornographic content than my one photograph in nearly two years of blogging, so where does one draw the line? And it was incumbent upon me to give fair warning that the post was "Not Safe For Work".

For that, I apologize. I was angry, and sometimes in anger, assume that I can make people as mad as I am, thus negating my own ethical code to try to see things through other people's eyes.

There are a raft of other issues I could raise here: what precisely is pornographic? Why are you blogging from work in the first place? Where do you draw the line between "if the boss sees this, I'll be fired" and "I have to hide my blogging from my boss" because don't BOTH situations endanger your job? I could raise the issue that the A list bloggers have begun to give into the pressures of running a revenue-generating site, thus are beginning to mainstream their content in order to accommodate customs, mores and the law (noticeably, however, still violating copyright law by posting, say, news clips from other networks, and other creative content).

So rather than open the door to that rant, I'm going to make a statement here: I will post porn when and where I see fit, if I feel the pornography is germane to the discussion I'm raising. I will post porn the same way that I would post photos of dead Iraqi babies, or protestors giving George Bush the finger, or any myriad of other possibly offensive images. I do not draw the same distinction that many other Americans draw when it comes to images of people having sex, just because there's a nipple or a penis showing.

I will not post pornography for the sake of titillation, and if anyone GOT titillated by that photo of Antonella Barba sucking some guy's penis, then shame on you for having such a childish and immature attitude towards both sex and the news. Don't blame me for your embarrasments.

[/soapbox]