Bush's War On Porn...

...is about as successful as everything else he's ever done.

Booming porn faces backlash
As its earnings pass $12 billion, the American industry is attracting the attention of legislators. John Harlow reports from Los Angeles


THE American pornography business is growing so fast that for the first time in a decade it is attracting the unwelcome attention of the White House and federal prosecutors.

When George Bush entered the Oval Office in 2001 he accused his predecessor Bill Clinton of being “soft on porn” and vowed to crack down on an industry that was generating $9.8 billion (£5.2 billion) a year. But anti-porn campaigners in Bush’s own party say that since then the president has been distracted by the war on terror and has done little.

Thanks in part to a new generation of “crossover” stars such as Jenna Jameson, who appears in both sex videos and the book charts with her bestseller How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, industry earnings have risen to more than $12 billion a year. Top producers such as the Private Media Group are even listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

With an average 40% profit margin on DVD sales, explicit porn is twice as profitable as the music business. Porn revenues in the US are higher than all money generated by the combined professional American football, baseball and basketball franchises.

Production is booming too. According to Adult Video News, 13,500 titles were released last year, compared with 8,000 in 1998 and 1,250 in 1988.

And, as in Hollywood, the top 20 celebrities took the lion’s share of receipts — women like Jameson and stage-named men such as Eric Everhard, Flick Shagwell and Seymore Butts.

Porn has also become high profile, with brands such as Hustler edging towards respectability and established stars such as Sarah Michelle Geller, who made her name as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, playing an x-rated actress in her next film.

I've written about "porn chic" in the past, myself. Simply put, all this brou-ha-ha the Holy Terrors are making about the porn industry calls attention to porn, but not in a "how disgusting" way, but in more of a "what's the big deal" way. And since it's gone mainstream to an extent, there's no wayt to remove porn's influence in the media, either. Try to remove explicit langage and content from every book, magazine, video, or the internet, and see how far that gets you.

But tell that to Bushco.