A few years back, Omni Hotels removed porn from its entertainment system. The results, reports James Harder, were bags of supportive mail and an increase in movie-rental profits… Hotels were among the first publicly held companies to profit from porn, networking their rooms to provide a flow of X-rated movies. It’s a route almost all […]
Business Ethics
Testimony from Northampton: Porn Entwined with Years of Domestic Abuse; Sex Ads in Alt Weeklies (explicit language)
Massachusetts legislators heard testimony about peoples’ encounters with porn at a hearing on March 16, 1992. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.406-407). Testimony of S I live in Northampton, Massachusetts. The first incident I’d like to talk about is representative of many incidents that I experienced by the […]
Realities of Teen Prostitution Mock Notions of ‘Sex Work’, ‘Sex-Positive’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Empowerment’; Media Glamorizes Pimps
Advocates for ‘sex work’ say it is or should be about free choice and the empowerment of women. They claim that if prostitutes have troubled lives, this stems from the fact that many (unenlightened) people find prostitution offensive and the government doesn’t care enough about prostitutes’ working conditions, rather than anything inherent in exchanging sex […]
Commerce, Addictive Products, and Harm: Lessons from The Cigarette Century
Porn is a product that addicts many, often with consequences that can be dire (loss of family, loss of job), affect innocent parties (abuse, molestation, secondary effects), and take a long time to manifest. During this time, the addict generates handsome profits for the companies that perpetuate his addiction. The industry, not surprisingly, aggressively protests […]
Pornoland’s unwritten law: “if we tell the truth about what’s really going on here, the fan will get turned off”
ABC News presented a remarkably blunt segment on the porn industry in “Porn Profits: Corporate America’s Secret” (2003): “Even the people who enjoy looking at pornography really despise the people they’re watching, and they have no sense of protection for them,” [former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop] said… The production companies market [porn movies] over […]
American Psychological Association: Media and marketers drive girls to be sexy early; sexualization linked to eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression
The American Psychological Association finds that media and marketing have a big impact on girls, reports the Washington Post (2/20/07): American girls, say experts, are increasingly being fed a cultural catnip of products and images that promote looking and acting sexy. “Throughout U.S. culture, and particularly in mainstream media, women and girls are depicted in […]
A Review of Can’t Buy My Love
NPN’s Jendi Reiter reviews Jean Kilbourne, Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. This book was published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, New York City (1999). Ms. Kilbourne’s documentaries are distributed by Northampton’s own Media Education Foundation. Activist filmmaker and educator Jean Kilbourne has been internationally recognized for such documentaries […]
Sony says ‘no’ to porn on Blu-ray Disc
We were pleased to learn of this report in InfoWorld, 1/19/07: Sony said it will not work with the adult film industry to help put their movies on its Blu-ray Disc format, although it will not try to stop them completely. The company will not allow its disc replicating subsidiary, Sony DADC, to handle adult […]
Testimony in Minneapolis: Prison Condones Porn by Selling It
Minneapolis city officials heard testimony about peoples’ encounters with porn, those who consume porn and those who produce it at a hearing of the Minneapolis Government Operations Committee on December 13, 1983. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.171-172). Testimony of Richelle Lee I work with sex offenders. I […]
Ask Blue Razor to Decline Capital Video’s Website Registration Business (explicit language)
Blue Razor helps people register domain names on the Internet. They are the registrar for Amazing.net, one of Capital Video’s websites. We recently asked Blue Razor to decline Capital Video’s business, and we invite the pubic to contact Bob Parsons, the president of Blue Razor, and support our request. We wrote on January 31: Dear […]