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That Old Feeling: When Porno Was Chic
Richard Corliss recalls those dear dead 'Deep Throat' days
Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2005
This column is rated NC17 for explicit nostalgia.
Here's a little statistic that means a lot. In hotel rooms where pornography is available, two-thirds of all movie purchases are for pornos; and the average time they are watched is 12 minutes. The image instantly summoned is of the traveling businessman who wants a smidge of sexual exercise before retiring, but who is too tired, timid or cheap to summon a call girl. He cares little about whatever niceties of dialogue or mise-en-scene the movie may contain. He seeks only a brisk hand job, self-applied, then clicks off the TV, and so to bed. Someone I know, on hearing of this archetypal businessman, wondered, "What did he do the other seven minutes?"
Pornography is big business: an industry that earns an estimated $57 billion worldwide annually —$20 billion just for adult movies in the U.S., where some 800 million videos are rented each year, according to Paul Fishbein, the founding president of Adult Video News. "And I don't think that it's 800 guys renting a million tapes each," he told CBS News. Fishbein means that the phenomenon can't be simply a big-city, left-wing perversion; a good many of those renters, those consumers of hotel porn, have to be red-staters. Which is why, among all the cries in favor of traditional values and against naughty TV, you haven't seen many county sheriffs or G-men forcing the old smut peddler do a perp walk. Porn doesn't affront contemporary community standards. It is a contemporary community standard.