IF porn is a $13-billion-a-year industry, why, you ask, shouldn’t CNBC — a business network, after all — cover it?
Why not, indeed. Let’s face it, porn is good for every business’ bottom line.
Think of it this way: If you’re a business network with shows that generally feature stock tickers and wind-bag CEOs talking product, how great instead to feature gyrating, naked babes in rhinestone G-strings doing their best, while at the same time talking all smarty-pants while you’re showing smut. You can’t lose for winning.
After watching tonight’s original CNBC doc “Porn: The Business of Pleasure,” you won’t come away knowing much more than you probably already knew or have heard — that 28,000 Internet users sign on to porn every second, and that every 34 minutes, a new porn video is made. But you will get to hear from the entrepreneurs of sleaze who don’t often show up on primetime TV — even if it is only cable.
And you’ll discover that — even in the dirty business of dirty movies — it’s all about becoming a captain of industry.
Many of the talking heads here are the usual suspects — like extreme sweater Steven Hirsh, CEO of Vivid Entertainment, one of the biggest producers/distributors of porn movies, and Paul Little, “The Dirtiest Man in America,” an unappealing older gent who apparently makes such nasty porn starring himself that he’s going to jail for 46 months.
Now, I mean, in this day and age, to go to jail for selling porn, you must be showing something really wrong. (I’d like to tell you what the heck this dirty old man does to those young women dressed as school girls but CNBC doesn’t say, and all Little says is that he doesn’t just push the envelope but jumps over it.)
But the idea here is that the women in porn, CNBC contends, are now taking over the business with their own production companies. The female-produced “Pirates” of porn series can cost as much as $10 million each to make, we’re told.
Tragically, women got in just in time for the business to collapse. Porn video sales were down by as much as 50 percent last year — which I guess means we’re supposed to be concerned about, seeing how the economy is tanking and all.
Problem is, everything’s free on the Internet, so as my mom would say, why buy a cow when milk is so cheap — and so many cheap tricks, too.
“Porn: The Business of Pleasure”
Tonight at 9 on CNBC