Porn Statistics: Highest Revenues - Curiously strong hypocrisy, with more than a hint of idiocy.

"There are some 13,000 porn films made in the United States a year. According to the Internet Filter Review, worldwide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs and the ever-expanding E-sex world, topped $97 billion in 2006. That's more than the revenues of the leading technology companies combined: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix and EarthLink. Annual sales in the United States are estimated at $ 10 billion or higher. There is no agency that does precise monitoring of the porn industry. And porn is very lucrative to some of the nation's largest corporations. General Motors, for example, owns DirectTV, which distributes over forty million streams of porn into American homes every month. AT&T Broadband and Comcast Cable are the currently biggest American companies accommodating porn users with The Hot Network, Adult Pay-Per-View and similarly themed services. AT&T and GM rake in approximately 80 percent of all porn dollars spent by consumers."

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Adult films books shops

I learned at an early age, I was at least 30, that Adults are not very adult. At the drop of the least provocation, Adults will resort to the nittiest sandbox behavior with very little gritty. Adults are often sad deeply-rutted creatures ruing the lost hopes of their youth and battling low-grade depression with stern hypocrisy and bottles of booze. A few, of course, have seized the various reins of power and cling to them with a single-mindedness that gainsays any possibility that they know or much remember what they are actually doing as they pull on those antique lineaments.

Some adults are sitting upon laurels won by others and bronzed by institutions devoted to arthritic decay and entropy. The "adult" part of their behavior is negative -- they are NOT young, growing, learning, seeking, or even doing very much.

I am astonished to see the word "adult" used as a caution, as if "adult" was to be warned against. Perhaps there is some truth to that. There are so many optimal characteristics of children, and for so many, maturation is a sad disaster. All the same difference, it just seems unseemly: "Beware! This Film contains scenes of grown-up and mature behavior!" "This book is of no help for infants or larva below the age of 21." Or the shop offering "Adult Toys" -- as if monished by a forbidding heaven that adults might be playing nearby.

Even more surprising, the "Adult" admonition usually flags pornography. This is even nuttier. Pornography is usually not mature. At its best it depicts the naked fantasies of juveniles. More often it simply displays preposterous postures and unlikely ordeals of endurance engaged in by childless people for money. The level of intercourse ranges from play to torture, and almost none of it is "Adult" behavior.

Admittedly, the audience for pornography is huge. And it crosses all borders and penetrates all age groups. Little children are curious about naked. Little elders are curious about naked. Everyone flies into reflection and longing at the sight of sex.

"Adult" is often coupled with the word "themes". When you have "adult themes", then the material is usually not pornographic enough to attract the huge audience for infantile fantasies. And that is also counter-intuitive. Fantasies around youthful or even (chillingly) "first time" sexual display are almost universally interesting. Do mature people REALLY want to be "young" again? Do they remember that when they were young, the one thing they most wanted was to be "adult"?

Does anyone, other than a few adherents of unnaturally pious apostles of a cult, WANT to be a Virgin? Is it actually a "turn on" to be fumbling with a person who is filled with uncertainties, concerns, or even fears? How "adult" is that?