Yes, Bailout the Porn Industry

You have to admire someone with balls, especially when they’ll show them to you for $2.99 per minute. Larry Flynt, taking over the mantle of Old Porn Guy Spokesman from Hugh Hefner, made plenty of headlines recently when he said the government should bail out the porn business. I say yes.

Why? Because unlike the hedge funds, mortgage securities repackagers, and Ponzi schemers on Wall Street, the porn business provides something tangible to their customers. Granted, porn on the Web isn’t as tangible as many would like, but just wait until we get 3D with TouchMe technology and virtual reality gloves and, um, other things.

America will not rise up out of this recession by making it safer for more Wall Street MBAs to trade paper filled with financial promises understood and regulated by no one. America will come out of this recession when people make and sell real products and entertainment products customers can get their hands on and will purchase.

The technology industry should be particularly enthused by a porn business bailout. After all, would VCR players have made it in the marketplace if we just had Disney tapes to play? Would VCR cameras have made it if they were just used to get bad videos of kids soccer games? Would digital cameras have the success they have if they didn’t allow people to take and share, um, personal images without the interim step of turning over private film to some pimply faced kid at the drugstore film processing station? Where would DVDs be if not for porn? And the new HD consumer camcorders?

We haven’t even talked about streaming video. Do you really believe engineers work hard to improve streaming video for more corporate sales meetings?

Yes, we should bail out the porn business. Certainly those of us in the technology biz should rally on their behalf, because we know how much they’ve helped us in the past. Perhaps it’s time for the tech people to more openly jump into bed with the porn people. Sure beats video games.

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