The announcement last week that the financially-struggling Yahoo Inc. was to quietly begin expanding its offerings of pornographic videos and DVDs threatened to make Yahoo the first top-tier Internet company to actively embrace the pornography industry. The company has been offering such products for the past two years. Two days after the announcement, however, in response to a flood of customer complaints, Yahoo decided that it would not sell pornography.
While such a move sounds good, on the surface, the beauty is only skin deep. Yahoo will continue to derive revenues from premium links to pornographic sites – to the tune of $599 per link. Currently, Yahoo provides links to more than 10,000 pornographic web sites.
Yahoo is not alone in its efforts to mainstream pornography. Last year AT&T, facing a similar decline in its own stock prices, made the decision to carry Vivid Entertainment’s hard-core Hot Network as part of its cable television line-up. That decision was met with much scrutiny.
Last December, a group of eight institutional investors controlling more than 1.6 million AT&T shares, filed a proxy resolution urging “Ma Bell” to review its role as a pornography distributor. The filers, led by Mennonite Mutual Aid, included Catholic Health East, Christian Brothers Investment Services, the Benedictine Sisters of San Antonio, and MMA’s Praxis Mutual Funds. They are the first group to file a pornography-focused resolution targeting a major U.S. media company.
The group cites AT&T’s involvement in pornography on both social and financial grounds and calls upon the company to issue a report by May, 2001, reviewing its policies for involvement in the pornography industry and an assessment of the potential financial, legal, and public relations liabilities.
“Our approach is to engage the corporation and get their attention,” said Mark A. Regier, SRI Research and Advocacy Coordinator with Mennonite Mutual Aid Financial Services. Collectively, the organizations own more than 2.8 million shares in AT&T, worth at least $92 million. “AT&T for decades has promoted and conducted itself as a leading corporate citizen in the country. We see their action flying in the face of their own stated values and objectives. AT&T does not need fewer customers. We want them to see that this is a risk to the company financially that we don't think is worth whatever AT&T imagines they will gain from it,” concludes Regier.
In response, at least one organization, the Sisters of Charity in Cincinnati, divested their AT&T stock. “The Sisters,” said Mary Kay Gilbert, Communications Director, “made the decision to sell all of their stock, despite a slight loss. It as an issue of morality, not money.” According to Gilbert, other individuals associated with the Sisters of Charity have followed suit, including one retired couple who decided to sell their stock even though they were living on the income generated by the stock's dividends.
As the MMA resolution so keenly points out, “the very nature of pornography demands a constant escalation of explicit content to maintain stimulation, as the addition of the Hot Network demonstrates, thus the current pornographic offerings can be presumed to be the first of even more graphic offerings to follow.”
To underscore the resolution’s point, Playboy Enterprises Inc. plans to release Spice Platinum Network on cable, a service that plans to offer racier sex acts not even available on the Hot Network channels.
Recent studies by respected medical organizations such as the AMA and the American Psychological Association, cite causal connections between graphic media content and aggressive behavior. Similar studies show links between pornography and sexual harassment, domestic violence, family disintegration, and even serial rape and murder.
With an estimated 190 million people worldwide accessing Yahoo each month, the marriage between the pornography industry and Yahoo stood to make Yahoo a dominant presence in the online pornography business. Thankfully that marriage has been called off, at least for the time being.
One example alone illustrates what big business pornography is. Launched in 1984, Vivid Entertainment Group, which owns the Hot Network, has gone from six million to 26 million homes, pocketing $14.3 million last year alone. The company plans to go public within the year in order to use proceeds to produce even more pornography, launch new cable channels, and acquire other content companies.
Vivid co-chairman Steve Hirsch told the Wall Street Journal, “We have always been the most mainstream of adult companies, and we did that for a reason, to attract the largest audience.”
Currently a $56 billion industry, such actions demonstrate the desperation of struggling companies to get a piece of the pie. Clearly, they see such decisions as a painless way to boost cash flow.
Make no mistake. Pornography and its secondary effects cause real harm to real people. So says, Kimberly Drake, Executive Director of the Spokane-based Citizens for Community Values. She knows firsthand the dangers of pornography. “I was addicted to pornography. What we view and read we eventually become. I was a stripper in a local club and lived 13 years in an environment where everyone finds their significance in their sexuality.”
The U.S. bishops, in their 1999 video “Renewing the Mind of the Media” compare the pornographer to the drug dealer – “preying on people’s weaknesses for their own benefit. It is…one of those categories of crime which are the breeding ground for other types of crime.”
The mainstreaming of pornography via magazines, mail, cable and the Internet is a grave offensive to mankind. It exploits women and children, destroys marriages and twists the minds of those who seek it out. When public companies invest in pornography just to make a dollar they put the public at risk. Pornography is about more than money — it’s about the destruction of individual lives. When corporations embrace something so fundamentally warped, they should be held accountable for its consequences.
