|
|
Welcome to Online Counseling!
Love Lines has a wealth of online information
and a tremendously gifted pool of writers that provide insight into
vital topics and current issues. If you are unable to contact us immediately
you may find the help you need right here! Watch for regular updates
in this section as well and don't hesitate to turn to the Lord for prayer!
He always helps those in need!
Salvation
Sexual
Issues
Suicide
Pregnancy
and Abortion
Finance
and Job Problems
Watch for more specific online help
in these areas soon!
Healing Abuse
Family Problems
Emotional Problems Drugs and Alcohol
Proceed
to Love Lines Online Writers
or Contact Love Lines for agreement
in prayer, literature, support or any other issue that can't be addressed
here!
Food for Thought
Money Lures Prominent Companies To Sell
Porn
Some of the most recognizable mainstream corporations are getting involved
in the pornography business.
General Motors, the world's largest company, now sells more graphic
sex films through its DirecTV subsidiary than does Hustler pornographer
Larry Flynt, according to distributors of the films, The New York Times
reported. EchoStar Communications Corp., the No. 2 satellite provider,
makes more money selling sex films than Playboy does with its magazines,
cable, and Internet businesses, records from the companies show.
AT&T Corp. the nation's largest communications company, runs a sex
channel called Hot Network to subscribers of its broadband cable service,
and owns a company that provides sex videos to nearly a million hotel
rooms, the newspaper reported. Other companies selling the kind
of X-rated fare that used to be seen mostly in adults-only theaters
include Time Warner, Liberty Media, Marriott International, On Command,
LodgeNet Entertainment, and the News Corporation, the Times reported.
The companies don't market the products much, and mention them only
in vague euphemisms in their annual reports.
Board members of these companies are "among the American business
elite," according to the Times.
New technology that brought anonymity to customers has vastly expanded
the pornography business. Years ago, a person would have to venture
into a seedy part of town to find hard-core films or bookstores, which
frequently were raided by police, further adding to the risk of shame
or arrest.
The introduction of the videocassette recorder in 1975 by the Sony Corp.
changed everything. Within 10 years, 75 percent of American homes owned
a VCR, and once entertainment moved from theaters to the privacy of
the home, the industry changed radically. Twenty percent of American
homes with a VCR or cable access now pay to watch explicit sex, the
Times reported, and 10,000 adult movies are made every year, according
to a survey.
Pay-per-view television and the Internet removed the final barriers
to shame, making pornography easier to order than pizza. Selling sex
films in hotel rooms, homes, and online has become a $10 billion industry,
according to Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass. Thirty years
ago, the value of hard-core pornography in the United States was between
$5 million and $10 million, according to a federal government study.
About 1.5 million hotel rooms, 40 percent of all rooms in the country,
are equipped with television boxes that sell X-rated fare, and half
of all guests buy the movies, generating $190 million in sales a year,
according to estimates by the hotel industry.
At home, Americans buy or rent $4 billion a year worth of graphic sex
videos from retail stores and spend an additional $800 million in less-explicit
sex films, according to trade organizations that track such things.
Sex videos comprise 32 percent of the business for general-interest
video retailers that carry X-rated films.
About one in four regular Internet users, or 21 million Americans, visits
one of the more than 60,000 sex sites on the Web at least once a month,
according to two Internet rating services. The sites generate about
$1 billion a year for credit card companies, search engines, and people
who build Web sites.
Religious and civic groups have castigated companies such as AT&T,
which offers the hard-core Hot Network to its 2.2 million digital cable
subscribers. "I don't think many people understand what it means
to take away the barriers to this kind of material, such as AT&T
is doing," said Mark Regier, who manages a mutual fund for members
of the Mennonite faith.
Only one small chain, the Omni Hotels, chose to remove the sex films,
and received phone calls and letters of thanks from 50,000 people as
a result.
|
|
