Time Magazine Drops The "Porn Word" Bomb For Eyeballs & Sales Boost

by Coleen Singer.

et tu, Time Magazine?

It’s not enough for the porn industry to have to endure and figure out how to work with all this modern interweb stuff for censorship, filtering and downright corporate cowardice. Now Time Magazine has decided to run a cover story that lumps “Drugs, Porn and Murder” into their coverage of the super duper secret “Deep Web” that is actually their coverage of the “Silk Road” fiasco in which a clueless bongo playing hippy in San Francisco created a great place for folks to buy illegal shit like guns and bombs under the radar of the NSA.  Using BitCoins.  Yep. As the old Christmas fireplace song goes, “Throw another log on, Uncle John”.  But, in this case, the Time Headline Writer of the moment omitted the comma – “Throw another log on Uncle John” is the result.

Read on…

And who is Uncle John this time?

As usual, the adult entertainment industry.

By simply injecting the word “porn” with “drugs” and “murder” watch those Time ad sales rise!

But, what sort of “porn” are they talking about?
It turns out it was a reference to kiddie porn.  NOT the responsible porn produced by “people like us” that features performers that brush their teeth twice a day, use deodorant,  have age verification documents on file, and get STD testing a few times a month as not to spread bugs.  The BIG TIME HEADLINE just used the word porn.  Sigh…  As if the adult industry needs another nail in its casket.

AVN pretty much summed it up with this post:

As silly as all this it, people in the adult entertainment industry will probably be miffed that once again corporate media has put the all-encompassing “porn” label into a headline that really meant to read “child porn,” a ploy that is always consciously committed in order to draw the reader’s eye, but as insulting a marketing tactic as it may be, porners in general have little to complain about when it comes to engaging in… um … creative marketing and linguistic flexibilities.

If anything, Time’s lame attempt at relevance betrays the sad reality that we’re all in this together. Porn sells subscriptions to content shot years ago while Time uses porn to try to sell subscriptions to stories that could have been written years ago. It’s a bizarrely beautiful symmetry of sin that does little to obscure the underlying digital dance of death that has all media in its grip.

But, AVN hit the “end of page one” and found out that to read the “rest of the story” (thank you Paul Harvey. Good Day!), a charge of $4.95 would be needed for a Digital Subscription to Time. Austerity-conscience AVN fled, much in the way a Tube surfer at YouPorn would run for the hills if actually asked for a few bucks to see more butts (in HD of course!).

Ergo, I got curious as to what was actually in this diatribe from Time that took yet another swing at porn as being right up there with drugs and guns and child porn and hit men for hire. Maybe Hitler too.  So, I took the plunge and gave Time $4.95 for a digital subscription so I could dig deeper.

What I ended up getting was a 9 page in-depth article about the demise of Silk Road with nary a mention of porn of any kind. The authors, Lev Grossman and Jay Newton-Small sort of sound like a comedy team in the Catskills as they whack away at the fuzzy beard SF dude that was so clueless as to even think he could get away with this.  But, where was the porn? Or even guns or blow? Or Adolph the Artist?

Probably the only significant statement in the Time piece was about the entire “secrecy” (TOR) element:

What’s certain is that the need for Tor–or something like it–isn’t going away. The Internet is becoming an increasingly unprivate place, where multibillion-dollar business plans are being built on companies’ ability to observe and rapaciously harvest every last iota and fillip of consumer behavior. More and more, it falls to consumers themselves to say where the line is and to take control of their personal information.

Thus, it looks like the inflammatory title of the article was, as my grandpa used to say, “A pig in a poke”, and they simply tossed in the word “porn” for a bit of yellow journalism flair to boost sales.

And, no sooner than last week’s Time came out with all of that, here is the next issue which, in some ways, is even WORSE:

Are “Times” so hard that you need to poke fun at heavy white guys, make them the butt of a joke, and be just plain obnoxious in order to sell magazines?

Inquiring Minds Want To Know!