If there’s one thing you can say about Larry Flynt, founder of Hustler is that he’s got balls. After one attempt on his life and the constant personal attacks he still manages to run an adult empire from his wheelchair. So it doesn’t come as a surprise that he has the hutspa to go cap-in-hand (along with Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild) to congress and ask for a bail-out for the adult industry.
Flynt’s reported to have stated “ … people are too depressed to be sexually active. This is a very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such, but they cannot do without sex. It’s time for Congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”
In one respect the request is founded on the quite valid premise that the big three US car makers have been thrown a life-preserver, and the banks got a mind-boggligly huge bail-out when the financial markets went into meltdown. So why shouldn’t adult?
DVD sales are down, and the whole adult industry is bracing itself for a year what could be termed “thining-out”. Disposable income and therefore discretionary spending is going to drop through the floor in 2009. The fit and well capitalised companies are going to survive, but some others are just going to disappear.
On the face of it though, the request for $5 billion is a huge publicity stunt. Does anyone in their right mind believe that congress will approve a single cent for an industry that is barely tolerated by the US government? It’ll be interesting to see how much coverage the petition will get in the mainstream media, and that will be the real measure of Flynt’s success.
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Sex Toy Digest