Porn disappears. What effect has it on the economy & society in general?

The sale of Victoria’s Secret catelogs will go through the roof.

Better looking strippers in Southern California?

And International Male/Undergear.

Cinemax gets millions of new subscribers for its “After Dark” lineup (assuming that softcore simu-sex still exists).

Ron Jeremy goes back to teaching.

We’d freeze to death. Why?

The sudden decrease the Earth’s mass would swing us right out of orbit from the Sun.

New technologies would be slower to catch on.

It’s not just the Internet – porn/sex industry use drove sales of things like answering machines, pagers, cell phones, VCR players, and DVD players. It may drive sales of HDTV (or, at least if the FCC hadn’t made them mandatory). Usually, porn/sex industries are early adopters of technology, and the interest in porn/sex is a factor in getting people to buy into them.

I get the VCR and DVD players, but tell me more about answering machines, pagers and cell phones. The link isn’t immediately obvious to me. (I’m sure I’ll “duh!” myself when you tell me.)

What **Whynot ** said.

Escort services were early adopters of indirect telephone communications (answering machines, cell phones, pagers).

Exactly. Call girls found answering machines, pagers, and cell phones very useful.

I should add that porn also helped drive the success of the printing press.

Well, that tells us how prostitution may have helped to spread the usage of answering machines, cellular phones, and pagers, but I still don’t see the pornography connection. Also, can we get a cite for Little Nemo’s allegation?

And there are enough call girls (as opposed to streetwalkers who find their clients just before the -uh- transaction takes place) who buy up the newest technology to keep it afloat long enough for the rest of it to catch on? I’m dubious. Or perhaps very naive. :smiley:

I bet (no cite) doctors, lawyers and self-important Wall Street assholes are a much larger share of the technology market - for these items, anyway!

Would the anti-porn effect only be on earth? If outer space is not affected then you’d see a big push for civilian Space Shuttle travel. Hell, this sort of thing could even possibly lead to colonization of the moon.