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The week's question
In March 2025, in the thread "Re: OT, out", Umm asked the members: "Do you think it is because America is made up of magical soil that makes businesses based in America magically profitable?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Author: PucksFool ✧✺  😊 😞
Number: of 86269 
Subject: Who is today's Hugh Hefner or Larry Flint?
Date: 10/02/26 7:52 AM
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The Guardian has an interesting story about the people financing the pornography industry.

theguardian.com - Patricia nilsson exposing worlds biggest porn bosses

‘Online sex workers literally have to bare it all’: why Patricia Nilsson is exposing the world’s biggest porn bosses

As a business journalist, Nilsson began rigorously reporting on the power players of the adult industry, who prefer to remain in the shadows. Along the way, she uncovered how porn has shaped the internet – and our lives as a whole

Amelia Gentleman
Tue 29 Sep 2026 05.01 EDT

There was a time, a few decades ago, when the men who owned the world’s biggest pornography businesses were happy to be famous. They paraded a lifestyle they hoped looked glamorous, appearing in public dressed in silk pyjamas or with a woman in swimwear on each arm. Porn moguls like Hustler’s Larry Flynt or Playboy’s Hugh Hefner were household names.

“Say what you want about these old perverts, who once set the tone of our sexual culture, but at least you knew who they were and what they were selling,” Patricia Nilsson writes in her new book, Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else. “These days, the men calling the shots are nowhere to be seen.”

It’s not that they simply feel shy about posing alongside the women who generate their income, or are wary of giving interviews. The owners of the industry’s biggest companies are so anxious to remain anonymous that we often don’t even know their names. They have understood that it is wiser to live in total obscurity.

So Nilsson’s decision to start investigating pornography for the Financial Times will no doubt have come as a very unwelcome development for these mostly invisible leaders of a sector that has been under-scrutinised for decades. For five years, she subjected the industry to the same deep analysis that a journalist would give to the oil and gas markets. She wondered why, unlike most businesses of a similar scale, pornography companies rarely made the headlines. “I started wondering: why is there so much porn everywhere? Why is the online world so saturated with images of people paid to have sex?” Nilsson says. She asks at the start of Guilty Pleasure: “We live in a world where as many people have instantaneous access to free porn as to clean water. Why aren’t we more curious about the growing role of pornography in our lives?”
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This community has written 86,214 posts about US Policy. The article-length ones it recommended most:
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