“What goes up must come down/Spinning wheel got to go round/Someone is waiting just for you/Spinning wheel is spinning true,” goes the lyrics of
the song in an album released exactly 40 years ago by the group Blood, Sweat & Tears.

The first line of the lyric has often been used to describe loss-making enterprises. However, even after the Great Depression of the 1930s, it used to be said that the porn industry, euphemistically called adult entertainment, was the one sector which was immune to recession and whose revenues kept going up and up without any downturn.

The $6 billion US porn industry has now been laid low by the ongoing global slowdown, with filming on new productions drooping by 50%. CNN quotes Adult Video News editor Mark Kearnes as saying: “It’s the first time I am aware that the industry has been affected by a downturn in the general economy. At its height, I would say there were about 5,000 people employed in various positions, from warehouse personnel to executives. and perhaps another thousand performers.”

All that, he adds, has changed, with staff being cut and performers earning less as budgets are slashed. The porn industry’s bottom line has also always attracted pirates who release blue movies for free viewing on the internet, now 40 years old. “At 40, men turn naughty,” the saying goes!

CNN has not yet told us whether the Obama administration is formulating a stimulus plan for the US porn industry which is now reportedly in more serious trouble than the print-media/newspaper companies. However, not all segments of the adult entertainment industry have been adversely affected to the same extent.

Adult goods like Astroglide and Fleshlight still have a market, perhaps because they cannot be uploaded! It is not known whether the US blue-movie industry is diversifying into that one sector whose fortunes are inversely proportional to the length and depth of a recession — namely anti-depressant pills!