Quick question: what do Snoop Dogg, Lil Jon, 50 Cent, and OutKast have in common?

Give up?

Porn deals.

That’s right, each of the prominent rappers listed above have a vested interest in the pornography industry. Lil Jon has the Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz American Sex Series. 50 has an interactive sex DVD, titled Groupie Luv, featuring G-Unit that allows the viewer to select partners, sexual positions, camera angles and even the dispositions of the women. In 2004 Playboy TV introduced a new hip-hop-themed series called Buckwild. The show features mainstream stars like OutKast, Snoop Dogg, Nelly and Busta Rhymes hanging out with a bunch of young women called the Buckwild Girls.

Hmm…

And that is just the beginning. In case you didn’t know, the porn industry is bigger than the film and record industries combined. Pornographic web sites in particular have shown tremendous growth in the past few years, increasing by nearly 300 a day and $700 million a year according to some experts. Today there are an estimated 372 million web pages devoted to pornography.

More quick facts:
• 12% of all websites are pornographic
• 35% of all internet downloads are pornographic in nature
• 28, 258 internet users are viewing pornography every second
• “Sex” is the most searched word on the internet
• Last year U.S. revenue from Internet porn hit $2.86 Billion
• 70% of internet porn traffic occurs during the 9-5 workday
*Source: Good Magazine

And if you’re the type who is still in denial about porn being mainstream, consider this: Jet magazine has been doing their Jet Beauty of the Week more than 20 years and BET has a section on their website called For Men, where you can check for more than 50 B-Girls: young ladies with names like Mahogany and Champagne.

There is debate over whether or not pornography has negative effects on individuals and society. The debate, like porn itself, is not new. Porn advocates (yes, there are porn advocates) point to increasing empirical evidence which suggests that negative effects of pornography on the human psyche are very small, if they exist at all. In fact, the 1970 Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography concluded that there is no relationship between exposure to erotic material and subsequent behavior.

That was 30 years ago. More recent data, however, tells the same tale. For example, a 1999 Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality study examined the effects of internet pornography on male college students’ attitudes towards women. The study found no effects whatsoever on men’s general attitudes towards women, their self-reported likelihood of sexually harassing a woman, or rape myth acceptance.

So then, where’s the debate?

In hip hop culture, the debate is often an awkward one. The music industry is unquestionably male-dominated. From label executive ranks to commercial sponsorship decision makers right on down to the starving artists one thing is crystal clear: sex sells. If you’re a woman, be sexy. If you’re a man, be sexy. If you’re a man but you’re not sexy, put sexy women in your video. Continued on page 2 »