Small Government Pr0n

Don’t worry — this one is safe for work. NRO’s Kevin D. Williamson went to Vegas for the “Porn Oscars” and you might be surprised by one of the things he found. And no, it was nothing communicable in that way:

What’s remarkable about the expo is just how square and corporate and conventional a trade show it is. Sure, there are a lot more impossibly pneumatic bare breasts displayed on the show floor than at your typical laundry-detergent convention, but that’s just trenchcoat bait, and such lewdness as there is is drearily predictable. (Everybody sniggers in unison when an elevator emblazoned with the seriously curvaceous image of one Stormy Daniels announces: “Going down.” Everybody, that is, except for one Rexxx Holz of Decadent D Digital, who is off in his own little apparently Stoic world.) Inside, in the sessions the gawkers are kept carefully out of, there’s a great deal of concern about whether the FDA — “three little letters with a whole s**tstorm of stuff behind them,” as the moderator puts it — is going to intervene in the herbal male-enhancement market, about inconsistent overseas regulation of benzocaine levels in penis desensitizers, about the high cost (up to $20,000) of getting FDA sign-off on particular blends of personal lubricants, etc. Craig — he’s just Craig, no surname, like Madonna or Sting but a known player in the sexual-products market — complains that he could “rebuild a rain forest with all the paperwork I have,” an observation met with general commiseration by the other panels in the regulation session. “We definitely don’t have a sex-positive agent at the FDA, to say the least,” complains one, while another declares: “The FDA has two jobs. One is to protect the consumer, and the other to protect Big Pharma.”

Anybody doing business in this country who isn’t wired into the regulatory machine will eventually become a hater of big government.

Still, I don’t expect the porn industry to start voting Republican any time soon, even though they have a perfect chance to exploit the frustrations, so to speak, of a wildly popular entertainment business.