Porn On Airplanes

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A backlash was inevitable. Parents insisted they couldn't stop their kids from staring at someone else's screens and seeing images that they would never be permitted to view at home. The more easily offended among us were also distressed. And moral crusaders were, as always, crusading for their brand of purity.

Last year, a photographer in North Carolina launched a website to push back against "inappropriate" in-flight films after his kids were exposed to what he considered overly violent images from the most recent remake of King Kong. He and his allies helped convince Representative Heath Shuler (Democrat, North Carolina) to introduce the Family Friendly Flights Act. The bill would have required airlines to provide a separate seating area for families if the carrier "provides publicly viewable entertainment screens on which violent programming is displaced."

The measure died quietly after a burst of leering publicity, but airlines remain wary. As an airline friend of mine said this week: "Save me from activists who want us to show nothing but Disney films. And save me from passengers who complain that I don't show art-house films in-flight. I've got an airline to run."

Of course, it could be worse. Just ask the folks at Marriott. Over the last couple of years, the lodging giant has been harassed by the Arlington Group, a coalition of about four dozen conservative Christian organizations, including James Dobson's Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins' Family Research Council, and Don Wildmon's American Family Council. Their demand: that Marriott stop selling pay-per-view porno movies in rooms.

From a strictly tactical point of view, targeting Marriott makes sense. The hotel chain is one of the world's largest, operating more than 3,000 properties ranging from side-of-the-road motels and big-city hotels to timeshare operations and luxury resorts. Besides, the Marriotts, who still run the publicly owned lodging group, are one of the nation's highest-profile Mormon families.

But the logic of the Arlington Group's attack stretches credulity. Like all hotels that have in-room adult entertainment, Marriott doesn't offer it free and includes a "lock-out" feature that allows parents to guarantee that their children cannot order the movies. In other words, unlike on airplanes, there's no chance an unwitting hotel guest can be exposed to potentially offensive material. That really doesn't matter to the Christian crusaders because "all pornography is harmful," according to a statement on the Focus on the Family website.

In response to the Arlington Group's campaign, a few individual hotels have stopped selling in-room porn. Some chains (most notably Omni Hotels) haven't sold pay-per-view adult entertainment for years. And for its part, Marriott says it has added a few more safeguards to its in-room lock-out systems.

But one hotel executive I spoke to this week made a backhanded case for keeping in-room porn. Her chain doesn't sell adult entertainment, but she pointed out that hotels with in-room pay-per-view "generally have less trouble keeping the hookers out of their lobbies."

The Fine Print… In-room porn is hardly a high-profit item. In fact, travelers rarely order pay-per-view movies of any kind in their hotel rooms. According to the latest Securities and Exchange Commission filing by LodgeNet, the nation's leading provider of in-room entertainment systems, monthly revenue from "on-demand entertainment such as movies" is just $16.85 a room. Roughly speaking, that works out to just two movies per month being ordered from an average hotel room.

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