A fox in the Penthouse

May 17, 2008 By

bigchurchThe Newsweek headline — “Penthouse Gets Pious” — grabbed me. But the story doesn’t quite deliver. In it, business reporter Jennifer Ordonez’s story argues that internet porn is forcing adult magazines to diversify. Here’s how the story begins:

Christian dating web site BigChurch.com’s motto is “Bringing people together in love and faith.” A pointed quote from the Old Testament (“A man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” Gen. 2:24) precedes the site’s Bible-verse search library. Further testimonial from a fresh-faced woman leaves little doubt as to the site’s higher purpose: “I feel like my prayers of finding a respectable man have been answered! Thanks BigChurch!!”

So it may surprise users that BigChurch.com has a decidedly promiscuous corporate parent: Penthouse Media Group Inc.

But that’s it. The article very dryly discusses how Penthouse acquired a social-network company with a broad reach. Its subsidiaries range from BigChurch.com to Bondage.com.

I know it’s the business section and all, but perhaps we could get a bit more? Some quotes from Penthouse execs talking about how great it is to run a Christian dating web site? Some quotes from Christians who think it’s not so great? Quotes from economists putting the business move in context? When the assignment editor gods give you a story that combines religion and pornography, you have to do more.

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Filed Under: Journalism, People, Pop Culture, Sex
  • Jerry

    Some quotes from Penthouse execs talking about how great it is to run a Christian dating web site? Some quotes from Christians who think it’s not so great?

    Mollie, as sure as the sun comes up in the morning, you can find someone to say that this is a terrible idea and someone from Penthouse to say it’s wonderful. That’s not news and not the kind of reporting I care about. It is, to me, typical MSM reporting you’re asking for. The interesting questions are whether or not many Christians will boycott the site because of the corporate parent and to what extent will the site and how it’s advertised change under Penthouse.

  • Dave

    Jerry ponders…

    to what extent will the site and how it’s advertised change under Penthouse.

    If the suits in charge have any sense they’ll leave it alone and let it flourish. To properly cold-blooded business types Christian dating is a niche and skin-and-grin is a niche, not to be conflated.

  • danr

    Gotta agree with Jerry/Dave… it’s a loud silence, but perhaps preferable to the MSM hitting speed-dial and getting an easy and predictable soundbite from James Dobson et al – much as I’d likely appreciate reading and identifying with their indignation. Business is about the bottom line, and if securing a niche market benefits a company, it’s strictly (and cynically) a business decision.

    No one expects Penthouse to act as some kind of paragon of moral virtue. If they’d turned down such an acquisition opportunity because it would offend others and violate “company ethics”, now that indeed would be news.

    It would be interesting to hear about efforts from church and parachurch organizations to forewarn people, and how much success they have. But I suspect that would be covered more at the local and church-based media levels rather than the MSM.

  • http://blogs.salon.com/0003494/ Bartholomew

    Well, Zondervan customers are mostly OK with Murdoch, although there was this in the Christian Post a while back:

    …According to London-based magazine The Business, Murdoch has been secretly building a stable of wholly-owned pornographic channels for his BSkyB subsidiary. The British publication claims that BSkyB now owns and operates its own pornographic channels – the 18+ Movies selection – after years of hosting third-party content only.

    I blogged some background on this here.

  • Chris Bolinger

    Until a major competitor tries to exploit the fact that Penthouse’s parent owns BigChurch.com, the MSM is unlikely to do much reporting on it. The bigger story here, in my opinion, is the fact that the parent company is dropping “Penthouse” from its name.

    Bankrupt and racked with debt, Penthouse was acquired in 2004 by a group of investors led by entrepreneur Marc Bell. Bell’s agenda for revitalizing the company evolved significantly last December when Penthouse acquired social-network behemoth Various, Inc. for $500 million in cash and stock. Operating well under the media radar compared with other social-networking companies like Facebook and MySpace, Various, headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., has a deceptively broad and profitable reach. Its subsidiaries now include a number of online dating sites—from BigChurch.com to Bondage.com—that have signed up a combined 250 million members since they were founded and 1.2 million current subscribers who pay for content…Bell says in the coming months Penthouse Media Group will be renamed FriendFinder Networks, Inc., and he plans to take the company public by the end of the year. The Penthouse brand will be a well-known but admittedly smaller arm of the company. “Penthouse is just another Web site. We are in the social-networking business. We are not in the business of Penthouse,” Bell says.

    The company’s strategy is to use its technology platform—and its well-established network of 600,000 online affiliates that link to its sites—to support a potentially unlimited number of sites catering to daters, friend seekers and adult-content consumers around the world.

    Bartholomew’s comparison to Murdoch’s company owning Zondervan is spot-on. Can a subsidiary or business unit that caters to Christians thrive and remain true to its target customers when it is part of a conglomerate that includes porn sites and porn channels? I doubt that the MSM will report on this, but maybe some Christian pubs will…assuming, of course, that those pubs are relatively independent. :-)