The LATimes finds the porn industry in a tech-induced slump:

Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply… At least five of the 100 top websites in the U.S. are portals for free pornography, referred to in the industry as “tube sites,” according to Internet traffic ranking service Alexa .com. Some of their content is amateur work uploaded by users and some is acquired from cheap back catalogs, but much of it is pirated. Sites like Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube attract more users than TMZ and the Huffington Post. The porn sites are even bigger than Pirate Bay, the top portal for illegal downloads of movies, TV shows and music. Frustratingly for porn producers and distributors in the Valley, none of these sites appears to be making much money.

I keep wondering if the porn industry — including online, cable, and hotel offerings from Fortune 500 media companies — isn’t fueled by old guys who are addicted to the new plethora of pornographic options. Maybe the explosion of porn has peaked and the digital natives are over it. They’ve got lives to lead and have moved on.

This new generation of young people has been developing its own morality for some time. I’ve found the best insight into that new morality expressed in Judd Apatow–branded movies. Some conservatives claim that morality is theirs:

“We make extremely right-wing movies with extremely filthy dialogue,” Seth Rogen, Apatow’s favorite leading man, told an interviewer during the promotional blitz for “Knocked Up.” He was half-joking, of course, and it’s safe to say that you won’t see Apatow and his merry men at the next Christian Coalition fundraiser. But the one-liner got something important right. By marrying raunch and moralism, Apatow’s movies have done the near impossible: They’ve made an effectively conservative message about relationships and reproduction seem relatable, funny, down-to-earth and even sexy.

That from Ross Douthat in the Sunday NYTimes. Douthat says nobody likes Apatow’s latest. He calls it “the first Apatow film in which you get punished for your sins” and thus “the most conservative” of all Apatow’s movies. And that’s why, he seems to suggest, no one likes it.

Douthat says the movie is a reminder that Americans of all ages tend to like their social conservatism much more in theory than in practice:

More than most Westerners, Americans believe — deeply, madly, truly — in the sanctity of marriage. But we also have some of the most liberal divorce laws in the developed world, and one of the highest divorce rates. We sentimentalize the family, but boast one of the highest rates of unwed births. We’re more pro-life than Europeans, but we tolerate a much more permissive abortion regime than countries like Germany or France. We wring our hands over stem cell research, but our fertility clinics are among the least regulated in the world.

In other words, we’re conservative right up until the moment that it costs us.

Matthew Yglesias jumped on that line to riff on Social Conservatism Beyond the Easy Parts:

I think this explains a lot about the appeal of anti-gay crusades to social conservative leaders. Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard. Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.

That reads right to me!

For the record, it’s the top critics that didn’t like Funny People. I and the RT Community called it fresh and liked it quite a lot. What the critics didn’t like is precisely that Apatow did, in fact, tack on a happy ending. That just didn’t ring true to the critics. It may also explain why moviegoers do like the movie.

More conversation about Douthat’s column via Memeorandum.

REMEMBER RELATED: Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker late last year, RED SEX, BLUE SEX: Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?