YNOT – Something is terribly wrong in the world when sex no longer sells. The wrong-ness teeters on the edge of cataclysm when even mainstream multimedia giants start blaming slumping profits on a slowdown in pornography sales.

That’s exactly what happened late last week when Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt told shareholders a “significant dip” in the company’s third-quarter revenues could be traced to a monumental plunge in income from video-on-demand porn. According to Britt, last quarter’s drop was the most recent in a “steady trend” brought about by consumers getting their porn online for free.

“One of the things going on with VOD is that there’s been fairly steady trends over some time period now for adult to go down, largely because there’s that kind of material available on the internet for free,” he said during a Thursday conference call. “And that’s pretty high-margin. That’s been not just this quarter, but going on for some time period.”

To be fair, limp porn revenues aren’t the only culprit in Time Warner’s current financial embarrassment. Chief Financial Officer Rob Marcus told The Wall Street Journal’s Peter Kafka the porn plunge accounts for only about one-third of the company’s revenue slide. The rest may be attributed to a third-quarter dearth of big PPV events like boxing and other sports matchups combined with a slip in VOD revenues from Hollywood movies.

Only one-third? Considering all the other programming areas from which Time Warner makes money, one-third seems like a hefty percentage for one small industry to bear.

Time Warner’s comments don’t amount to an all-out endorsement of adult content, but at least Britt’s revelation has the mainstream talking about the economic role the adult industry plays, if only tangentially. When Wall Street companies feel compelled to air their porn pocketbook pinch in public, perhaps the conservative contingent in the legislature will feel compelled to find another whipping boy.