Porn has been around for a long time, right? After all, cavemen drew sexual images on stone walls, and the ancient Greeks painted it on their pottery.
But here’s the catch, comparing ancient paintings on clay vases to today’s endless stream of live action videos depicting every possible and impossible sexual act—all available 24 hours a day on a device that fits into your pocket—isn’t exactly comparing the same thing.
A slow and steady change
So what changed? Like most large cultural shifts, nothing happened overnight, but some wheels were already turning back in 1953, the year Hugh Hefner published the first copy of Playboy.
Sex had become a more prominent part of American’s cultural conversation due in part to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who had published a controversial but extremely popular book on sexuality five years earlier. [2] He was heralded as one of the first scientists and writers to talk so openly about sexuality, [3] and as a result, his books went flying off the shelves. [4]
Hefner capitalized on the trend with his magazine. However, to maximize sales, he had to change porn’s image; instead of being thought of as something your friend’s creepy uncle might have, porn needed to look mainstream. To do that, Hefner put pornographic photos next to essays and articles written by respected authors. In Playboy, porn looked like a gentleman’s pursuit.
The next big shift happened in the 1980s when VCRs made it possible for people to watch movies at home. [5] For porn consumers, that meant that instead of having to go to sketchy movie theaters on the wrong side of town, all they had to do was go to the back room at their local movie rental place. Sure, they still had to go out to find it, but porn was suddenly a lot more accessible.
And then the internet changed everything. [6]
An explosion of accessibility
Once porn hit the Web, suddenly there was nothing but a few clicks between anyone with an internet connection and the most graphic material available, [7] and the online porn industry boomed.
Between 1998 and 2007, the number of pornographic websites grew by 1,800%. [8] According to a 2004 study of internet traffic in May of that year, porn sites were visited three times more often than Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search combined. [9] Consider how that was 15 years ago, and porn has only grown more available, accessible, and affordable.
Porn hasn’t stayed behind the computer screen, either. Now that porn is more normalized and easily accessed than ever before, more people are becoming compulsively hooked [10] and its influence has crept into so many aspects of our lives. [11] Popular video games feature full nudity. [12] Snowboards marketed to teens are plastered with images of porn performers. [13] Even children’s toys have become more sexualized. [14]
Television shows and movies have been impacted, too, as producers and writers have upped the ante with more and more graphic content to keep the attention of audiences accustomed to porn. [15] Between 1998 and 2005, the number of sex scenes on American TV shows nearly doubled. [16] And it’s not just happening on adult programs. In a study conducted in 2004 and 2005, 70% of the 20 TV shows most often watched by teens included sexual content and nearly half showed sexual behavior. [17]
And the more our society becomes sexually saturated, the more porn creators produce harder and harder material to make sure they stay on the cutting edge and draw in consumers’ attention. [18] It’s all about novelty, and creating content that is increasingly more hardcore. And consumers will continue to cash out on this more extreme material because porn is an escalating behavior.
Where we are now
“Thirty years ago ‘hardcore’ pornography usually meant the explicit depiction of sexual intercourse,” wrote Dr. Norman Doidge, in his neuroscience-focused book, The Brain That Changes Itself. “Now hardcore has evolved and is increasingly dominated by the sadomasochistic themes … all involving scripts fusing sex with hatred and humiliation. Hardcore pornography now explores the world of perversion, while softcore is now what hardcore was a few decades ago …. The comparatively tame softcore pictures of yesteryear … now show up on mainstream media all day long, in the pornification of everything, including television, rock videos, soap operas, advertisements, and so on.” [19]
And not only is there more porn to watch, but also there are more ways than ever to watch it. [20] Today, not only do we have high-speed internet, we’ve got it on tap for devices we have with us 24 hours a day. Families have gone from having one shared computer to often having multiple personal laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
As porn’s availability has risen, so have its devastating effects on its consumers, their relationships, and society at large. [21] As therapist John Woods recently wrote, pornography addiction “is no longer just a private problem. It is a public health problem.” [22]
This is why we raise awareness that porn is a “new” drug. Never before has society seen such global, deeply devastating effects of something that’s regarded as “normal.”
It’s time we speak up about it, and do something. It all starts with education and awareness.
