New Media & Porn - A match made in adult heaven

This semester, I'm enrolled in a human sexuality course, taught by Dr. Robin Sawyer. Tuesday morning, we started our unit on pornography by looking at the history of porn and legal battles involving porn. We also watched one Dateline piece and one 60 Minutes piece on recent issues stemming from the porn industry.

One piece was about the seizure and eventual banning of the 1979 movie The Tin Drum in Oklahoma City. Go read about it. It's terrifying on so many different levels.

We also watched a 60 Minutes piece from 2004 on the evolving porn industry, Porn in the U.S.A, and how it has become more mainstream and has entered into our culture. One point made in this piece I had never thought of before is how new technologies have fueled porn, and how porn has fueled new technologies.

The piece explains:

Adult entertainment is so lucrative and profitable that it's become part of the mainstream culture -- readily available, easily accessible, and all but impossible to legislate away. How did it happen? It began 25 years ago with a brand new household appliance: the video cassette recorder.

Paul Fishbein, the founder and president of Adult Video News, the industry's trade publication, further explains this relationship between technologies and porn.

"Most people had never seen an adult movie, because they had to go out in public, to a theater, to see it. I mean, sex is a very private thing. So, now that you can watch it in the privacy of your own home, nobody has to know. And I think that's what drove the VCR. And I think, to a degree, it's what drove a lot of people to get on the Internet."

The piece continues:

In fact, pornography has helped drive early sales and the development of most new entertainment technologies for the past 25 years - providing software for the latest gadgets, and a reason to buy them. And usually the first people who do are affluent young men who like porn. Type the word "sex" into an Internet search engine like Google and you will get 180 million hits. [This number is now 751 million.] For years, adult sites were the only ones to turn a profit. They have pioneered and helped to develop numerous technological breakthroughs from online payment methods to streaming video.

Personally, I love new technologies. I love my internet, my cell phone, my DVD player and my former VCR. It made me feel slightly uncomfortable when I started thinking about the massive role porn played in the creation and evolution of these technologies. Then I though, "Meh, no big deal." If the porn industry is responsible for giving me streaming video and PayPal, then here's to the porn industry.