We all love to see people fucking on film, huge cocks in greased asses, spooge going down hot throats and pink pussy lips spread wide as can be… so why is pornography considered such an underclass when it fuels our economy, our technology and our very human nature?
Porn is, even today, that dirty secret no one in respectable society wants to talk about. Porn is something that is kept under the bed, hidden from the prying (and judgmental) eyes of the world, a lone fetish built from the unencumbered id and meant as the most personal aspects of ones very being. Sexual needs are just normal parts of what it means to be a human, they are at the core of what keeps humanity going, if we only screwed to procreate then what damn good is that id I spoke of? Isn’t that (partially) there to house and unleash our basic natures, one of which is what gets us aroused? Porn is a visual/auditory expression of that id and one that we as humans tend to suppress for some illogical reason… some arrogant ideal of it not being “civilized” or proper. Porn is not just the very center of civilization but it pushes advancement in every field of our lives.
Go back to the times of our neanderthal forefathers and you will find cave drawings of a pornographic nature, medieval dark ages produced wood cuts of screwing, cultures throughout time have books, paintings and written works meant to entice and cause the blood flow to make “naughty bits” become engorged. What was the first thing we did with this new fangled “movie camera” after it came onto the market? A film of naked people having fun with each other, Le Coucher de la Mariée (also known as Bedtime for the Bride or The Bridegroom’s Dilemma) was made the same year the mass market camera hit the scene and to the amazement of absolutely no one it was a huge hit… people like to see other people naked. Shortly after this though the films got more explicit, featured intercourse and of course were much larger hits… face it, people love to see other people fucking on film. This is a way of passively engaging in that very same sex act… of the mind. It’s safe, it’s private and most of all it’s YOURS. Porn is something the viewer can claim the same as the maker/performer… you can mentally insert yourself into the act and go forth with pure fantasy.
When the VCR hit the scene what do you think moved more machines into homes? Patton, The Sound Of Music and M*A*S*H* or Debbie Does Dallas, The Devil In Miss Jones and Deep Throat? Yeah, the skin flicks outsold the “mainstream” movies and it is said that more people bought VCR’s for the ability to jack-off in the privacy of their own home than any other reason. Even christian author Luke Gilkerson notes this “The history of the VCR is directly linked to the history of pornography. In 1978, when fewer than 1% of American homes had VCRs, over 75% of VHS tapes sold were pornographic. It has been suggested that Sony’s Betamax lost to VHS, despite technological superiority, because Sony refused to allow the porn industry to use their format”. Now, what he said is only partially true, while Sony (owners of the Betamax format) did refuse to allow adult titles onto their format it is pure speculation whether this had a real impact on the sales numbers outside of the differences between Beta and VHS in and of themselves (Beta was better quality but less user friendly and VHS could hold more tape therefore making it cheaper to the consumer). The point that is irrefutable though is that porn was the main reason the VCR took off the way it did in 1982 (the first year that sales spiked). DVD’s are the same thing… even before commercial “mainstream” movies came out on DVD… the adult market adopted the format and it went over very well indeed.
Lets say you take the kids to the Disneyland and you camcorder (or modern equivalent, it’s still called camcordering) the trip… you have porn to thank for that. The Home video camera was integrated into american homes, not to record those precious moments when Johnny takes his first step or Debbie gets the lead in the school play… the Home Video Camera was mass marketed to allow for homemade porn. More people are said to have videoed themselves or others fucking in the 80’s than actual “mainstream” films were released. Today it is even more ubiquitous as sites such as Porntube and X-Hamster are all about making “amateur” videos. Speaking of the internet…
Adult Video News says that from 2001 to 2007, Internet porn went from a $1-billion-a-year industry to $3-billion-a-year in the U.S. and in 2006, revenue from online subscriptions and sales was $2.8 billion, up from $2.5 billion in 2005 and that is numbers from 9+ years ago… it has grown exponentially since then (remember kids, the various tube sites were not even around then). Why do you have DSL and Broadband for the net today? Porn… people needed to download porn faster. You really think it was 20th Century Fox that pushed for faster internet speeds so you could watch their newest trailer better or Vivid Entertainment that made this happen so they could stream live sex videos? Indeed, it was porn again that made this happen.
In 2001, there were an estimated 70,000 to 74,000 adult pay websites. As of September 2003, there were more than 260 million pages of pornography on the net. Between 2000 and 2004 the number of porn sites went from 88,000 over 1.6 million with at least 80% of them offering free material. 90% of free porn websites and nearly 100% of pay porn websites buy their material rather than create it themselves and they get this material from “the industry” in part (approx %38) and the rest comes from you and those Home Video Cameras. Two-thirds of business have said they have discovered pornography on employee computers and 43% of these said they had found such material more than once. The largest segment of people that watch porn on the internet are concentrated in… the bible belt. Yup, the religious are the most ardent viewers of adult material. According to data taken from internet users who took part in the General Social Survey for the year 2000, self-identified “fundamentalists” are 91% more likely to look at porn than atheists or “casual” christians.
“Porn doesn’t have a demographic—it goes across all demographics.” – Paul Fishbein
We all watch porn, ALL OF US… even those out there who wish to think they are above such prurient material watch porn and to their amazement get aroused by it. Their hatred comes from them projecting their own sexual insecurities and inadequacies into what they are watching and lashing out in the darkness as a coping mechanism. Since porn is such a major part of our culture (both pop and otherwise) why the shaming? Why the underclass status assigned to it? Is being an actor that kills a a great deal of dudes really all that more “legitimate” then an actor that fucks a great number of dudes? Why is shooting someone in the face with a bullet totally cool and an act to be proud of and yet shooting someone in the face with cum is a dirty act that one should be ashamed of? If a magazine that breaks hard news, REAL NEWS, also shows cunt shots why does that impune the credibility of that magazine? Why are we, as a society, so afraid of flesh and more importantly so afraid of desire? Why do we, as a society, penalize sex and endorse violence? I can’t answer these questions as definitively as I would like, but I ask them nonetheless…
“It seems so obvious: If we invent a machine, the first thing we are going to do (after making a profit) is use it to watch porn. When the projector was invented roughly a century ago, the first movies were not of damsels in distress tied to train tracks or Charlie Chaplin style slapsticks; they were stilted porn shorts called stag films. VHS became the dominant standard for VCRs largely because Sony wouldn’t allow pornographers to use Betamax; the movie industry followed porn’s lead. DVDs, the Internet, cell phones. You name it, pornography planted its big flag there first, or at least shortly thereafter”
– Damon Brown, Porn and Pong
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