Nowadays, when people think of pornography, they think of pornography on the web. However, before the dawn of the internet age, way back to ancient civilizations and even before that, pornography already existed – only they came in other forms.
Sexual content could be found in cave paintings, for example. Many depictions of the naked body has been carved by many sculptors around the world. The Kama Sutra, a text from the third century by Vatsyayana, contained graphic sexual positions, for the purpose that man and wife find carnal and cerebral pleasure with each other to maintain a happy marriage. As technology advanced, pornography could be seen in the cinema, adult theaters, and adult magazines.
Believe it or not, pornography is one of the major driving forces of the World Wide Web. In the early 1990s, pornography was found in Usenet newsgroups and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). During this time, because of bandwidth limitations and time restrictions, the image has to be converted to ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) text and then uploaded to the Usenet newsgroup, and then a user has to download and then recompile the pieces to view the image. Among all the posts made from users, many of the images shared were pornographic in nature, a lot of them scanned pictures of erotic material from adult magazines.
Now, compare that to today. Today, there are a lot of pornography websites easily available online. Unlike in Usenet newsgroups, it’s no longer necessary to convert images to ASCII text and then compile them just to view the content. When Googling “porn,” there are more than 2 billion results! There 2 billion different ways to view pornographic content, and that is only what is available on the surface of the internet, not counting the deep web.
Nowadays, internet pornography is not available in only one format anymore. Instead of just posting and distributing images, pornography is available as videos. Porn video is, in fact, the most well-sought form of pornographic material. There are many pornographic galleries which showcase thousands and thousands of erotic images, while there are also many pornographic websites which showcase thousands and thousands of porn videos.
Before the internet, there were services which provide paid “phone sex,” where people basically hire others to talk dirty to them for a period of time. A better alternative for this with the internet is video conferencing, which the porn industry took advantage of and were advanced at, and now it’s commonly known as live webcams. Yes, one of the major uses of video conferencing is for pornographic purposes.
All these pornographic materials can be viewed through either free or paid means. Because of user demand, maintaining a porn site requires a lot of bandwidth. The transfer of videos—and not only a single video, but multiple—to many users from all over the world means a whole lot of data. This means users might have to pay to maintain and keep the porn sites and all the content up. (However, there are still free alternatives, which use paid advertisements as a way to pay for the cost.) Of course, businesses have been made out of internet pornography. Some of the most popular porn sites are among the biggest internet companies, in fact.
At this point, do you think there exists an adult that has not seen porn online? In 2009, Simon Louis Lajeunesse, a researcher from Montreal, conducted a study entitled ‘Are the effects of pornography negligible?’, which analyzes the effects of viewing pornography for men in their 20s. To conduct the study, he had to interview men who have seen porn and men who have not seen porn. However, apparently he could not find a single man who has not seen porn in his 20s.
This is no surprise, as pornography is very accessible on the internet. Just one Google search, and pornographic material is immediately available right in front of your eyes. Because of its very easy accessibility, and of the simple fact that porn satisfies urges and can be a source of pleasure, it is also very easy to get addicted to pornography. Porn is everywhere and now you can find dating apps specifically for your needs.
In a book, Mark Kastleman talks about how pornography “destroys the mental and spiritual capacity of its victims.” Of course, there are also many activists who argue that pornography is actually a safe and healthy way to satisfy sexual urges and explore one’s own sexuality. In fact, some health professionals use porn to help their clients with clinical sexual problems.
Whatever anyone’s opinion of pornography is—whether it be good or bad for an individual person and society as a whole—it does not change the fact that porn has made its way to mainstream society. And that is thanks to the World Wide Web.