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Abstract
The following article analyzes the evolution of pornography from 1527 until 2009. It addresses the people, inventions, events and phenomena that have shaped pornography's modern history. This article has identified three meaningful trends. (1) The interpretation and acceptance of pornography has radically shifted over the last five hundred years. To assume that we are at the zenith of our pornographic tolerance would be presumptuous. (2) The increased quantity and quality of pornography is principally a derivation of new technologies; pornography is likely to become more pervasive as technology develops. (3) Censorship and opposition to pornography have had little effect in stemming the tide; the biological chemistry of sexual desire has outlived all censorship attempts and will continue to do so. Brought to you by Smuutle.com. Pornography is often portrayed as one of the ills of today's society, evidence of modern moral decay brought to you by video cameras and broadband access. As it turns out, modern times have got nothing on the past. Pornography existed long before video or even photography, and many researchers think evolution predisposed humans for visual arousal (It's a lot easier to pass on your genes if the sight of other naked humans turns you on, after all). Whichever way you slice it, the diversity of pornographic materials throughout history suggests that human beings have always been interested in images of sex. Lots and lots of sex.
Definition of pornography
For the purposes of this article, pornography is defined as any media with sexual activity or nudity that stimulates erotic as opposed to aesthetic feelings in a community. Such feelings are subjective and change with the passage of time. In its original meaning, pornography literally means "writing about prostitutes" from the Greek "porne" (prostitute) and graphein (write). The term itself was, however, a made-up word coined in England around1850 that had a spurious air of age and scholarship about it. It quickly came to have negative connotations and to denote writing about anything sexual, especially in a base manner, when the creation, presentation, or consumption of the material was for sexual stimulation. In comparison, the term "erotica", continues to enjoy something of a higher standing. To avoid confusion, this programme looks at the whole caboodle.
thick-thighed figurines of pregnant women out of stone and wood. Archaeologists doubt these "Venus figurines" were intended for sexual arousal. More likely, the figurines were religious icons or fertility symbols.
Fast-forwarding through history, the ancient Greeks and Romans created public sculptures and frescos depicting homosexuality, threesomes, fellatio and cunnilingus. In India during the second century, the Kama Sutra was half sex-manual, half relationship-handbook. The Moche people of ancient Peru painted sexual scenes on ceramic pottery, while the aristocracy in 16th century Japan was fond of erotic woodblock prints. In the West, many early explicit materials were political, rather than exclusively pornographic, said Joseph Slade, a professor of media arts at Ohio University. French revolutionaries, in particular, satirized the aristocracy with sexually charged pamphlets. Even the Marquis de Sade's famously brutal and erotic works were part philosophical. "They were political invectives disguised as pornography," Slade said. It seems that in the modern age, to a large extent, we are constantly faced with pornographic images - from lingerie adverts to lads mags. And yet, as this entertaining six-part documentary shows, porn has a very long and varied history that mirrors the very development of civilisation itself - from as far back as the hey day of the Romans and Greeks - adapting itself to the technologies of the time. In short, love it or loathe it, you'll discover that dirty pictures have always been with us.
the seventeenth century. Aretino's work was pornographic, voyeuristic, controversial, heretical, and politically incorrect. "Nowhere in European literature prior to Pietro Aretino do we encounter the combination of explicit sexual detail and evident intention to arouse that became, three hundred years later, the hallmark of the pornographic".
daguerreotype, a primitive form of photography. Almost immediately, pornographers commandeered the new technology. The earliest surviving dirty daguerreotype described by Slade in a 2006 paper as "depicting a rather solemn man gingerly inserting his penis into the vagina of an equally solemn and middle-aged woman" is dated at 1846. Video followed a similar path. By 1896, filmmakers in France were delving into the erotic with short, silent clips like "Le Coucher de la Marie," in which an actress performed a strip tease. Hardcore sex started showing up after 1900. These "stag films" were usually shown at all-male gatherings, and they were tame by today's standards, Slade said. "They look like your grandparents having sex," he said. "They were quaint, but it was real intercourse."
United States
Imported erotic novels made their way to the United States in 1780 where they were advertised for sale in New York and Massachusetts newspapers.
Marquis de Sade
Donatien-Alphonse-Franois, Comte de Sade (1740-1814) was a French nobleman and a controversial author. He is popularly referred to as the Marquis de Sade and it is from his name, that the term sadism originates. Sade is the intellectual heir of violent pornography; his writings were extreme and an affront to conventional morality. His work incorporated many sadistic aspects from rape to torture and beyond. His most famous works include: The 120 Days of Sodom (1785) Justine (1791) and Juliette (1797). Beyond sadism, Sade's work was philosophical, political, and opposed to religion. The republican police and later the Napoleonic police, spent more time tracking down copies of Justine and Juliette, than all other works of pornography combined. Every government, ancien regime, republican, and Napoleonic condemned Sade.
the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Ward Society in Boston.
Photography
In 1839, Louis Daguerre sold the rights of the 'daguerreotype' to the French government, who proceeded to immediately publish the technology, as a free gift to the world. The daguerreotype was an early photographic process where a single image was directly exposed onto a metal plate. The earliest pornographic daguerreotype is an 1846 exposure housed at the Kinsey Institute; it depicts a middle-aged man inserting his phallus into a middle-aged woman's vagina. By the 1850s, American photographers both professional and amateur, were producing three million daguerreotypes per year, this was despite the fact that daguerreotypes were extremely difficult to copy and could not be mass-produced. The collodion process superseded the daguerreotype in 1851 when the glass plate negative was developed. The collodion process provided the ability, to reproduce fine detail in multiple prints. This was a watershed moment for photography, which, translated into a watershed moment for pornography. The ability to produce multiple copies of a photograph led to the industrialization of pornographic photographs. The result was profound; in 1848, there were thirteen photographic studios in Paris, by 1860, there were over four hundred. The Parisian output of nude photographs was prolific, in 1852, forty percent of the photographs registered for sale in Paris, were nudes. Motivated by lucrative profits, pornographers in Britain, the United States, and more commonly France, increased production. The increase in supply lowered the price of photographic pornography, which increased the quantity demanded. The distribution of pornography occurred at many points including train stations, bars, docks, fairs, barbershops, pushcarts, and theaters. Illicit photographs were commonly sold as: (1) single prints peddled on the street, sometimes in postcard format, or (2) sets of prints ranging from a nude woman, to couples or multiple couples posing and/or engaging in sexual acts. Sets of prints would usually be ordered via the mail utilizing the international postal service.
Halftone Printing
The next technological advance that pornography utilized was halftone printing. Halftone printing broke up the tone of the original image; it employed dots that varied in both spacing and size. Frederick Eugene Ives of Philadelphia perfected the halftone printing process in 1885 and proceeded to patent it. The utilization of halftone printing spread rapidly after 1892 when Levy Company mass-produced the screens required for the printing process. Besides the unprecedented realism that halftone printing provided, it cut the cost of newspaper illustrations by ninety five percent. This technology revolutionized the publishing industry and hence the pornographic industry. Pornographic magazines were sold with high quality photographs (relative to the time) at an affordable price. Pornography's vehicle to the masses, the men's magazine had been born. One of the early magazines was an English title by the name of Photo Bits; it portrayed burlesque actresses in natural settings with explicit articles accompanying the photographs.
receptive to the printing of photographic images. To create the film, he had built upon J.W. and I.S. Hyatt's (1865) as well as Hannibal Goodwin's (1888) previous inventions. On March 22, 1895, the Lumire Brothers projected their first black and white silent film to an audience in Paris using their new patent, the Cinmatographe. Using the film technology devised by Reichenback and building upon Edison and Dickson's Kinetoscope (1891), as well as Charles mile Reynaud's Thtre Optique (1892), the Lumiere brothers launched a primitive and popular form of cinema (NowellSmith, 1997). It did not take long for stag films/blue movies (primitive pornographic films) to emerge. According to The Mirror (2007), a French film titled Le Coucher De La Marie (1896) was the first pornographic film; it displayed a couple having sex and a female striptease. Stag films were a major leap forward for modern pornography; audiences could voyeuristically watch real people engaging in real sex acts as if they were physically present at the scene.
Legal Response
In 1842, the United States Tariff Act was the first federal obscenity law to ban the importation of obscene contraband; it was amended in 1857 to ban erotic daguerreotypes. In 1857, the English Obscene Publications Act (1857) was introduced by Lord Campbell; it criminalized the sale and the distribution of 'obscene libel'. The Act fulfilled three main roles, (1) it permitted the issue of search warrants for obscene materials that were available for sale or distribution, (2) it provided for the seizure and destruction of such obscene materials; the proprietor was given an opportunity in court to state why such material should not be destroyed (3) it rendered the offender(s) liable to prosecution. Notably, the term 'obscenity' would not be defined until 1868 in Regina v. Hicklin. In 1865, a postal obscenity law was adopted in the United States, which banned pornographic books, photographs, and images from the mail. In 1868, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn proposed a definition for obscenity in Regina v. Hicklin, which came to be known as the 'Hicklin test'. Cockburn said that the test of obscenity is "whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall". The Hicklin test formed the basis of anti-obscenity legislation in both Britain and the United States for almost a century. It allowed judges to find a book obscene based on selected passages without considering its merits as a whole. In 1873, the Comstock Act was passed in the United States. It was amended in 1876 to prohibit: Every obscene, lewd or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use, and every written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the before mentioned matters, articles or things may be obtained or made, and every letter upon the envelope of which, or postal card upon which, indecent, lewd, obscene or lascivious delineations, epithets, terms or language may be written or printed, are hereby declared to be non-mailable matter, and shall not be conveyed in the mails, nor delivered from any post office, nor by any letter carriers. Failure to comply with the act had a maximum penalty, of a $2000 fine or five years of hard labor for
each offense.
Anthony Comstock
From 1873 to 1915, Anthony J. Comstock waged a war against pornography and all forms of obscenity in the United States. A fanatical and infamous crusader, he was America's anti-obscenity czar for four decades. Despite the fact that Comstock was only a private citizen, he was the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a special agent of the Post Office Department, the prime enforcer of the Comstock Act (which he designed and submitted to Congress), deputy sheriff of New York City, and an honorary U.S. marshal on occasion. He wholeheartedly believed that obscenity was the greatest corruptor of youth and ultimately society. Driven by Victorian prudishness, religious convictions, and a fanatical zeal, Comstock would obsessively hunt down peddlers of obscenity. At one point in his career, he proudly boasted that fifteen people (obscenity peddlers) had committed suicide to evade his prosecution. Entrapment, bullying, docket-fixing, harassment, and persecution were all employed for the 'greater good'. Comstock's regular targets included: lewd writings and pictures, sex education, blasphemy, gambling, theatrical performances, family planning literature, feminist tracts and any other 'offenses' against public decency. Comstock's influence would wane at the turn of the century; Victorian values were receding and community standards were evolving. Despite this, Comstock refused to change with the times; the public started to see him as less of a reformer and more of prude (or worse). As his biographers, Broun and Leech (1927) put it, "To his youthful countrymen, he had become a great tradition, a joke, a scapegoat". His constant attacks on art and literature for so-called obscenity birthed the term 'Comstockery'. Despite his fall from grace, Comstock's record speaks for itself; by 1913, he had destroyed one hundred and sixty tons of obscene literature, and convicted more than three and a half thousand people for violating the Comstock Act. When he died in 1915, the obituary notice in the New York Times called Anthony Comstock both a hero and a benefactor. Without a doubt, he was one of the most, if not the most zealous and influential opponent of pornography, in modern history.
possessing pornographic films for his own private use. 1973, Miller v California, the U.S. Supreme Court constructed a test to determine whether a work was obscene. It had three parts: (1) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would judge that the work appealed primarily to prurient interests, (2) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (3) whether the work lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Using the 'Miller Test', a work is deemed obscene only if all three conditions are satisfied. 1982, New York v Ferber, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not prohibit states from banning the sale of material that depicts children engaging in sexual activity.
Men's Magazines
One of the first magazines to display photographs of the female nude, was the French magazine Le Frisson at the turn of the century. At that time, it was increasingly common for French magazines to publish nudes, under the guise of naturism. American magazines were less risqu; they displayed reproductions of erotic paintings with the occasional 'live' model. Such magazines included Nickell (1894-1905) and Metropolitan (1895-1911). The United States produced Tijuana Bibles in the 1920s, they were a cheap form of pornography that contained stapled pages of gamy photos, dirty stories, and/or erotic comics. They were printed on low-grade paper and inked off the same printers that made the labels for whisky bottles. Tijuana Bibles were especially popular during the Great Depression as a cheap form of entertainment. In December of 1953, Hugh Hefner published the first edition of Playboy Magazine in the United States; a nude Marilyn Monroe was the first Playboy centerfold. Whilst publishing nudes was not original, Hefner's achievement was to turn Playboy into the liberal voice of a masculinized middle class and to marshal advertisers behind his "Playboy Philosophy, a justification of a postwar good life that, he said, included sex as recreation". Whilst Playboy was controversial, it never showed photographs of pubic hair or genitals in the early days. Hefner managed to keep the censors at bay by combining high quality journalism with relatively 'respectable' photography. In 1965, Bob Guccione published the first edition of Penthouse magazine in the United Kingdom, the first American edition was launched in 1969. More risqu than Playboy, Penthouse photographs contained pubic hair. Penthouse was popular with persons who wanted more explicit photographs and written content than Playboy. In 1974, Larry Flynt Jr. published Hustler magazine in the United States for the first time. Hustler went where no mass-market men's magazine had gone before; it displayed the female genitalia, hardcore sex acts, various fetishes, and sex involving sex toys. Hustler magazine continually pushed social boundaries; it challenged societal taboos, held contempt for the existing obscenity laws, and stridently campaigned for the magazine's right to free speech. Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler have been the most popular magazines in the history of pornography. Traditionally each brand has dominated a specific niche within the men's magazine market; Playboy is known for its softcore content, Hustler is known for its hardcore material, and Penthouse occupies the space in-between. Men's magazines were the primary vehicle for pornographic distribution from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. Their popularity declined
Stag Films
Stag films as an illegal pornographic medium were utilized from 1896 until the 1970s. In the 1970s, the feature length and legal X-rated pornographic film with its superior quality and famous porn stars, "supplanted the silent, one-reel, illegally made and exhibited stag". The early stag films (1896-1911) were short (less than fifteen minutes long), crudely primitive, bawdy, amateur, anonymous, and of poor visual quality with simple disjointed narratives. The vast bulk of early stag films originated from Latin America, France, and Germany. They were illegally shot, distributed and consumed. The films depicted a wide range of sex acts ranging from: strippers baring their breasts to hardcore penetration, fellatio, cunnilingus, and masturbation. Early films included El sartario (Argentina, ca. 1907-1912); the film begins with three women bathing in a river, a man dressed as a devil then kidnaps one of the women, she performs fellatio on him, they then engage in simultaneous fellatio and cunnilingus, which is followed by sex in the missionary position. Am Abend (German, ca. 1910) begins with a woman masturbating alone in a room, a man then enters whereby they engage in sex; with the man on top as well as penetrating her vagina from behind. It includes additional masturbatory scenes and a large number of genital shots. The earliest known American stag film was A Free Ride also known as A Grass Sandwich; circa 1915. It begins with a man driving a car containing two female passengers through a rural setting. The car stops whereby the man exits the car to urinate, whilst the women spy on him fondling themselves. The women then urinate themselves and the man spies on them fondling himself. This is followed by the man having sex with one of the women; after some time the second woman joins in. The film is interspersed with title cards such as "Oh, Baby," "Please give me a little" and "Oh, isn't he wonderful!" Stag films were smuggled into towns by travelling salesmen for bachelor parties, military events, college fraternities and other exclusively male "smoker" events. It was also common to find them in brothels where they were employed for arousal purposes to generate business. After World War II, large numbers of people made their own stag films using 8mm film. Unlike regular cinema, stag films did not substantially evolve; they essentially remained the same for several decades. The reason for this is that stag films were an illegal 'underground' trade that were not exposed to mainstream culture. As such, there were no film critics to suggest changes or improvements. In the words of Linda Williams, the general attitude was, "Let's just feast our eyes and arrest our gaze on the hidden things that ordinary vision, and certainly ordinary filmic vision, cannot see: a penis, a breast, a vulva, looking right at us; who needs more?". In addition to regular stag films, less explicit titles emerged in the late 1950s, they were referred to as "beaver" movies. Beaver movies displayed women stripping to display full frontal nudity. Beaver movies evolved into "split beaver" films, which involved the spreading of a woman's legs and/or her vulva. Split beaver films evolved into "action beaver" movies, these movies often depicted softcore lesbian scenes. Some of these movies were legally screened at public cinemas in the 1960s.
Lasse Braun
Unhappy with the poor quality of stag films and frustrated with the lack of color films, Lasse Braun decided to make his own movies. He made high quality, color, hardcore pornographic films, using Super 8mm and later 16mm film. From his base in Stockholm, Braun made eighty color titles or 'loops' from 1968 to 1977, with running times ranging from eight to fifteen minutes each. Braun's titles included Sex on the Motorway, Casanovaand the Country Girls! The Vikings, Top Secret, Perversion, and Tropical. Shot in exotic locations, they ranged from historical dramas, to spy thrillers, island adventures, and various forms of reality pornography. Braun's pioneering work set a new standard for the porn industry. In 1971, Reuben Sturman; the American porn industry's godfather, visited Stockholm to acquire Braun's films for his new invention; the peepshow. The combination of Braun's films with the private peepshow booth earned millions of dollars in a constant stream of small change. The peepshow booth would be the first medium to privately screen pornographic films to a mass market.
Denmark
In 1969, the Danish Parliament legalized pornography. From 1970-74, over thirty percent of the feature films made in Denmark contained pornographic material (Sigel, 2005). Two Danish documentaries; Censorship in Denmark: A New Approach (1970) and Sexual Freedom in Denmark (1970) were screened publicly in the United States. Censorship in Denmark: A New Approach depicted a live lesbian sex act, the filming of a hardcore movie, as well as phallic and other forms of nudity. Since the educational content of these documentaries contained 'redeeming social importance', they managed to evade the censors. Such documentaries pushed the moral limits of American cinema.
Behind the Green Door (1972) was released after Deep Throat to adult theaters across America. It starred the all-American girl Marilyn Chambers, who would go on to become the most famous porn star of the 1970s. Chambers had previously been the wholesome face of Proctor & Gamble's detergent Ivory Snow. The plot involves Gloria (Marilyn Chambers) who is kidnapped and taken to an audience filled sex theater. Multiple women pleasure her before the African-American Johnny Keys enters and they have sex. After a psychedelic money shot, Gloria is carried away through the green door by the narrator, who proceeds to have sex with her. Chambers went on to star in Resurrection of Eve (1973), Inside Marilyn Chambers (1975), and Insatiable (1980) amongst many other pornographic films. Other notable films of the 1970s include The Devil in Miss Jones (USA, 1973), Sensations (Holland, 1975), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (USA, 1976), Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here (USA, 1976) and Debbie Does Dallas (USA, 1978). From 1973 to 1974, Americans shot approximately one hundred pornographic films, Hollywood in comparison, shot four hundred feature films per year. Ultimately, the privately viewed videotape would supersede pornographic cinema.
Snuff
Prior to the release of Snuff (1976), there was an unsubstantiated rumor in New York City, that police were confiscating snuff films from South America. These snuff films purportedly depicted the senseless murders of innocent women after they had sex with anonymous men. Snuff was opportunistically released into this emotive environment and marketed as an authentic pornographic snuff film, with a real murder. Snuff was segmented into two distinct parts; the first part screened the re-cut horror movie The Slaughter (Argentina, 1971). After The Slaughter ends, the viewer is led to believe that she is watching some behind the scenes footage of the film crew from The Slaughter. In this footage, the
director propositions the 'script girl' for sex whereby they copulate. When she realizes she is being filmed, the script girl tries to pull away but the director stops her. He proceeds to gruesomely hack her to death with a knife before holding her bodily organs above his head in an act of sadistic triumph. The screen then goes black, a voice says, "Shit, we ran out of film," another voice asks, "Did you get it all?" followed by "Yeah, we got it. Let's get out of here." The film then abruptly ends and there are no credits. The marketing of the film, "A film that could only be made in South America where Life is CHEAP!" led viewers to believe that the murder of the script girl was real, which was a hoax. In the words of one feminist writer: Snuff marked the turning point in our consciousness about the meaning behind the countless movies and magazines devoted to the naked female body. Snuff forced us to stop turning the other way each time we passed an X-rated movie house. It compelled us to take a long, hard look at the pornography industry. The graphic bloodletting in Snuff finally made the misogyny of pornography a major feminist concern. Despite the fact that Snuff was a hoax and did not "belong to the pornographic genre", it was the spark that set the anti-pornography movement ablaze.
of pornography from an obscenity standard, which appealed to the public morality, to that of the subordination of women". They did this by defining pornography as the "graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words". From 1983 until 1992, they worked with officials in Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Boston, and Los Angeles to pass anti-pornography civil rights ordinances. Their legal attempts gathered immense public attention but were ultimately unsuccessful. Most feminists would reject the principles of Dworkin and MacKinnon in the mid 1990s. Feminism generally shifted from an anti-pornography stance, to a pro-sex, anti-censorship position.
Cable Television
In the 1980s, pornography was available at hotels and motels with in-room pay-per-view. In the 1990s pornography was available from a person's residence if desired with the Playboy Channel, Vivid, and the Spice Channel amongst others. American pay-per-view revenues rose from $54 million in 1992 to $367 million in 1999.
Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN commenced development of the World Wide Web in 1989 which debuted in 1991. A text based Web browser was released in January 1992, Mosaic graphical browser software was released in 1993, and Netscape Navigator was released in 1994. In particular, Netscape Navigator made the Internet more user-friendly to the public. The growth in Internet usage was astounding, in 1981, less than 300 computers were linked to the Internet, by 1989 there were 90 000, by 1993, there were over one million and by 1998, there was over 36.7 million computers linked to the Internet. Web sites experienced similar growth with fifty web sites operating in 1993, 1.3 million in 1998 and over fifty million by the year 2000. The Triple A-Engine; anonymity, affordability and accessibility drove the exponential growth in Internet pornography usage. Additionally, "[p]ersonal inhibition levels, social controls, and the lack of willing partners and sexual scenes that may limit sexual activity in everyday contexts are obsolete in cyberspace". Users had unrestricted and instantaneous access to an immense amount of pornographic: photos, videos, films, games, cybersex, webcams, and texts from a wide variety of niches. Pornography was completely democratized; amateurs produced their own pornography for distribution (generally for free), whilst commercial operators sold their wares for a fee. In 1994, Playboy launched its website, in 1995, Penthouse launched theirs; respectively they received 620,000 and 802,000 daily visits in 1995. That same year saw the introduction of video conference technology, which immediately led to live striptease shows and mutual masturbation on the Internet. In 1996, Internet pornography revenues were estimated to range from $50 million to $150 million. By 1997 Video Fantasy; a provider of video conference peep shows had 20000 subscribers. Also in 1997, Internet Entertainment Group claimed 50000 sub-scribers, Porn City averaged two million daily hits, Playboyaveraged five million daily hits and all up, there were over 10000 pornographic websites in operation. By 1998, internet pornography revenues were estimated at $750 million to $1 billion with 84% of the revenue being generated in the United States. The research firm Datamonitor reported that over half of all personal spending on the Internet was related to sexual activity. Leone & Beilsmith (1999) estimated that 31% of the total online population had visited a pornographic web site by 1999.
grown to $4.9 billion in revenue per annum. The Internet including mobile phone usage accounts for $2.48 billion, adult video sales and rentals account for $1.24 billion, pornographic magazines account for $740 million (this figure has continually declined since the late 70s), and pay-per-view and cable programming account for $440 million per annum. The Internet is now the most popular medium for accessing pornography. There are over 2 million adult web sites with more "than a million people across the globenow photographing themselves during various sexual activities, uploading these photos onto personal and commercial websites, and inviting the entire computerized world to enjoy them". The $2.48 billion in Internet pornography revenue understates the medium's usage. Over 95% of pornography consumed on the Internet is sourced from free amateur sites, free adult porn tubes, and/ or free file sharing protocols such as BitTorrent. Commercial sites face a challenge generating revenue in the face of free alternative products; they have to distinguish themselves from the relatively homogenous product that is pornography. They do this by using new technologies such as high definition video (HD video), securing popular stars to exclusive contracts, producing a higher quality product, letting subscribers keep all the material they download and attempting to create a brand.
Generation XXX
Pornography is now the most popular Internet destination for American men aged eighteen to thirty four. It is 50 percent more popular than music sites or eBay and four times more popular than travel services such as hotel and airline reservations. In 2002, a convenience sample of students from Canada (average age of 20), 24% of female and 72% of male participants stated that they had used online pornography within the last 12 months. In 2004, an Elle/MSNBC survey (15,000 people) found that 66% of women and more than 50% of men claimed that the 'pornosphere' had boosted their sex lives. In 2006, a representative study in Norway reported that 96% of men and 73% of women had viewed pornographic magazines in the last year, and that 96% of men and 76% of women had viewed pornographic films in the preceding 12 months. In 2008, a study of American Midwestern college students (50% women, 50% men), found that 67% of men and 49% of women; agree that the viewing of pornography is acceptable. From this sample, 87% of men and 31% of women reported using pornography.
Controversial content
So what is all that porn doing to us? The question is a hornet's nest of controversy. While most mainstream Internet porn today doesn't rise to the level of those early Bulletin Board images, critics argue that competition between pornographers has led to an upswing in dominance and verbal abuse of women depicted in films made for straight men. "They need to always put out something new, something enticing, to attract people," Chyng Sun, a professor of media studies at New York University and director of the film "The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality and Relationships," told LiveScience. "The degradation, the aggression
levels, that is something you can create, something a little bit new to offer to the audience." By analyzing best-selling pornography films, Sun has found that physical and verbal aggression are present in 90 percent of mainstream porn scenes. Films directed by women are no less likely to contain aggression than films directed by men, she reported in a 2008 paper in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly. Sun argues that these aggressive images are harmful to people's sex lives and that they help cement negative stereotypes about women. Others disagree. Prosterman, the San Francisco sexologist, points out that research has failed to draw a clear link between porn and criminal sexual behavior. And, he said, porn is one way for people to explore their own sexual desires. Debates about pornography have been ongoing since at least the Victorian era (no word on whether stone-age people hid the fertility statues under the mattress), and they're not likely to cease anytime soon. Nor are people likely to stop looking at pictures of other naked people. "Most people like to have sex," said the AVN's Kernes. "A not-too-much-smaller segment of them like to watch other people have sex, and that is what the adult industry delivers." The shift from publically viewed stag films to privately viewed rentals and internet downloads drove changes in the types of acts shown on-screen. Privacy, Slade said, made men more willing to watch fetish films depicting specific, sometimes odd, sexual behavior. A 1994 Carnegie Mellon study of early porn on computer Bulletin Board Systems (a precursor to the World Wide Web), found that 48 percent of downloads were far outside the sexual mainstream, depicting bestiality, incest and pedophilia. Less than 5 percent of downloads depicted vaginal sex. This could have been because magazines and pornographic films had traditional sex covered, and people went to their computers for images they couldn't find elsewhere, Slade suggested. Today, porn is all over the internet, but the actual size of the industry is a mystery. No one keeps official records, and few studies have made a stab at the economics of porn. Adult Video News, a trade industry journal, made annual estimates of porn sales and rentals, along with sales of magazines and sex toys. In 2007, according to an AVN senior editor Mark Kernes, retail sales reached $6 billion a year. However, AVN's figures have been widely disputed. And even if they were reliable, the numbers wouldn't take into account all of the free amateur videos uploaded to sites like XTube or the photography site Flickr. Regardless of how much money is being made, porn is attracting eyes. A 2008 study of 813 American university students found that 87 percent of men and 31 percent of women reported using pornography. The study was published in the Journal of Adolescent Research. And in 2009, University of Montreal researcher Simon Louis Lajeunesse made headlines when he announced that he had attempted a study on the impact of pornography on young men's sexuality, but he couldn't find a control group. In other words, good luck finding a man in his twenties who hasn't seen porn.
AVN Best New Starlet Award. Audrey Bitoni was born on August 16, 1986 in Pasadena, California to an Italian/German/Spanish family. She currently resides in Los Angeles County. She appeared on the cover of the November 2008 issue of Penthouse as well as being featured as the Pet of the Month. Bitoni was the cover girl for the November 2008 issue of Club International.
Carmella Bing
Carmella Bing has appeared in over 100 adult films and has been reported to work under various other stage names.
Eva Angelina
Eva Angelina began her career at 18 and has won several industry awards, including the 2008 AVN Award for Best Actress (Video). Angelina was born in Orange County, California. She is of Cuban, Chinese, English and Irish descent. She has said that she came from a "very wealthy" background, but that changed when she turned thirteen; her family "pretty much lost everything". Angelina entered the porn industry by answering an advertisement in the newspapers; her first scene was for the Shane's World series.
Jayden Jaymes
Jayden Jaymes has appeared in more than 200 adult movies since starting her adult film career in November 2006. She was featured in an episode of MTV's True Life about pornography. She has also made appearances in mainstream films, featuring in small roles.
Jenna Haze
Jenna Haze (born February 22, 1982) is an American pornographic actress. She entered the adult film industry in 2001 at the age of 19. Between 2002 and 2005, she was a contract girl for the film company Jill Kelly Productions. During most of her time at the company, she performed exclusively with women, out of loyalty to her then boyfriend, an industry cameraman. She returned to working with men in the 2006 multi-award winning release Jenna Haze Darkside, produced by Jules Jordan. Haze has won numerous adult industry awards, including the 2003 AVN Award for Best New Starlet and the 2009 AVN Award for Female Performer of the Year.
Nikki Benz
Nikki Benz (born December 11, 1981) is the stage name of a Canadian pornographic actress and Penthouse Pet who was selected as the 2011 Pet of the Year. Benz resides in Los Angeles, California, USA. Nikki Benz entered the adult film industry by contacting an adult film director shortly before her 21st birthday. She signed with Pleasure Productions in January 2003 and made her first onscreen sex scene in Strap On Sally 20 with Gina Lynn, and her first boy-girl scene with Ben English in The Sweetest Thing. After completing her contract, Benz moved to Los Angeles and signed with
Jill Kelly Productions in September 2004. Benz signed a contract with TeraVision in September 2005. Benz has been featured in many popular adult magazines including Penthouse, High Society, Genesis, Fox, OUI, Cheri, Hustler, Club and Club International. She is the Penthouse Pet of the Month for April 2010, and was also the magazine's cover girl and feature in the May 2008 issue. Benz was named Penthouse Pet of the Year 2011.
Phoenix Marie
Phoenix Marie (born September 21, 1981) is the stage name of an American hardcore pornstar and "Penthouse Pet" who now resides in Los Angeles, California, USA.
Rachel Roxxx
Rachel Roxxx (born March 2, 1983 in San Antonio, Texas) is an American pornographic actress. Roxxx worked at Hooters before joining the sex industry. A friend of hers in Houston got her into the industry and she moved to Los Angeles to begin her career. According to Roxxx, her first scene was for Shanes World College Amateur Tour in Texas. In 2007, she was one of the co-owners of a lingerie store with Nick Manning that was facing eviction, allegedly because the landlord and other tenants of the building did not like their professions.
Shyla Stylez
Shyla Stylez (born September 23, 1982 in Armstrong, British Columbia, Canada) is the stage name of Amanda Friedland, a Canadian pornographic actress. She was interested in entering the pornography in her teens. She moved to Vancouver and worked as both a stripper and a webcam model, in addition to appearing in nude pictorials. In her off-time, she would contact studios by email and phone to find out how to appear in movies.