Considering how few women are still stay-at-home moms, that’s quite an accomplishment.
Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993. However, it certainly appears that the main thing the Internet has accomplished is the normalization of amateur pornography. There is no justification for the amount of naked people on the World Wide Web, many of whom are clearly (clearly!) doing so for non-monetary reasons. Where were all these people fifteen years ago? Were there really millions of women in 1986 turning to their husbands and saying, “You know, I would love to have total strangers masturbate to images of me deep-throating a titanium dildo, but there’s simply no medium for that kind of entertainment. I guess we’ll just have to sit here and watch Falcon Crest again.”
This phenomenon blows my mind, but—apparently—nobody else is the least bit surprised. It has been my experience that people who are especially obsessed with Internet technology (HTML designers, “new media” pundits, Lord of the Rings fans, etc.) tend to become extremely agitated when you start to talk about Internet pornography, typically because they think that it degrades the social import of the Web and insults all the be spectacled geniuses who create it.[41] The argument they make in response is usually something along the lines of this: “Okay, sure—there’s porn on the Internet. But who cares? There are some perverts on computers who spend all day looking at Teri Hatcher’s ass, but there are just as many perverts in public libraries looking at medical journals and playing with themselves under the table. You wouldn’t judge the merits of literature by the actions of those losers, and it’s equally shortsighted to study the Internet through the prism of its lowest common denominator. People who obsess about Internet porn are missing the point.”
The first time I heard that argument, it seemed savvy. However, I’ve grown to realize that the opposite is true. People who aren’t obsessing about Internet porn are missing the point, because that sleaze was the catalyst for everything else. I doubt that pornography has been good for the advancement of society, but I suspect it’s done wonders for the advancement of computer technology.
People always forget how new the Internet truly is. I was a senior in college during the spring of 1994, and I knew exactly two people who had e-mail addresses. They wrote e-mails to each other. It seemed completely impractical and a total waste of time. From what I could tell, the only people who were sending e-mail were people who drank Zima, and they mostly used the Internet to discuss properties of calculus or to send Steven Wright jokes to other weirdos in Canada. They were mostly CompuServe users. I can recall an extremely antisocial MC Hammer fan in my dormitory who had a Macintosh in his room and once tied up the phone line for five hours while he downloaded the Batman logo for no apparent reason; soon after, he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of Ibuprofen. This did not seem like the future.
However, I can also vividly recall my friend Robert showing me something in the fall of 1994 that seemed legitimately amazing—and while it didn’t prompt me to get an e-mail address, it did reinvent my image of how prevalent the Internet was going to become. Robert had always been a ground-floor computer nerd, and I asked him if there truly was an avalanche of porn online (which was something I had read about in the newspaper). Robert said, “I could show you lesbians having sex in two seconds.” Now, I assumed he meant “two seconds” figuratively, as in “I just have to wash my hair and put on my makeup—I’ll be ready to go in two seconds.” Obviously, I was wrong. Robert meant two seconds as in 00:02. And the actual image of two vacant blond girls with serpentine tongues was not nearly as mind-blowing as the fact that someone has designed a hypercomplicated network to show me lesbian smut. I could not fathom why this technology—for this particular purpose—would even exist.
Almost a decade later, I still sort of feel that way. Internet porn has replaced going to the moon as the explanation for all that is unexplainable. Here’s what I mean by that: People used to ask rhetorical questions like, “How is it that we can put a man on the moon, but I still can’t get a good martini in downtown Seattle?” Neil Armstrong made everything less complicated than a lunar landing seem plausible. Meanwhile, Internet porn makes everything more reasonable—once you’ve realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it’s erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.
We all like to talk about how the Internet is such a ground-breaking educational tool, but we’re missing what it can teach us about ourselves. Porn sites are the window to the modern soul; they’re glimpses into the twisted minds of a faceless society. All the deviancy Freud tried to deduce through decades of analysis is now completely exposed in seconds (or milliseconds, if you have DSL). When Carl Jung introduced the concept of the “collective unconscious,” he was trying to explain why all humans are inherently scared of things like darkness and vampires—but net porn is the collective conscious. It’s where we all see the things people would never admit to wanting.
And what is it that we want? From what I can tell, that answer is twofold: We want imperfection, and we want heightened reality. The pornography everyone wants to see on the Internet focuses on (a) amateurs and (b) celebrities. We either want a truck stop waitress who’s a little overweight and sort of freakish, or we want voyeuristic shots of Britney Love Aguilera[42] on a private beach in Italy. And some would say that’s simply human nature, but they’re wrong; that’s a reflection of how we’re still trying to understand how this technology works. Ironically—or perhaps predictably—we need porn to do this. It’s what keeps us interested.
Let’s say a guy is sitting in a bar in Des Moines and two women walk in. One of these girls is clearly a model/actress, and she has fake boobs and luxurious hair and a perfectly sculpted body; meanwhile, her companion is just a totally normal, decent-looking person. Who will our hard-drinking Iowan immediately want to see naked? The answer is obvious—he would want to see the model. And if there are twenty-five women in the bar that night and he’s given the opportunity to see any one of them nude, he will pick whoever he thinks is the most attractive. Yet this would not be the case if these women were 2-D thumbnail pics on a Web site called nakedtavern.com. The first female selected would be whoever seemed the most normal (i.e., neither ideal nor repulsive), or maybe the woman with the nicest smile who seemed just a tier below gorgeous. And porn sites are completely aware of this phenomenon. You often see banner advertisements that scream things like, TIRED OF SITES WITH MODELS CLAIMING TO BE AMATEURS? WE GUARANTEE REAL UNPROFESSIONAL SLUTS! This is one of those bizarre paradoxes that could only have been created by the acceleration of culture: Within the realm of their Gateways, men prefer to look at nude images of women they’d normally ignore in real life.
Now, I realize phrases like “the acceleration of culture” tend to be frustrating terms, mostly because there’s a certain segment of the population that throws around this term too often (and usually incorrectly), and there’s another segment that only vaguely understands what it means (they can define the individual words, but the larger concept still seems fuzzy). However, it’s the best explanation as to why amateur porn is more popular than professional porn, which is only the case in the online idiom. Before the Net devastated the smut mag industry, success had always been directly tied to professionalism: In the 1990s, Playboy was forever the front-runner, followed by Penthouse, followed by Hustler, followed by Perfect 10. The same still goes for live erotica: Whenever I hear guys talking about their favorite strip clubs, they always talk about how unbelievably hot the dancers are; I’ve never heard anyone raving about how unbelievably ordinary the dancers look. Yet with computer pornography (much of which is still free), the key is normalcy—the surfer is hoping to see the girl next door in an almost literal sense. This is the product of a technology that has accelerated faster than its user can comprehend.
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2. One Web designer actually told me that focusing a discussion around the topic of porn sites “insults” the Internet, prompting me to ask him if the Internet gets jealous when I use the microwave.