History of Single Life

Smut Goes Digital

by Ken Mondschein

March 23, 2009

Ah, the internet. Strange fact: a medium with such an effect on how we live and love today began with Sputnik. When the Soviet satellite became the first human-made object to orbit the Earth in 1957, the United States government chartered the Advanced Research Projects Administration, or ARPA, to turn scientific and technical know-how into feasible military projects. In 1969, ARPA sponsored the construction of a computer network that used a technique called "packet-switching," in which a piece of information is broken down, sent in chunks through the maze of connections, then reassembled at its destination. This decentralized approach aimed to create a network that would be invulnerable to disruption by a nuclear strike.

Naturally, one of the first things it transferred was pornography.

Well, not really. But, just as Neolithic stonecutters used their newfound skills to craft figurines of generously proportioned women, just as Charles Goodyear applied his just-patented technique for vulcanized rubber to manufacture condoms and dildos, and just as stag films were among the first movies ever made, one of the earliest applications of the internet was sex. Even before the Web brought connectivity to the masses, computer pioneers were trading nudie pics over blisteringly fast 600-baud modems. On USENET, the primordial discussion forum established in 1987, anonymous voices sought Japanese tentacle-rape cartoons and discussed the politics of erotic piercing. Even the shyest, geekiest college undergraduate, once inside the school computer lab, could connect to a world of infinite possibility, recreating himself as a Norwegian beauty queen, BDSM-dabbling swinger, or polyamorous dungeon master.

But it took the introduction of Mosaic, the first Web browser, in 1993, to make online porn ubiquitous. Though at first the interface was slow and awkward, as connection speeds improved, the Web democratized the internet and enabled the launch of large-scale commercial service providers. (Arguably, one reason AOL beat historical-footnote Prodigy is that the former allowed "adult" chat rooms.) By 1994, fourteen-million users were online worldwide; by 1998, 101 million; and by 2003, 619 million. According to Pew Internet Life, about seventy-five percent of the United States used the internet by the end of 2008 — which, if the statistic that forty-three percent of users are habitual porn-viewers are correct, means that one-handed mouse-clicking is a favorite hobby of one-third of Americans. We think the figure might be closer to one-hundred percent: You won't catch the Obama administration passing out this statistic, but pornography is a major American industry, producing $13.3 billion dollars in revenue in 2006. More than one-fifth of this was from online porn, which made the Playboys under Dad's mattress the stuff of nostalgia almost overnight.

Anecdotal evidence bears this out, as well. "Whenever I meet people who read Fark, usually the first thing they say is how much they like the site. The second thing they say is how much they like the boobies," Drew Curtis, founder of the newsfilter Fark.com, once told me. (This was back in 2003, when the site still had the occasional softcore link. The smut has since split off into a sister site, Foobies.com.) "A good news story will get 7,500 clicks. An excellent news story will get 15,000 clicks. Anything with a picture or video will get 30,000 clicks. Anything labeled 'Not Safe For Work,' on the other hand, will get 75,000 clicks minimum. The clicks record for NSFW is 500,000 in one day."

Deep Throat and 1970s porno chic had begun to make talking in public about porn acceptable. But the internet made it omnipresent, while at the same time moving it beyond the reach of any effective censorship. Graphic, sometimes even illegal, material is now not only instantly accessible, but also all-pervasive. Merely by entering an incorrect or outdated URL, you can be whisked away to a magical land of silicone; a few words typed into a search engine yield a lifetime supply of movies and still pictures. No matter what gets you off — big boobs, clothed woman/naked man, medieval armor — it's out there.

Yet, as normalized as online pornography may be, the material itself has become increasingly stripped of any greater context or meaning. This trend began when video replaced film in the 1980s, and continued in the early 1990s with the advent of "gonzo" porn, in which any plot is abandoned for a nonstop stream of often-brutal sex. The digital revolution has accelerated this trend greatly — partially because bandwidth costs money, which in turn encourages producers to limit their content to the essentials, and partially because the conventions have become self-perpetuating. Much like computer code itself, porn has become a purely symbolic language, as stylized as ancient Greek drama. For instance, the "penetration" shot, used as early as the 1920s to assure viewers that real sex was taking place, has evolved so that now the arrangement of the performers' bodies and the camera angles serve no purpose save to show one body part going into another.

While this may make the sex seem cold and mechanical, to the viewer, the actual enjoyment of the performers is a non-issue. The on-screen penetration represents his or her own surrogate sexual experience. Another example of a self-perpetuating convention is the "money shot," or external ejaculation, which was important in the "old days" both to signal male completion to the viewer and, in the days before the Pill, as a form of birth control. But ever since the Mitchell Brothers' psychedelic fountains of semen in Behind the Green Door, the image of a man ejaculating on a woman's face or breasts has become a fetish in its own right — and viewers consider it erotic because they've been conditioned to. Having established the grammar of the language, producers became afraid to create anything new for fear of jeopardizing their profits.

With the ready availability of pornography having shaped a generation's perception of the erotic, life has come to imitate art. The variety of sex acts that partners request of each other has grown — thanks to the confluence of porno chic and pro-sex feminism, these days everything goes, just so long as everybody gets off. And women's fashion has changed to follow male desire, as well. The much-ballyhooed taste for radical pubic grooming is a good case study, but perhaps the most pervasive example is female bisexuality — or, more properly, pseudo-bisexuality. Ani DiFranco and k.d. lang's best efforts aside, lesbian sex has become more accepted not because of increased tolerance of homosexuality in general, but because seeing two women together is a male fantasy that's spread beyond pornography and swinger's clubs to beer commercials and daytime television. Ironically, by having sex with both genders, a woman increases her perceived desirability as a mate — just so long, of course, as she remains "feminine." The erotic and the commercial have become inextricably intertwined.

©2009 Ken Mondschein and hooksexup.com.