INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody,& said Bruce Sterling years ago, referring to the effects of free downloadable music on
their industry; and so it has come to pass for pornographers, as depicted by the great Jon Ronson in his equal parts charming and
spellbinding podcast series &The Butterfly Effect.
Pornography, however, is much weirder than music, both as concept and as industry, and
so, unsurprisingly, the emergent properties of the overturning of the porn industry are much weirder too, and the full extent of their
ripple effects have yet to be measured
It at least plausible that the latest salvos in our intensifying culture wars, the subjects of &incels& and &enforced monogamy,& stem from
touchpaper lit long ago by the butterfly in Ronson story.
That story seems simple in outline
A Belgian named Fabian starts trading in passwords to porn sites in the 1990s
Next decade, he purchases a relatively small company in Montreal which offers porn online for free
It faithfully complies with DMCA takedown requests, but they have no hope of keeping up with the firehose of uploads
He applies modern data science, A/B testing, SEO, etc., and his business grows from &substantial& to &enormous.
Based on that he gets a $362
million loan, which he uses to purchase essentially all of his competitors
Ultimately, this cornucopia of free porn makes Fabian very, very rich, while impoverishing the American porn industry, headquartered in the
San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles
It is the tale of a transfer of colossal amount of money, and viewers, from the Valley to Montreal; from porn directors and performers to
buttoned-down data scientists and infrastructure engineers.
It is also, more interestingly, a tale of the emergent properties of free
For instance: there is so much free porn that it had to be taxonomized; this, in turn, trained users to focus on and search for particular
categories and keywords; this, in turn, forced the industry to adapt to those keywords
Ronson finds a director (Mike Quasar, the find of the show) working on a movie called Stepdaughter Cheerleader Orgy 2
&I guess the first one left a lot of unanswered questions,& Quasar cracks, but in fact it called that because titles have become strings of
Ronson discovers that because porn viewers search for either ''teen& or &MILF,& performers in between those ages, i.e
women aged between 24 and 29, find themselves effectively shut out of the industry for those years.
(It should be noted that Ronson talks to
quite a few women, and does not depict the industry as the exploitative nightmare that, say, the movie &Hot Girls Wanted& does, though he
doesn''t especially depict it as uplifting and empowering either
What first drew him to the subject was the raw contempt with which many &normal& people treat porn performers.)
Another emergent property of
free porn is that porn now reaches enormous audiences
Pornhub, which is just one of dozens of porn brands owned by this same Montreal company, has a higher global Alexa rank than LinkedIn or
4 of the top 50 US sites are porn
Studies show that 90% of men in college, and a third of women, have watched porn within the previous year
We can conclude that a substantial majority of the entire adult population — and, awkwardly, probably the teenage one, too — indulges in
pornography, while much to most of that same adult population simultaneously treats the porn industry as fundamentally contemptible and
shameful.
That neo-Victorian attitude towards sexuality and porn performers, our collective cultural madonna/whore complex, may be changing,
Note that Fabian got a $362 million loan, while porn performers have trouble getting leases, or small business loans, and/or get fired from
other jobs, when their profession emerges
Which makes the siphoning of pornographic income away from performers and towards data scientists especially problematic.
And so, what
happened to musicians happened to porn stars: they found other forms of income, especially niche or live performances
A great deal of &The Butterfly Effect& is devoted to bespoke videos crafted for specific individual customers, known as &customs.& I won''t
spoil the show more than I already have, but they&re even more … idiosyncratic … than you might imagine
While porn is often accused of being depersonalizing, &customs& are very personal indeed
There has also apparently been a sharp rise in &escorting& among porn performers, and, of course, a movement towards carefully curated
personal social-media brands.
Is this a stable and beneficial state Doubtful
There probably aren''t that many unique and wealthy fetishists out there
As for beneficial — well, as a good San Franciscan I am of course sex-positive, pro-sex-workers, and pro-porn as a concept … but it
would be disingenuous to pretend that Ronson doesn''t show a lot of dubious-trending-negative emergent effects of essentially unlimited free
pornography.
Did you know that teens are having substantially less sex than the previous few generations It true! And generally interpreted
But Ronson suggests that this is in large part because porn is replacing sex, and, in fact, making real sex with real women seem alienating
Did you know that erectile dysfunction rates have risen tenfold among young men since the rise of free porn Correlation does not prove
causality but it hard to imagine that those two things aren''t somehow related.
I&ve seen a few references myself over the last decade or
so, on sites ranging from LiveJournal to Reddit, from men who said they had to teach themselves how to have sex with real women after
imprinting on porn, and how it did not feel easy or instinctive to do so
These are anecdotes, but the erectile dysfunction studies are data, and it difficult to interpret them as healthy.
Perhaps the most volatile
question: does widely available free porn encourage &incels,& the latest boogeymen from the Internet, and the calls for &enforced monogamy&
blowhard academics who people inexplicably take seriously
I&m inclined to tread cautiously here before I even ascribe any correlation, much
Porn is also frequently viewed as a safety valve for sexual frustration
As Ronson points out in the series, violent porn is actually much less common than it was fifteen years ago
And &incels& — who basically started out as a thoughtful support group for people of any gender who found themselves unable to get laid
(the woman who coined the term is an acquaintance of mine, and has recently launched a new site called Love Not Anger) — are much, much
weirder than free pornography.
I&ve spent some time reading incel sites, out of pure horrified fascination, before they became a hot-button
Their body dysmorphia, their bizarre obsession with concepts like &canthal tilt,& and the language of hate they have developed, are all so
weird that they do not lend themselves to any easy explanation at all
It true that the number of young men who are not having sex at all seems to have risen in the last decade
But only a tiny fraction of such men are actually &incels.
Nonetheless, it hard to escape the awkward bad-San-Francisco-liberal conclusion
that porn, as is, has both positive and negative aspects, and that the latter are neither trivial or tiny in number
In particular, it seems pretty apparent that porn is not good in excess; that free-porn revolution has made unlimited excess available at
the tap of a button; and that teenage brains are, to understate, not good at avoiding excess.
But there some good news
I like to think solutions are being born
See, especially, Cindy Gallop Make Love Not Porn, her struggles getting funding, her recent success, and her attempts to provide superior
sextech alternatives to porn as we know it
(MLNP seems to be moving from strength to strength recently; in particular, they&ve hired Charlotte Reid, former Director of Project
Management at MakerBot, as their COO.) Their slogan — &Pro-sex
Pro-knowing the difference.& — could hardly be more timely, in this strange new sexual world.
On the one hand, the audience for
pornography and sex tech alike is beyond immense; on the other, both find themselves in a kind of perpetually fraught state of unpredictable
transformation, constantly revolutionized by both technical and social changes, their business models endlessly overturned even as they
slide along the spectrum between anathema and respectable
It awfully hard to predict what will happen to that industry or to our culture; but I think we can say with some confidence that neither
Let hope what comes next is an improvement.
