Pornography

My father, in an attempt to stimulate debate on a controversial topic (he has loved to engage me in this way for a very long time), asked me what I knew about pornography. Particularly, he wanted to discuss the underlying psychology behind why it is so popular. I told him that I would put my thoughts down in my blog to give him an excuse to get online (I’ve been trying to get him to do THAT for a long time, also).

Before I do this for him, let me say that I don’t have any interest in using this forum solely to express my political beliefs. I think that, over time, this blog will come to be about experiences, not opinions. My opinions and beliefs are my own, and I guard carefully against their inappropriate distribution. I have found that throwing my beliefs out headlong gets in the way of considered discourse and understanding.

First, however, some information about the topic. I took a little time to come up with some basic statistics. I like statistics. Coming up with them on porn is challenging, though, because they get outdated quickly. This industry is growing BY THE DAY, apparently. Here’s what I found by searching different reputable sources through Google…

- Pornography is a $57.0 BILLION industry worldwide, with $12.0B coming from the U.S. Worldwide, adult videos generate about $20.0 BILLION of that total. (Who the hell is watching all these movies? That’s a LOT of movies, don’t you think?).

- There are, as near as I can determine, some 4.2 million pornographic websites (this represents around 12% of the total number of sites on the Internet today).

- Daily, Internet search engines receive over 68 million pornographic search requests (about 25% of all Internet searches).

- The average age at which an American child is exposed to pornography via the Internet is 11 years.

- The largest consumer of Internet pornography is the 12-17 age group.

- By gender, viewers of online pornography represent approximately 72% men and 28% women.

- Only slightly more men than women (20% vs. 13%) admit to accessing pornography on the job.

- Women are far more likely than men to act out behaviors in real life.

- This might seem irrelevant at first, but women favor chat rooms and online services like AOL Instant Messenger twice as much as men.

What does all this mean?

Someone (my father, I think) said that pornography is one of the biggest industries in the world that no one admits to knowing anything about. Based on this information, that would seem to be the case. With $12 BILLION changing hands in this country alone (by the way, that’s a total that exceeds by nearly double the revenue from the 4 major network television companies ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX), a lot of us must know something about it. But what’s the interest?

I would argue, based on my experience and discussions with the kids I teach, that much of the draw for teenagers is simply curiosity. Porn is pervasive online now, and with Internet access so widely available, it is easy to see for themselves what all the fuss is about. That they might keep coming back to look at it is, I would suggest, a function of hormones and the convenience of a means to help them self-regulate them.

The question that I would raise is whether the same is true for adults and, if so, why? Now, I’m not going to delve into this here but, in very general terms, I would offer the thought that it is the same, at least for men, and that the reasons have much to do with the way men and women view the world. Those last two statistics might even offer some explanation. They would seem to suggest that women are much more social creatures that men, that they prefer to talk about things and (again, generally speaking—I’m trying to be politically correct here!) are more interactive with the world.

There it is, Dad.