Photograph Source: The Naughty American The photograph was taken by Larry Knowles for an article for The Naughty American website – CC BY 2.0

When was the last time you watched a porn flick? It doesn’t matter whether you are a woman or a man, whether straight or gay, whether you watched it alone or with another, or whether it is a romantic, feminist or “gonzo” video. Want to bet you saw it in the privacy of your home, on a digital TV, computer or mobile device like a smartphone or tablet, and that you accessed it via an internet connection?

Over the last half-century, pornography has been increasingly “democratized” and, in the process, transformed. Once upon a time, men (and some women), often dubbed “the raincoat crowd,” slinked into shops in down-market parts of town to purchase print porn magazines, 8-mm and 16-mm films, and assorted sex toys. Those days are over.

Nothing contributed more to the “mainstreaming” of explicit sexual materials than home video. By the 1980s, it became a consumer-electronics industry “truism” that no new major programming-driven new-media entertainment product could be introduced without a strong “adult” component. This applied equally to cable TV, DBS, computer software, CD-ROM titles and online services.

There are estimated to be nearly 25 million porn sites worldwide, making up 12 percent of all websites. Sebastian Anthony, writing for ExtremeTech, reports that Xvideos is the biggest porn site on the web, receiving 4.4 billion page views (pvs) and 350 million unique visits per month. He claims porn accounts for 30 percent of all web traffic. Based on Google data, the other four of the top five porn sites — and their monthly page views — are:........

© CounterPunch