Porn is Dead: Long Live Porn
Posted By jss on January 10, 2009
User-generated porn isn’t new, but that ever-on-the-edge-of-the-curve girl, Violet Blue, suggests in her predictions for 2009 that the “Look at Me” Revolution is on the verge of wiping out mainstream porn. Larry Flynt and his peers (He *has* peers, right?) may half-joke about needing and wanting a $5B federal bailout but I agree with Ms. Blue:
Mainstream porn (from The Valley), even with all of mainstream media’s statistics laundering of the industry’s income, is set for a bigger crash than Wall Street’s 2008 wreck. An entire industry built on DVD sales, consumers who now can now choose to watch porn they actually like (online), YouTube-style services such as YouPorn.com and xTube.com that provide not just searchability, but free, authentic user-generated content. It looks like this might finally be the year the business model of churning out 12,000 DVDs a year packed with cookie-cutter starlets and boring sex-by-the-numbers is likely going to collapse like a house of tired old cards …
Let’s not forget about RedTube.com, either, once brought briefly to its knees by Turkish cyberhackers. All this is alongside all the personal porn posted on the major social-sexual networking sites. A few quick points:
– The sheer amount of “Look at Me” porn is inevitably going to come to play a role in defining what “community standards” are in the U.S., from a legal standpoint … which will probably mean fewer prosecutions and convictions for distributing pornography. As it is, the government remains unyieldingly tough on child porn; prosecutions for adult porn happen far less frequently than they did, say, 15 years ago, but the Justice Department brings cases just to remind the porn industry that it’s being watched, and is vulnerable. Since “community standards” is the basic test of whether a film or anything else is pornographic and beyond redemption — the federal prosecutions are likely to lose a lot of credibility when defense lawyers start pointing out, in case after case, in city after city, that large numbers of people not only look at porn but post to Internet sites their own nude photos and videos of themselves having sex. We’re no longer talking about just California and New York City. We’re talking about Topeka (and yes, TBK, St. Louis …)
– From my own experience over the years, I’m much more likely to spend time on a sexual networking site, and even to pay to belong to one, to look at hot photos and videos made by people who might actually want to have sex with me than I am prone to cruising the Internet looking for unapproachable porn stars having sex in positions that might put me in the hospital. (And the dialog in real life is generally of much higher quality than that in mainstream porn.)
– If you think such activity is limited to a few raunchy web sites, you’re not paying attention. Mainstream dating sites have been adding red light districts for a while now. For example, LavaLife (“Where Singles Mingle) now let’s members choose between having three kinds of profiles: “Dating,” “Relationship” and “Intimate.” Or mix and match — the lines blur, just as they do in real life.
Don’t tell me you never noticed that even MySpace allows members to designate themselves as single, married, in a relationship, divorced, engaged … or swinger. (Oops, the SMC says she never noticed …)
Within five miles of my little writer’s loft, there are 151 people who call themselves swingers on their MySpace profiles. Within 10 miles — the number is 365. Within 20 miles: 1,207. Within 50 miles: More than 3,000. (MySpace stops counting at 3,000, figuring that’s already, well, more than all you can eat.)
There are a lot of definitions of “swinger,” of course, ranging from “I’m curious and I want to shock people,” to “The 30th Annual Pansexual Anonymous Orgy will be held at my house on Sunday.” Social networking — yes, it’s that. But it is also sexual networking on an unprecedented scale.
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"Into Temptation" is a usually-but-not-always safe-for-work forum about evolving social-sexual networks and how they have changed and are changing lives. It will also loosely chronicle the research, writing and publication, I hope in 2010, of a book by the same name.
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