{"id":3778,"date":"2016-09-24T21:54:25","date_gmt":"2016-09-24T21:54:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=3778"},"modified":"2016-09-24T21:54:25","modified_gmt":"2016-09-24T21:54:25","slug":"making-sense-of-modern-pornography-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/24\/making-sense-of-modern-pornography-the-new-yorker\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Sense of Modern Pornography – The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Pornography has changed unrecognizably from its so-called golden age\u2014the period, in the sixties and seventies, when adult movies had theatrical releases and seemed in step with the wider moment of sexual liberation, and before V.H.S. drove down production quality, in the eighties. Today\u2019s films are often short and nearly always hard-core; that is, they show penetrative sex. Among the most popular search terms in 2015 were \u201canal,\u201d \u201camateur,\u201d \u201cteen,\u201d and\u2014one that would surely have made Freud smile\u2014\u201cmom and son.\u201d Viewing figures are on a scale that golden-age moguls never dreamed of: in 2014, Pornhub alone had seventy-eight billion page views, and XVideos is the fifty-sixth most popular Web site in the world. Some porn sites get more traffic than news sites like CNN, and less only than platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and PayPal. The twenty-first-century porn kings aren\u2019t flamboyant magazine owners like Larry Flynt, whose taboo-breaking Hustler<\/em> first published labial \u201cpink shots,\u201d in the mid-seventies, but faceless tech executives. The majority of the world\u2019s tube sites are effectively a monopoly\u2014owned by a company called MindGeek, whose bandwidth use exceeds that of Amazon or Facebook. Its C.E.O. until recently was a German named Fabian Thylmann, who earned a reported annual income of a hundred million dollars; he sold the company while being investigated for tax evasion.<\/p>\n

The millions of people using these sites probably don\u2019t care much about who produces their content. But those who work in porn in the United States tend to draw a firm line between the \u201camateur\u201d porn that now proliferates online and the legal adult-film industry that took shape after the California Supreme Court ruled, in California v. Freeman (1989), that filmed sex did not count as prostitution. Since then, the industry has been based in Los Angeles County\u2019s San Fernando Valley, where its professional norms and regulations have mimicked its more respectable Hollywood neighbors. In \u201cThe Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know\u201d (Oxford), Shira Tarrant explains how that industry works in the new age of Internet porn, and sets out to provide neutral, \u201ceven-handed\u201d information about its production and consumption.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not an easy task. Since the \u201cporn wars\u201d of the seventies and eighties, when feminists campaigned against the expanding pornography industry (and other feminists sided with Hustler<\/em> to defend it), talking about pornography in terms of mere facts has seemed impossible. The atmosphere of controversy makes it hard to avoid moral positions. Even to suspend judgment may be to take sides.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source: Making Sense of Modern Pornography – The New Yorker<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pornography has changed unrecognizably from its so-called golden age\u2014the period, in the sixties and seventies, when adult movies had theatrical releases and seemed in step with the wider moment of sexual liberation, and before V.H.S. drove down production quality, in the eighties. Today\u2019s films are often short and nearly always hard-core; that is, they show […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-YW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3780,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3778\/revisions\/3780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}