The Internet owes a lot to porn, whether we care to admit it or not. Without porn driving growth and web technologies (picture formats, file-sharing, and so on), the Internet probably wouldn't be what it is today. In the early days, trading pornographic pictures occupied much of the Internet's time and effort. Even before the Internet, there were BBSs full of porn for the downloading.
Web searches for porn bring up hundreds of millions of results—more hits than looking for ‘god’.
The folks at onlinemba.com recently posted a full-page graphic detailing the latest statistics on Internet porn, showing that it is not quite as popular as it used to be, if only because so much information is now available to Internet users. Even so, the statistics speak for themselves.
According to OnlineMBA:
- 12 per cent of all the sites on the Internet are pornographic in nature, accounting for more than 25 million sites;
- $3,075.64 (96,698.50 baht) is spent on Internet porn every second and there are 28,258 users looking at porn every second;
- bout a third of porn viewers are women;
- 2.5 billion emails each day are pornographic in nature.
- Most children are first exposed to Internet porn at age 11.
To see the full report, point your browser to http://www.onlinemba.com/blog/the-stats-on-internet-pornography/.
More statistics: a Google search for "porn" turns up 215 million hits. A search for "sex"turns up 621 million hits. By way of contrast, a search for "god" turned up 378 million hits. The pornography industry, according to the Top 10 Reviews web site, makes more money than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined.
In 2006, revenues were reported at $97 billion (3.05 trillion baht). Every 39 minutes in the US, another porn video is being created.
I would be hesitant about imposing any controls on Internet porn. Controlling access to information, of whatever kind, is a thing of the past, when leaders and elites tried desperately to impose their own values and points of view on the huddling masses. That will no longer do. If given a choice, I would much rather my child was looking at Internet porn than watching a Friday the 13th-type movie. Watching people do the rumpy-pumpy can't be nearly as traumatic as watching a mad man hack hapless teenagers to death. One is really rather normal, part of life, while the other is unnatural and rightfully disturbing.
Curiosity about sex, and the opposite sex, or the same sex as the case may be, is quite natural, especially for young people, and they will always find a way to indulge that curiosity. For myself, growing up in the 1970s, it was looking at Playboy magazine. As long as people are not being exploited, it matters little to me what others choose to do with themselves and their sexuality. Efforts to legislate such matters betray an inability to deal with the facts of life. The world is what it is, and there are far more important matters that one could legislate than Internet porn.
Which is not to say I approve of Internet porn. But "approve" is the wrong word altogether. I do not approve of many things, merely acknowledge their existence.
Life is what it is, warts and all. Sex is part of life, indeed an essential part. Without sex, none of us would be here. Biologists suggest that the pleasure of sex ensures that the younger generations will keep at it, replenishing the species in the process.
The Internet has gotten better at hiding porn. There was a time when porn ads were thrown in your face - it was called getting stuck in a "porn cycle". When one tried to read Newsgroups (no longer as popular now as they once were), the entries were full of ads for porn and porn sites, even pornographic pictures. Spammers managed to fill your inbox with all sorts of nonsense, so much so that it was sometimes embarrassing to read your own email.
Things have improved immeasurably. The popular webmail sites, like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, have introduced automatic filters to remove most of the unwanted junk (porn or otherwise) so that you never see it (unless you click on the "Spam" or "Trash" folders and go looking for it).
Years ago, after a flurry of hysteria about child porn, I did a bit of research and tried to see if this was as readily available as the reports indicated.
My search was rather half-hearted, fearful as I was that the Internet police would arrest me and haul me off to the clink. I looked around enough to realise that the Internet was not swamped in child porn, but one had to dig rather deep to find it. The average user was not going to stumble across it while looking for cake recipes.
For the purposes of this article, I did another Google search for "child porn" that demonstrated a lot of progress on this front. Most of the hits were related to news articles about child pornography or YouTube videos on why child porn is wrong. Even a Google search under the "Images" tab turned up nothing that could be considered illegal.
One problem in this area, and just as an aside, is kids themselves using technologies like the Internet and cellphone cameras to take pictures or videos of themselves (or others) in the buff, and then posting them online. Sometimes this is done just for fun. Folks at places like YouTube have been vigilant in removing such postings - but not always.
So while Internet porn is just as strong as ever, it has fallen into the background, like those adult bookstores I used to see in seedy neighbourhoods. Still there, still available, but not quite so in your face. And whether you approve of porn or not, one must acknowledge the debt the Internet owes to its lustier inhabitants.
If the Internet gods continue to police themselves and keep porn out of the mainstream (and get rid of child porn and any other type of porn that hurts or exploits others), this will continue to be the non-issue it is.
Parents who are worried about the issue should investigate software options like NetNanny, which do a good job of keeping young users away from porn sites. For an overview of several such products, visit http://www.internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/.
Email Gotfried K. at gotfriedk@yahoo.com.
