WASHINGTON, November 28, 2017 – Sex commerce, Porn, is the largest and most profitable industry in the world, and includes some 4.2 million pornography websites. In America, sex-as-a-business, from pornography to comic books and Play Station games, is worth $97 billion.
U.S. sales of sex toys alone generate $15 billion.
In 2016, the porn industry was $13+ billion
By producing 13,000 videos (a basic tenant of the porn industry is “if it exists, there is porn of it.”) This is remarkable considering that making a porno film or acting in one is not legal in most states. Meanwhile, Hollywood grossed about $12 billion in the movie business.
Porn and the Internet
Gail Dines, Professor of Sociology at Boston’s Wheelock College, has observed that,
“A lot of people believe the Internet drives porn, but, in fact, much of the research and development for today’s technology is driven by the porn industry itself.”
Mind Geek, who owns several porn sites, is the number three bandwidth-consuming company in the world: the other two being Google and Netflix. Pornography sites attract more visitors each month than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined.
As scored by the List25 Internet Service, the porn industry makes more money than the National Football League, the NBA, and Major League Baseball combined. On its own, one website, XVideo, is bigger than the websites of CNN and the New York Times combined.
The Gift of Porn
Pornhub, with a net worth of $2.5 billion, sells its “premium gift card membership” on Amazon with the promise of “no ads, exclusive content, faster downloads, and 10,000+ full-length movies,” [the website features such flicks as “Who’s Your Daddy,” “Nineteen,” and “Tortured.”]
Amazon ranks the Pornhub gift card at number 198, behind Starbucks and iTunes, but ahead of Applebee’s, Nordstrom’s, Taco Bell, and JC Penny.
Pornhub recorded 23 billion visits last year and reports that “teen,” “mom,” and “step-sister” were among its top ten search terms. “Step-mom” was number two.
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Victimless Porn?
The porn business thrives on the notion of being a benign no-one-gets-hurt activity; it also claims protection by rights in the Constitution. Most adults agree: a Pew Research Center found that by a 48-41% margin, Americans see a greater danger in the government’s imposing undue restrictions on the sex entertainment industry then to just leave it as is. Pornstar Mercedes Carrera summed up her defense of the porn industry by declaring it to be “the last truly free market.”
However, some lawmakers, pro-family advocates, and sociologists are worried about the influence and impact of unregulated and unfettered pornography.
Youth and porn
Gail Dines, who is the author of Today’s Pornography and the Crisis of Violence Against Women and Children, observes:
“We cannot speak about rape, child sexual abuse, commercial sexual exploitation, teen dating violence, domestic violence, or college sexual assault without understanding porn as a driving force behind the normalization and legitimization of violence against women and children.”
Youth are on the front line of the groups’ pornographers target. A University of Montreal study finds most men encounter porn for the first time at age ten. According to Psychology Today, 90 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls experience Internet porn by age 18.
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A North Carolina State University poll (38% of respondents were female) on the question of “How often did you view pornography” found that 30 percent of students watch porn at least once, maybe a few times a month, 20 percent said several times each week, and 10 percent admitted they watch porn daily.
The effects of Porn
Stanford University Emeritus Professor Philip Zimbardo writes in Psychology Today:
“Some people can watch porn occasionally and not suffer significant side effects; however, plenty of people, including teens and pre-teens with highly plastic brains, find they are compulsively using Internet porn, and their porn tastes are becoming out of sync with their real-life sexuality. Researchers are finding that the hours and years of porn use are correlated with decreases in grey matter in regions of the brain associated with reward sensitivity. It may be no coincidence then that porn users report less satisfaction in their relationships and real-life intimacy and attachment problems.”
Insensitivity and alienation is obvious in the results of an annual September 2017 survey of 8th-12th graders by The Atlantic:
- In 2000, 80 percent of teens dated, but by 2015, that number had steadily gone down to 55 percent.
- Teens “hung out” with friends on the average of three days a week in 2000, but in 2015, the average dropped to two days a week.
- In 2000, 22 percent of teens admitted to “often feeling lonely;” that figure jumped to 34 percent in 2015.
Children and porn
One in three Internet users are children under the age of 14. In 2016, the London-based Internet Watch Foundation identified over 57,000 URLs containing child sexual abuse images. The Internet security company McAfee did a “cybersquatting” study and found that there is a 1-in-14 chance of a child typing in a misspelled URL and stumbling upon a porn site by accident.
Over 39,000 Verified Registered Sex Offenders have profiles on MySpace, and those are just the ones who have registered their real names. According to Crimes Against Children Research Center, one in five teenagers who regularly log on to the Internet say they have received an unwanted sexual solicitation via the Web. Solicitations are requests to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or to give personal sexual information.
Twenty-five percent of children say they are upset by online encounters or that they tell a parent.
The US Justice Department warns:
“Only five percent of online predators pretend they’re kids. Most reveal that they’re older, which is especially appealing to 12-to-15-year-olds who are most often targeted.”
