Porn is Still Legal: But For How Much Longer?
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: PornHub, 2.5 billion pvs; YouPorn, 2.1 billion pvs; Tube8, 970 million pvs; and LiveJasmin, 710 million pvs. In comparison, Wikipedia gets about 8 billion page views.
No one knows the real size of today’s porn industry. The true financial goings-on of the commercial porn industry is like an old Sally Rand fan dance; nothing is really exposed. Estimates as the size of the business range across the board. BedBible estimates the U.S. porn industry revenue for 2024 at $13 billion and the global market at $100 billion.
As expected, males make up more than four-fifths (82%) of viewers, while females consist of less than one-fifths (18%). It is estimated that the average length of time spent on Xvideo at 15 minutes. From an aesthetic perspective, sadly, most people receive their digital video feeds using low-resolution streaming.
If you know little to nothing about the porn business– or want to offer your students a quick, clearly-written and well-organized overview of it– there’s no better book than Shira Tarrant’s The Pornography Industry – What Everyone Needs to Know (2026). It could have been entitled, “Porn 101 – A Beginner’s Guide,” for, as its subtitle reminds a reader, it’s a well-reasoned overview of the porn industry.
Tarrant, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Cal State Long Beach, offers a snapshot of the contemporary porn industry, providing a thumbnail review of many of the key issues defining the market. Among the topics she considers are: historical background; economics of the industry; situation of porn performers; assessment of porn viewers; health and legal concerns; porn viewing by children and teens; and the possible future of pornography. Tarrant’s book offers a balanced dissection of each topic with very little indication of where she stands on the moral or political issues addressed.
In 1942, the noted economist Joseph Schumpeter introduced the concept “creative destruction” into the business vocabulary. It refers to the never-ending process of innovation by which new methods and technologies replace outdated ones. Examples of creative destruction include everything from the first computer to the latest smartphone, as well as Amazon, Google and Facebook to Uber and Airbnb.
While Tarrant appears not to know of Schumpeter’s work, she does recognize that creative destruction is transforming the old-fashioned porn business. She links the “democratization” of porn to the rise of the internet and do-it-yourself (DIY) video production techniques. They are, collectively, killing the traditional porn industry, including the careers of female porn performers (who she correctly identifies as “sex workers”) as well as the video producers and technical personnel.
She reports that in the 1980s, it took female performers two years in the biz before they engaged in anal sex; now it’s six months. She also finds that porn performers work longer hours with no benefits and are forced to cover significant out-of-pocket costs. Making matters worse, their “professional” careers are shorter than ever, between four and six months.
Sometimes a book’s strength can be its weakness – and this, sadly, is most evident in Tarrant’s work. It’s a summary overview of the current porn business lacks a sense of the history that is most evident in her consideration of the phenomenon of creative destruction that is remaking the porn industry. In the modern era, this process has been underway for more than half a century.
DIY or user-generated-content (UGC) emerged with the Polaroid camera introduced in 1948, enabling the first-generation amateur still-image pornography. It was followed by the Zerox copier of the ‘60s that enabled the unlimited reproduction of black-and-white pornographic images and culminated with home video that, by 1986, saw DIY porn account for 30 percent of the home video market.
America has been fighting censorship wars since before the nation’s founding. William Pynchon, the founder of Springfield, MA, published The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, a challenge to Puritan power. The book was banned, copies were seized and burned in the Boston Commons in 1651, the first banned book in American history. Three centuries later, Susan Sontag introduced the concept, “the pornographic imagination,” in a 1967 Partisan Review essay. The article appeared three years after Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously declared, in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), “I know it when I see it,” to distinguish “hard” from “soft” core pornography, obscenity from art.
In the U.S. today, with the exception of some state age-verification laws, porn is basically unregulated. In 1873, Pres. Ulysses Grant signed the 1873 anti-obscenity law, popularly known as the Comstock Act, that barred all forms of “obscene” materials from the U.S., including medical information about contraception.
Now, a half-century later, porn is a booming multi-billion-dollar industry. One can only speculate when the Christian nationalist Trump administration will seek to regulate, if not suppress, pornography.
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