How free porn has made sex boring
Digital technology’s creators did not set out to change human sexuality. They didn’t even intend to change pornography. It was an unintended consequence, a flap of a butterfly’s wing that led to a series of alterations in the world, some helpful, some ironic, some tragic.
The British journalist Jon Ronson, author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a groundbreaking book on the mainstream taste for online sadism, was sitting in a Los Angeles hotel lobby in January 2013 when he saw a sneer. It was a male receptionist giving a woman in a tight, bright blue dress “a look of total contempt.”
She was a veteran porn performer. With this, a wing flapped for Ronson personally. “With disgust comes incuriousness,” he says of the shunning of the story of porn, but he had been alerted. This very humane man began hunting backwards. From that glance, he tracked down the wreckage of the California porn industry, the social cost of free product and the intrusion of technology into, well, our pants.
As I binge-listened to his 31⁄ 2- hour Amazon Audible documentary podcast, The Butterfly Effect, I could hear a tolling bell from a decade ago. It came from Montreal of all places, where two geeks in a boring office building formed a company — it hired McGill University grads for tech help — called Mansef to build websites and hunt clicks. PornHub was their biggest draw.
They sold the company in 2010, Ronson reports, because they didn’t want their parents to find out.
Fabian Thylmann, a young German who was already surfing primitive porn sites in the 1990s, bought it, changed the name to Manwin — he tells Ronson he intended no insult to women — and then MindGeek, as Slate has reported. He then got fantastically wealthy very fast by aggregating porn.
Thylmann talks to Ronson with great candour. Unlike the Zucker- bergs of this world, he is a strangely charming person who somehow managed to lay waste to the San Fernando Valley, the Detroit of porn-making, a place blessed with natural light. Ever wonder why there’s so much outdoor porn?
Porn was a lot like the newspaper industry, a cash cow with good pay, lavish awards ceremonies and a class system, with tabloids at the bottom trying for shock and broadsheets at the top aiming for dull respectability. People paid money for them.
For reasons that still elude me, online goods became free. This created a habit, and as humans never seem to learn, habits are hard to break. Porn exploded. Profit margins became razor-thin, with videos gaining hundreds of millions of online views while desperate actors went unpaid.
Genres became a thing. As in Google-ized journalism, keywords were essential: cheerleader; stepdaughter; babysitters; group; racial; etc. When that grew stale, customers bought custom fetish porn — their psychological origins are fascinating — contracting performers to burn their stamp collections, swat flies and do specific things with towels.
They know what they like. Beauty is not essential, but age is. Porn women have to look like teens, aging out of the business at 26, tops. It’s a mirror of online dating, where men of all ages, however unattractive they are, all seek women under 25.
Ronson talks gently to the People of Porn.
Porn men sound irritable. Porn women sound kittenish and enthusiastic, with chirping voices and peals of giggles. In Shamed, victims were afraid to talk to Ronson. In Butterfly, even unhappy people are almost excessively amenable. The most common word used by women is “sweet.”
Ronson is the journalistic equivalent of Charlie Brooker, the Guardian columnist who created Black Mirror, the surreal TV series about the terrifying effect of technology on human lives. It is futuristic, not historical. It’s always sickening when an episode happens in real life. Human foolishness is Shakespearean: low comedy; anguished monologues; much strutting.
Ronson is doing Mirror’s opposite, tracking the story backwards to where it began. He is a dissector of stories, and porn is his lab rat. It’s difficult to summarize Butterfly because it continually offers details of porn life that send up emotional smoke, the “wisps of darkness” inside everyone.
Take the performer whose 13-yearold daughter was taunted by friends who discovered what her mother did for a living. Take the performers who can’t leave because they’re so easily identifiable online, so easily shamed and fired from regular jobs.
Porn runs like river water, seeking a profitable outlet wherever it can find one. There’s a lot of misery and poverty. As one trapped male actor says, “Porn people like us. The real world does not like us.”
Ronson’s sympathies are with victims. But who are they? They’re us.
Porn isn’t the problem. A surfeit is. Ordinary men and women behave like heroin addicts looking for fentanyl, with real life failing to measure up to that first fine careless rapture.
They forget how to talk to other humans. They can’t get a date. Since 2008, erectile dysfunction has soared in the U.S., Ronson reports, and the Navy is trying to figure out why sailors are so exhausted, presumably after porny nights. This is funny. Or not.
No one knows anything. Younger millennials may be having less sex than did older ones 10 years ago. Maybe everyone is. Sexual dysfunction may be lowering the U.S. teen pregnancy rate. Teens get ludicrous sexual instructions from porn, and the real thing is a car crash.
At this point we’re veering into The Handmaid’s Tale territory. Men can’t cope with women who don’t look like porn stars, so sex dolls are next. After that comes VR (virtual reality) porn where you attach a device to your head, masturbate and, I don’t know, never leave the house again.
If the effects of porn are a cascade, so is the effect of tech generally. “The tech world deadens people,” Ronson told me. Consumers didn’t mind the death of the music industry. We like free stuff. (Yes, The Butterfly Effect is free by Audible subscription and on iTunes in November.)
Like the famous saying about Sandy Hook being the end of the U.S. gun control debate — “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over” — what is the end point of porn?
What is the end point of sex, the final flap of that fine wing?