7/6/2023 0 Comments The wild real wild childIn the weeks that followed, the internet fought back against its critic Mr. All discussed the so-called findings that 85 percent of images on the internet were pornographic, and many of those images would most certainly be judged obscene in the courts-images of children of “deviant” behavior such as bestiality, urination, and defecation and torture scenes. With these delegitimizing details obscured at the time, the Time story prompted coverage in news outlets around the country, including national television programs like Dateline. In reality, the study was an 85-page undergraduate research paper, possibly partly plagiarized, that managed to get published in a law journal without undergoing any peer review. That July, the same month The Net premiered in theaters, Time magazine published an exclusive cover story featuring a “new study” by Marty Rimm on the startling dangers of internet pornography. It was the year of the movie The Net, starring Sandra Bullock, a thriller whose villain was a contract killer hired by cyberterrorists. In 1995, when only about one in four households had a computer and far fewer had an internet connection, the media was full of scary stories about the World Wide Web. Not only was there the robust home video market, but there were also cable networks dedicated exclusively to adult entertainment, and the internet, which offered a new opportunity for paid home consumption.Īs David Marshlack, the founder of Entertainment Network, a company that owned thousands of pornographic websites, said at the end of the decade, “It’s as if I owned a bank and printed my own money.” One porn industry mogul, John Stagliano, who produced the series Adventures of Buttman, reported to the New York Times that his production schedule had doubled between 19, along with his profits, which grew dramatically, from $34,000 to over $1 million. Still, the authors of one study controlled for attitudes regarding pornography (that it should be illegal) and found that these attitudes remained relatively stable between the 1970s and early aughts, suggesting that people now are no more or less likely to report porn viewership honestly. These data come from the General Social Survey that tracks Americans’ reported consumption of porn, which may be different from their actual consumption. In 1973, 31 percent of men across all ages reported that they had viewed porn, compared to 33 percent in 2000. The internet did cause a jump in porn consumption, but for most Americans that increase was relatively small. Between 19, 45 percent of men ages 18 to 26 reported they had viewed porn in the past year, compared to 61 percent between 19. Porn viewership has steadily increased since the 1970s, especially among porn’s most loyal consumers, young adult men. This number sounds big, but comparing it to the total number Americans ages eighteen to sixty-four (just over 174 million in 2000) or the number of Americans with basic cable at the time (nearly 73 million households) suggests that internet porn was not quite the national epidemic that some assumed. According to her analysis, based on a number of internet polls not generalizable to the American population, virtually everyone had come across internet porn by the early aughts. “All-pornography, all-the-time,” is how Pamela Paul, the author of the 2005 book Pornified, put it. And when it came to its emergence, Trekkie Monster captured a widespread fear. At the time, a majority of American households, 62 million of them, owned a computer that connected to the internet. When Avenue Q premiered in 2003 with its song “The Internet is for Porn,” it became the first Broadway cast album to be released with a parental advisory label. But when she describes her lesson to a reclusive, shaggy-haired neighbor named Trekkie Monster, he interrupts every line with what he says is the real reason for the Internet: porn. She works as an assistant kindergarten teacher, and when she finally gets to teach a kindergarten lesson all by herself, she chooses to teach children about the wonders of the World Wide Web. In the fictional world of the Broadway musical Avenue Q, Kate Monster is a puppet with a sweet demeanor, a lavender-colored turtleneck, and a bob hairstyle.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |