The Internet Is for Porn

On March 20th, 2003, just a year and a half after the unrelated 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, the US invaded Iraq, and a theater production premiered off-Broadway, inspired by Sesame Street but made for grown-ups, Avenue Q, which featured the memorable ditty, "The Internet Is for Porn." The song's central allegation is that even though we use the internet (which, as we know it, was only about ten years old at that point) for other grown-up stuff like online banking, trading stocks, communicating with people we know and don't know, buying books and selling junk, we mainly use it for porn, i.e. looking at images and videos of people in various states and stages of undress doing things to themselves and others we otherwise only do in private.

There's a long history of porn predating the internet, of course, from multiple-millennia-old cave art in Brazil and France to the copulating couples depicted in private homes and brothels in Pompeii, incinerated in the year 79, to the skanky and sticky movie theaters in Times Square and squares and alleys in every other city in the twentieth century, along with designated areas, curtained-off or not, in non-chain video stores. But, compared with the World Wide Web of the twenty-first century, those precursors of modern porn are like tic-tac-toe or tiddlywinks compared with Grand Theft Auto, like playing a half-hearted round of foosball with friends in your garage compared with hitting a home run in the World Series. For anyone living in the Dark Ages preceding Danni's Hard Drive, the wide world of nudity-for-hire we have at our fingertips, the ability to conjure every imaginable fantasy and permutation of human sexuality and beyond at the click of a button, would seem no less like science fiction than tripping through a black hole or hunting dinosaurs for sport.

Even bracketing the kinds of audiovisual content that most mentally sound humans would deem illegal or immoral, there's still a jouissance of socially acceptable or at least tolerated porn that gushes across our screens on a daily and nightly basis, going back to the heady days of Tumblr and facettes de la petite mort and grainy sex GIFs, extending to webcams and playdates and online sex with friends, culminating in gooning sessions with strangers and virtual reality orgies and AI companions of all shapes and genders and races and sizes. Custom porn is next, with the helping hand of large language, image-to-video and text-to-video models and a burgeoning industry of porn start-ups catering to loneliness and horniness, incels and kinks and desires, anyone in need of a turbo boost. Whether storylines have improved since the golden days of hunky plumbers and Orson Welles shower scene edits and Bikini Frankenstein and Throbin Hood is up for debate, but it's easy to imagine a future where originality and the tried-and-true are on a sliding scale, along with every other aspect of explicit filmmaking, all in the skillful hands of sophisticated prompt engineering.

Porn skeptics point to the over-sexualization of society driven by porn, and the explosion of unrealistic expectations: If we can always fast-forward past the pool cleaning to the good parts, we might not slow down to clean the pool in real life. A culture obsessed with body image is unlikely to benefit from a medium in which body image is ninety percent of the appeal, and where perceived imperfections can be erased by an algorithm. If we objectify humans on screen, we're likely to objectify them in real life. If we expect humans on screen to smile and come while engaging in incredible and incredibly painful feats of sexual athleticism, we might expect the same of our real-life partners. If we can create any artificial sex partner we want and do whatever we want with them, we might fail to respect the limits of real people – consent works differently in real life than it does with sexbots, Westworld notwithstanding. People who indulge too heavily in made-to-order online fantasy may have trouble finding a real-life partner, or may not deserve one. The porn industry suffers from exploitation and abuse and unequal power dynamics, even more so than most industries in our stage of capitalism, or any stage of economic development, and even if we close our eyes to the underbelly while rolling them back into our skulls, an ickiness remains.

Porn boosters, i.e. anyone who thinks the internet's true calling is to get you off, may appreciate those points while drawing attention to porn as a tool, an adult toy, a forum for escape and experimentation, for expanding one's understanding of sex and the world and for discovering oneself, a way for couples to embark on adventure without the messiness of emotional drama, broken hearts, third and fourth wheels, jealousies and insecurities, sheer exhaustion, unintended pregnancies, and STDs. In the early twenty-first century, where time and space, work and stress, routine and habit, aging and illness, monogamy and commitment may demand the improbable or impossible, the science fiction of fantasy come to life online might help sustain rather than undermine relationships in real life.

Like all the artificial worlds created by the internet, all the online bubbles that protect and separate and keep growing until they pop, all the fantasies supercharged by fiber optics and CCBill and AI, twenty-first century porn is as double-edged as This Ain't Conan the Barbarian's sword. But maybe, just maybe, Avenue Q is right, and we're all still learning to wield it.