2008 Woodie Awards
The hypocrisy of porn
Matthew Melnyk
Issue date: 1/29/08 Section: Opinion
In public we cringe at the thought of pornography. We turn our noses up to this supposed perverse form of entertainment and present ourselves as being somehow above the low lifes and creeps who view that stuff.
Unfortunately for our mythologized public image, it is more likely than not that we have at some time viewed pornography.
Perhaps more interestingly, it is likely that the person beside you, the professor at the front of the class, your parents or maybe even your girlfriend or boyfriend are avid consumers of pornography.
There are numerous disconnects between the realities of the market for adult entertainment and how people discuss it. It would be hard to find someone who would publicly admit to viewing porn on a regular basis, yet all statistics show that it is popular beyond the scope that most of us realize.
The amount of money people pay to see others frolicking in the nude is staggering. Canadians spend about a billion dollars on pornography a year. Worldwide it is almost a $98 billion dollar industry. To put that in perspective; that is more money than the top technology based companies combined (eBay, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Netflix). For an industry that nobody seems to be consumers of, it seems to be doing well for itself.
We may have an image in our minds of dirty old men in trench coats shopping in the back rooms of adult book stores, but the pervasiveness of pornography is far more basic than that.
The Internet is a virtual cornucopia of pornography, driven by what seems like an insatiable desire that consumers have for it. People often discuss how much of the Internet is pornography (roughly 12 per cent of all Web Pages are porn) but there is a reason for this; people want it.
Twenty five per cent of all search engine queries relate to sex. People joke about accidentally stumbling onto a porn Web site through what seemed like an innocent search, and there is a reason that this happens so often. Search engines are designed to help people find what they are looking for, and evidently what people are looking for much of the time is pornography.
Unfortunately for our mythologized public image, it is more likely than not that we have at some time viewed pornography.
Perhaps more interestingly, it is likely that the person beside you, the professor at the front of the class, your parents or maybe even your girlfriend or boyfriend are avid consumers of pornography.
There are numerous disconnects between the realities of the market for adult entertainment and how people discuss it. It would be hard to find someone who would publicly admit to viewing porn on a regular basis, yet all statistics show that it is popular beyond the scope that most of us realize.
The amount of money people pay to see others frolicking in the nude is staggering. Canadians spend about a billion dollars on pornography a year. Worldwide it is almost a $98 billion dollar industry. To put that in perspective; that is more money than the top technology based companies combined (eBay, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Netflix). For an industry that nobody seems to be consumers of, it seems to be doing well for itself.
We may have an image in our minds of dirty old men in trench coats shopping in the back rooms of adult book stores, but the pervasiveness of pornography is far more basic than that.
The Internet is a virtual cornucopia of pornography, driven by what seems like an insatiable desire that consumers have for it. People often discuss how much of the Internet is pornography (roughly 12 per cent of all Web Pages are porn) but there is a reason for this; people want it.
Twenty five per cent of all search engine queries relate to sex. People joke about accidentally stumbling onto a porn Web site through what seemed like an innocent search, and there is a reason that this happens so often. Search engines are designed to help people find what they are looking for, and evidently what people are looking for much of the time is pornography.
Viewing Comments 1 - 3 of 3
tom
posted 1/30/08 @ 4:08 AM EST
b4 any thinks that they should protest against the porn industry think do u watch porn do you like porn if so don't protest just because your wife or neighbor thinks it is wrong i believe in freedom and for most freedom of speech if we all protest porn because the are church says to do so then the people do not run this country the church does
this amounts to a the good willed Christians and catholics being just like the taliBAN porn is something u do in private not what you share with the world but as such nobody wants to stand up for their freedom of speech when it comes to porn
if u believe in the right to bare arms would you go to a gun protest in utah but some poeple are geting bullied into protesting porn
ya i know that i will get some flamers who believe porn is bad or even evil aka sin but these same poeple are the ones doing the bullying most likely this amounts taliBAN like tactics and you know it let people believe what they want it is a free world lets keep i
j
posted 2/01/08 @ 7:29 AM EST
Nice comment Tom - next time use some punctuation so we can stand reading your post.
Trevorkian
posted 2/06/08 @ 7:40 AM EST
It's rather funny that one of the worlds largest industries is probably the least respected and most denounced. Perhaps only the arms industry has a poorer standing. (Continued…)
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