What can we learn about humanity through the patterns in the intake of pornography and the advent of the internet.
As long as there has been internet, there has been porn, which isn’t too surprising. As long as we have had sex, we have had prostitution. Not unlike the experiment with money and monkeys went awry at Yale, some of the first ever internet purchases were porn videos.
This harassment stems from the massive popularity that the porn industry has particularly amongst the college community. An anonymous poll and questionnaire of 31 constituents conducted by this writer, 93% of the college students reported that they watch porn “regularly” (at least twice a week), while all those polled stated they have watched the full length of at least one porn video for physical satisfaction.
Southern Vermont College is not the only school where porn is popular. In fact it was via tracing pirated video downloads of pornography that Harvard was able to discover numerous clandestine “BDSM” (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism) clubs. To avert the spread of more clubs under the school’s nose, Harvard has created a school-funded BDSM club.
Sex is not only watched by college students, it is practiced, discussed, and recorded. The pressure that college kids have to engage in sexual activity is massive. It doesn’t take a genius to point out the amount of sex in pop culture references to college, such as Van Wilder, or American Pie.
The social microscope of “Why haven’t you dated anybody in so long?’ ‘Why do you date so many people?” “What do you mean ‘It’s Complicated”?” “Why are you married to your best friend when you’re 22?” Social pressures and the stereotypes of what relationships should and shouldn’t be leads to a rise in the consumption of porn.
The correlation between relationships and pornography is further pressed by the private nature of porn even within a relationship, particularly with women. According to the Daily Dot your relationship to porn is mostly about you—your sexuality, unencumbered by a partner.”
This finding contradicts the claim, the article continued, that “women feel threatened by [porn] or watch it reluctantly in order to please their partner, and that millennials’ sex lives will be ruined by childhoods bombarded by online sexual images.”
If anything, these sexual images, such as a naked woman or an erect penis, have desensitized millennials. Between television shows such as the “Sunday Night Sex Show” and “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” sex is such a commonplace subject it is almost forgettable.
The reason we don’t forget is that sex is “supposed” to be serious. It is supposed to be made with love and compassion, an honorable art that is hard to attain and cherished not chased after. What the porn industry has shown us is what sex always has been: primal instinct via social interaction.
Matrimony and spending your life with a partner, and saving yourself sexually for that partner, has put this pressure and stigma towards sex. When the internet was created it was the biggest and purest form of a Democracy. This plebiscite dictated what streamed the most and took up the most data is what people would want to see the most. Humanity’s response to this was sex. That primal instinct in the greatest means of social interaction ever conceived by man makes sex primal.