Thank goodness for men who like sex

[rrneck]

136. Yep.

Porn, and more specifically the technology that makes it ubiquitous, helps to set the boundaries of acceptable verisimilitude. It does it by pushing the envelope. Just like any other artistic medium, sometimes it tells us a good deal more than we want to know and more importantly, it generally focuses too much on a thin sliver of the human experience to the detriment of quality.

In antiquity graphic depictions of sexual activity using the most cutting edge technology of the time were just images of what people did. Nobody's doing anything in porn that people haven't been doing for thousands of years. Even rape porn. Remember, for most of human history rape was a weapon of war, and in our earliest history it was probably instrumental in our survival as a species. The word "rape" only dates back to the late thirteenth century. And the word pornography appeared not long after the first photograph.

To say that "porn pushed the beds together" is a significant oversimplification of a cultural trend toward verisimilitude in media. I wonder if future generations will look back on the internet as the Gutenberg bible of sex.