Credible-seeming statistics suggest that about one in seven web searches is for porn. This is not trivial – but of course it means that six in seven web searches are not.
The most-visited porn website – Pornhub – is roughly as popular as the likes of Netflix and LinkedIn. That’s pretty popular but still only enough to rank 28th in the world when I checked.
New technologies often tend to be expensive and unreliable. They need to find a niche market of early adopters, whose custom helps the technology to develop.
Once it is cheaper and more reliable, it finds a bigger market, and a much broader range of uses.
There is a theory that pornography played this role in the development of the internet, and a whole range of other technologies. Does it stack up?
Since the very dawn of art, sex has always been a subject. Prehistoric cave-painters record buttocks, breasts, vulvas and comically large penises.
Carvings of copulating couples date back at least 11,000 years, to goat herders in Judea.
About 4,000 years ago, a Mesopotamian artist lovingly crafted a terracotta plaque of a man and woman having sex as she sips beer through a straw.
A couple of millennia later, the Moche in northern Peru depicted intercourse through the medium of ceramics. India’s Karma Sutra dates from about the same time.
But just because people used the arts and crafts to depict erotica does not mean it was the driving force behind these techniques. There’s no reason to think it was.
Consider Gutenberg’s printing press. Although titillating books were certainly printed, the main market for reading material was religious.
A more plausible candidate, leaping ahead to the 19th Century, is photography.
Pioneering studios in Paris did a roaring trade in so-called “art studies”, a euphemism the authorities didn’t always accept.
Customers were willing to pay enough to fund the technology: for a time, it cost more to buy an erotic photograph than to hire a prostitute.
The word “pornography” derives from the Greek for “writing” and “prostitutes”.
By the time of the next big technological breakthrough in artistic expression – the moving picture – the word had taken on its modern meaning.
But porn didn’t really drive the film industry, for obvious reasons.
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