On the one hand, says Web filterer Ted Ladd, he couldn't find any new Internet porn last October. On the other hand, says Bay Area Adult Sites co-founder Caity McPherson, the question isn't whether new sites are out there but where they're going.
Ladd's company is Websense, which identifies and blocks porn sites for corporate customers who don't want the worker bees buzzing around naughty hives on the company dime. "My database guy came to me and said, 'Our Web crawlers and our human searchers are having a hard time finding porn sites,'" Ladd tells Wired.
Which made no sense to Ladd, since new porn sites have doubled every year since his company started tracking and blocking in 1994, says Wired. Websense's own collection of e-porn sites is said to be several hundred thousand. But Ladd says the data made it clear: e-porn's growth is leveling off - it still grows at 40 percent a year but it's heading south fast, he tells Wired. "It's a pretty dramatic drop-off," he says. "It looks like the market is starting to become saturated. Maybe people are starting to realize you can't make money by throwing up a Web page."
Not so fast, says McPherson to the journal's Web site. There may be hundreds of thousands of e-porn sites out there, amateur mostly, which make at best up to $3,000 a month, and she acknowledges that hosting a new e-porn site "is really like opening up a coffee shop in the financial district between all the Starbucks."
But she and other e-porn professionals and observers like former Forrester Research analyst Mark Hardie say the business is having to find new niches to plumb to get noticed. And just schlopping up a Web site with stills pinched from porn films isn't exactly the way to make it, Wired says - which may help explain the surging proliferation of "superhardcore fetish" Web sites.
"Hello, shemale-bondage-teen-latex lust," says the journal. "And whoa, who knew we felt so passionate about our pets?"
"When I started studying porn six years ago, all the really hard-core stuff was in the newsgroups, it wasn't on the Web," says anti-porn crusader and author Donna Rice Hughes to Wired. "Now it's absolutely everywhere. It's so proliferated now, I don't think it could get much worse."
And it could get a lot better, according to sex columnist Susie Bright. "Erotic sensationalism and taboo-breaking is inevitable when we bear such a cruel tradition of American Puritanism and censorship," Bright wrote in a recent Yahoo Internet Life column she sent Wired during an email interview with the journal. "The public is preoccupied with infantile fixations, much like babies who must thoroughly examine the contents of their diaper before they are able to leave it behind."
She says the censor-free Net explosion has created a fetish market "that literally has to be seen to be believed. The Internet has opened Pandora's box. Fetish is king," she says, adding that in the long term that could be outgrown just as a baby outgrows its diapers, Wired says.
Bright says the biggest mistake would be putting a "legislative lid" on the box. "A move like that will take us right back to the starting block, another generation stuck in repression's play pen."
But the anti-porn crowd says halt right there - the fetish sites are enough proof of a pending sexual apocalypse, says Wired. "We're already experiencing a sexual holocaust," University of Pennsylvania psychologist Mary Anne Layden tells the magazine. "The ramifications [of ubiquitous porn] are hard to imagine. We're already at tsunami levels."
And she and other anti-porn activists maintain porn is addictive and, like heroin, you need a harder fix to get off once you're hooked. Layden tells Wired that even if that addiction doesn't exactly lead to criminal behavior, it will distort sexual expectations, destroy intimacy, and wreck marriages.
Says Hughes, whose affair with Gary Hart sank his Presidential aspirations in 1988, it is important "to start to view this as toxic material and start looking at what the impact will be on the human environments."
But University of California Santa Barbara psychologist Dan Linz tells Wired it depends on how deeply you examine all research. "You'll find that there's no difference in frequency of consuming sexually explicit materials between criminal sex offenders and the rest of the population," he tells Wired.
