Web Saturated With Porn? Not Quite: Ohio Professor

Let Big Nanny and her minions keep blowing about an Internet "saturated" with porn - they're in for a little surprise, to hear an Ohio University professor who has studied porn for decades put it. It's the aggressive marketing of many porn sites, not the volume of material, that gives the impression that the Internet is porn-saturated, according to Prof. Joseph W. Slade III, author of Pornography In America: A Reference Guide and other works.

"More and more people are beginning to put sites on, so what you're getting is a kind of horizontal dilution... There is a kind of general cheapening of the product," Slade told the Athens News. But he also believes, he said to the paper, that the Internet's total content is still less than five- percent porn.

And Slade also believes that the Internet isn't the porn moneycatcher it's often believed to be outside the professional porn industry. "It's a funny industry, in that everybody thinks it's easy," he told the News. "They think, 'I've got a girlfriend, she's got a great body, she's uninhibited. We'll take a few pictures, we'll make a lot of money'."

Known for his views that porn has actually enriched rather than eroded American culture and art, Slade nevertheless told the paper that the current porn explosion, including cyberporn, includes a flood of gonzo porn he describes as little other than just aiming a camera on people having sex. And he said gonzo porn is something of adult's answer to the mainstream film that lays so heavy on spectacular effects the audience can be lost to find a story.