Is Porn Getting Out of Hand?
  Written By Titmowse

I think back to what porn was like twenty years go. The truth is smut is a hell of a lot easier to find than it was before the Internet came along. Used to be a person could only get their adult entertainment from mail order or by traveling to the seedier parts of town. Things got a little easier with the advent of the VCR and rise in respectability of men's magazines. Just the same, if a fella or gal wanted to see the dirty stuff of their desires they had to hide their interests or face social embarrassment.

Now we have the Internet where a porn lover can access adults sites in the privacy of their home. They can feed their kink without anyone being the wiser. They can join paysites, browse free sites and TGPs. They can have cybersex without fear of disease. They can watch models masturbate on live webcams. A person can find any kind of sexual proclivity they choose on the Internet.

Because the Internet is so anonymous and so big the world is finding out about sexual activities they might never have imagined had it not been for the web. Twenty years ago you could say the word "bukkake" in polite western company and no one would know what you were talking about. Twenty years ago sodomy was just something they did back in Gomorrah. Twenty years ago "scat" was something you yelled at a cat. Nowadays, everyone knows about such things. Nowadays, whatever your taste, there's an adult site for it. There's rape sites, bestiality sites and there are sites that serve up nothing but gore all for your adult entertainment. Porn is everywhere. It's on the news. It's mentioned on talk shows and sitcoms. New niches are showing up every day and the World Wide Web is the reason for it.

Some say that porn has gone too far. They complain that all this stuff is sick and that it's killing civilization. They mourn for the old days where sex was more innocent and simple. They somehow believe that all this stuff is a new invention brought on by evil and greed and the personal computer. The truth is the type of porn you find to be horrific, odd or wrong has probably been around a lot longer that you realize.

Let's start with bestiality. Its practice is older than civilization. Zoophilia was common in pastoral societies. The Mongols even had specified methods for tying an animal for the purposes of intercourse. Ancient mariners praised the physical attributes of a certain fish that -when cut open- felt just like a vagina. Roman women inserted live snakeheads into their birth canals.

Sado-Masochism is a time-honored practice. Long before the Marquis De Sade or Sacher-Masoch's "Venus in Furs", sexual excitement was derived from either the delivery or acceptance of pain. Caligula was a prolific sadist as well a lover of animals. In the eleventh century the Catholic Church stopped keeping the joys of flagellation to themselves and introduced its wonders to the common folk. S&M is far tamer and more cooperative today. Now we have subs and doms and scripts and code words. In 1949 Szechwan peasants discovered a rape chair that dated back to the eighteenth century.

Coprophilia (scat fetishism) was practiced at the end of the Ming Dynasty. The Greeks made pederasty a part of higher culture. Judeo women from antiquity were known to enjoy giving hand jobs. Herod shared a bed with his dead wife's body for nine years. The word harlot was originally attributed to priestesses who traded sex for donations to their temple. Virgin brides in Rome were saved the humiliation of vaginal intercourse during their honeymoon encounters by good old sodomy.

The fact is sex and porn haven't changed at all. The stuff we do today is the same stuff we did way back when. The only real difference is that today the veil has been lifted. The genie is out of the bottle and sex is finally coming out of the closet. The sexual revolution of the sixties just unlocked the door. The Internet is what opened it and pulled it off its hinges. Perhaps what concerns people isn't that porn has gone too far but rather, that porn is everywhere. Is that a bad thing? Only time will tell.

My belief is that all this porn will demystify sex to the human race once and for all. I don't believe that rape, bestiality or sodomy will become the norm. Rather, I predict we will finally stop demonizing sex. We'll have a healthier attitude about sex than we did twenty years ago. We'll come to see sex as what it is and not what some dogmatic tyrants tell us it is. I can't say I like some of the types of sexual activity described above. Some of it I think is just plain wrong. But as long as people are adults and their partners are willing, who am I to judge?