Technology's Dirty Little Secret

Reconnecting With History #14

This is a part of my Reconnecting With History series. I no longer write in this series as regularly as I once did, because well-written entries sometimes provoke a storm of garbage that I don’t always have the time or energy to deal with. However, the importance of this topic has been impressed upon me by many of your comments on my notes and submitted privately, as well as by friends of mine who were good enough to tell me of their personal alarm when I commented with high-handed irritation upon this topic recently.

Therefore, I invite you to consider the following in the hopes that it adds useful context to your evaluation of a major topic of moral fervor in today’s world.

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If I had written this yesterday, I would have opened with a complaint that nobody reads books anymore. I would have done so despite having noticed a few hopeful points, but this morning I found a wonderful essay by Jeff Giesea documenting that rather than a few scattered hopeful signs, there is a full-fledged revival of literacy happening among Gen Z outside of the curated cultural spaces. After you’re done with this essay, I recommend reading it.

Notwithstanding what will hopefully become a full-fledged renaissance, literacy now is startlingly uncommon compared to what it was just a couple generations ago.

On the face of it, this shouldn’t be too surprising. Entertainment media wax and wane, and change with technology. The Greeks loved theater, but its popularity waned as Greece declined. The Romans loved novels and wrote zillions of them, despite the expense of hand-copied manuscripts. But when the Caesars needed the mob on their side, they poured money into the horse races and the ancient WWE (the gladiatorial games)¹ and other public spectacles, and the novel declined as the culture of popular education and literacy declined. Medieval cathedrals featured comic-book versions of Bible stories and national myths in stained glass and frescoes, while at the same time troubadours traveled the countryside bringing songs that told tales of great heroes imagined and real.

King David and musicians from Olomouc Bible, 1417. The musicians painted as troubadours.

The jousting tournament was a popular spectacle for a time, and theater eventually rose from the troubadour ashes to become a high art form in the Renaissance. Opera followed it not long after.

But it was the printing press that forever changed the face of civilization. Books made their way out of monasteries and into the streets. Those who could afford them loved handsomely bound classics (the height of subversive literature at the time), but it was the popular pamphlet that sold best (to those who could afford it). And, of course, thanks to the Protestant Reformation, the Bible was an early bestseller and remains so to this day.

Still, literacy was pretty uncommon, and popular literature was something enjoyed primarily by the aristocracy…until the Industrial Revolution.

From the point of view of those who lived through it, the Industrial Revolution ruined society. In the space of two or three generations, the common grazing lands were enclosed and sold off to private interests, robbing peasant farmers and craftsmen of their livelihood. The displaced peasants who could not afford transport or find an indenture contract for the colonies made their way to the cities—cities choking with sewage, where families and strangers slept five-or-ten to a room in conditions that were a step or two below what you typically find in a Brazilian favela today.

The work was brutal and long, worker’s rights were a distant dream (if that). But there was solace to be had in the new popular entertainments: newspapers, chapbooks, magazines, and pulp fiction which sold for a penny a book. Universal literacy rose in response to the desperate need for escape and entertainment. It kept people sane (or at least functional).

Photography and print-reproduction of fine art came in around this time, giving people the ability to make beautiful things to put on their walls and memories to keep in picture books and share with friends at dinner parties.

Movies followed a couple generations later, and movie houses sprang up across the developed world like weeds, fed by distribution networks originating in New York and Hollywood, and then smaller film industries in England, Germany, France, and what is now the Czech Republic.

Then, within a couple decades, came radio—music, radio plays, comedy, news, and government propaganda came over the airwaves into any sufficiently wealthy living room, and then into every car, every job site, and every restaurant. Television soon followed.

During this same time, pulp fiction experienced a massive boom, fed by reading habits developed by soldiers on the front in World War Two and Vietnam. Publishers and authors and friends and family organized massive book drives—everyone donated cast-off books, and they got mailed to the soldiers in-theater to give them something to do in their off-hours other than carousing, drinking, partying, and seducing or raping the locals.

Home video followed in the 1970s, and mass adoption started in the late 70s and early 80s. People could now enjoy movies in the privacy of their own homes, they could record soap operas and sporting events that aired while they were at work and church, and then watch them at their own convenience.

Betamax was superseded by VHS, then (after a major format war) by DVDs just as recorded music moved from vinyl to tape to CD, all of which was then swallowed up by the computer a decade later. File sharing, streaming video, photo sharing, and eventually streaming—the world you know now.

This is the history of arts and entertainment as you can find it in any encyclopedia. It’s accurate, and it’s comprehensive…but it isn’t complete.

With the exception of the occasional weirdo hobbyist, nobody opens a publishing enterprise in any media (theater, concert hall, newspaper, publishing house, streaming platform, social media website, or whatever) without the ability to make a profit. These enterprises are expensive—massively so—and they depend upon easy capital with guaranteed return to get going. I have written elsewhere about the role that greed, piracy, propaganda, and money laundering played in the establishment of all popular entertainments, but on their own, such forces are not enough.

You need something else to make sure you can guarantee a return on investment.

And that thing is something we do not talk about in polite society.

Technological Fairy Dust

That thing?

Interest.

It’s one thing to print a book, or a newspaper, or fund a movie, or whatever—it’s another thing to get people to buy it. Once people are bought into a medium, adoption spreads across the population through mimicry, customer evangelism, and status competition. But those early adopters?

Well, to pull people away from the kinds of entertainments they’re used to and into a sort they’re not used to, you need something else. Something with pizzazz. Panache. Something that promises initiation into something hidden. Something exciting. Something thrilling. Something taboo. Something lurid.

Something, in other words, with sex appeal.

Since the dawn of recorded history, popular entertainments and stories are filled to bursting with the lurid. Violence. Gore. The hidden wisdom of the gods.

And, always, everywhere, sex.

Pornography.

The American Supreme court famously described pornography as that which appeals to the prurient interest.

And that is exactly what entertainment does.

Magic. Mystery. Risque humor. Scandal. Adultery. Romance. Incest. Torture.

The stuff, in other words, that gets people off.

The Epic of Gilgamesh (the earliest recorded popular fiction) is about a sadistic bisexual who rapes and tortures his male lover—a lover sent to him by the gods to distract him from his normal hobby of tyrannizing his subjects.

The second tale in the Bible is a story of a serpent seducing a naked woman and getting the husband to cuck for her. It’s rapidly followed by tales of gang rape and revenge, over and over, punctuated by the occasional sexual humiliation of a father by one or more of his sons (and that’s just the first 20 chapters of Genesis), women (sometimes sisters) competing for the same man by offering him their servants as concubines, and on and on.

The surviving Greek myths, plays, and epics turn on adultery, lust, seduction, incest, bestiality, rape, and all sorts of other fun stuff. Sometimes it’s played for laughs. Sometimes it’s played for morality or justified with philosophy. Sometimes it’s just a rollicking good story.

The same applies to Roman novels, Elizabethan theater (originally staged, I’ll remind you, with catamites² playing the roles of women, as women were prohibited from the stage), the great works of opera, and of musical theater.

The early successful mass-market novels were derisively called the “penny dreadfuls” because they were priced at a penny and contained tales of cannibalism, serial killers, slut-quests, incest, adultery, sex tourism, human sacrifice, sadomasochism, child molestation, and all other sorts of lurid debauchery described in scandalous detail.³

The popularity of photography was driven, initially, by women going into studios and posing nude (or lewd) for photos they would then send to their love interests on tin type plates through the mail (a practice that provoked the first Federal censorship law in the United States: The Comstock Act).

Vaudeville theater made its name as a bawdy adults-only affair, featuring comedy and short plays and acts filled with all of the above, often featuring nude and what the standards of the time would call “half-naked” women traipsing around on the stage (or doing strip teases) for the titillation of the audience. All American theater and film descends directly from Vaudeville and its relatives Burlesque and Minstrel (the three forms inter-bred so relentlessly that they form a close family rather than three distinct traditions).

The earliest successful films were also pornographic, driving the proliferation both of movie cameras, private projection systems, and nickelodeons (the first pre-recorded pay-per-view peep shows). By the 1920s, mainstream movies commonly featured nudity, orgies, drug binges, sexual slavery, miscegenation, and other scandalous content as major plot points, driving some opportunistic moral crusaders to use “obscenity” as a pretext for extending Federal regulation over the film industry (a fate avoided by handing content moderation over to members of the Catholic Church, whose devotees administered the infamous Hayes Code—not that this stopped all but the most respectable studios from making a fortune from stag films sold and exhibited on the sly).

The pulp fiction boom of the mid-20th century was filled with such tales as well, and in legitimate magazines sold to all ages for a nickel-to-a-quarter a pop—crime fiction was the most effortlessly lurid, but science fiction tales ratcheted it up several notches with tales of sex with aliens, transgender time travelers who impregnate themselves, strange cults with exotic sexual practices, and just about anything else you can think of. Much of the tamest material (such as the Tarzan and Barsoom stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs) still regularly featured languorously described nudity and graphic (by the standards of the time) violence, often co-located.

Legit stuff (i.e. that which was sold proudly on newsstand and bookstore shelves) did its most scandalous titillation with a wink and a nod—or at least a sense of detached irony—but most of the writers who made their living at it (including almost all of the names that you now recognize as writing classic 20th century literature) made most of their money writing taboo (for the time) pornography⁴ under assumed names.⁵ ⁶ I have been fortunate enough to read some of these otherwise now-destroyed tales (which survive in the libraries of obsessive pulp collectors), and they are impossible to classify as anything other than “pornography”—i.e. their sole purpose is to titillate and arouse along whichever lines the market called for.

Albert Gleizes, 1915, Composition for “Jazz” from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Meanwhile, over in consumer-technology land, the home media revolution was gaining steam. The early consumer adoption of wax cylinders (the precursor to vinyl records) and player-piano rolls was driven by ragtime, jazz, and other nakedly sexual musical forms—yeah, believe it or not, they were considered not only risque, but pornographic. These musical forms—just the music, mind you, not only when paired the lyrics, which frequently featured tales of sexual conquest and adventure⁷— were believed to be a danger to public morals as they encouraged sexual dancing and sensual feelings that invigorated the sex organs and encouraged listeners towards forms of dancing that caused arousal, fornication, and masturbation.

Swing music followed soon after, and was even more rambunctious (and its dance forms were considered even more objectionable, at least for a while, given how swing dancing slams bodies together, encourages literal leg-spreading and exhibitionism, and involves the kinds of dips and hip swivels that you might associate with later scandalous dance crazes such as the Lambada), and after that came rock’n’roll, a form of music that takes its name from a euphemism for fucking.

Respectable music (gospel, classical, crooner music, etc.) that appealed to older, more settled customers also sold on home media, but it was the raucous, scandalous sexual stuff that kept the record companies and record-player-making companies alive, because that is what youngsters would work their asses off to be able to afford. The sweat of their brows helped them finance the sweat of their bodies when they met up at night with a record player and a glint in their eye.⁸

Broadcast television is an unusual standout in the history of technology⁹—while the adoption of television was pushed by sensationalism and fad psychology, the governments of the world got their regulatory hooks into the media before mass adoption happened. Add that to the fact that it came online during a period of protracted moral panic around explicit pornography, it had to rely on quieter versions of sensationalism (soap operas—i.e. non-explicit, female-coded relationship porn—and sports/news—i.e. masculine forms of surrogate war) to drive its adoption.

Meanwhile, video tape—long the staple of low-cost broadcast TV production (live events, soap operas, etc.)—was making a play for the consumer market as early as the 1971, but it couldn’t get a foothold. Players were $2000 a piece (in 1971 dollars) and the only utility they offered was the ability to record things off TV for watching later. The public didn’t really see the point, and while one company after another made a play to create a consumer market they found nothing to drive wide adoption, so VCRs remained a toy of the rich and braggadocious.

Until, that is, some enterprising film producers in the San Fernando Valley realized that they could cut their production costs almost to zero by moving their production pipeline from film to video. No more lab costs for developing film. No more expensive storage for film stock. No more optical distribution. For the same amount they’d normally pay to produce 2-3 films, they could replace several subcontractors and build an entirely in-house production pipeline that would last for years and pay for itself in months.

Thus did pornographic film studios convert, en masse, to video production and distribution. Now the consumer didn’t have to go out to a seedy theater (and risk police raids) to watch unsimulated sex on screen—they could get as much porn as they wanted for a fraction of the cost and without any of the risk. Because JVC priced their technically inferior VHS format (and its production tools) lower than Sony’s Betamax, VHS became THE go-to format for pornographic videos, which meant more consumers bought them for their home setups, which meant that mainstream studios—when they started releasing mainstream films on videotape—sold more units on VHS. Betamax slowly died on the vine.

Porn studios were also early adopters of cable TV, and early cable stations were filled with an odd mix of classic movies (which were almost free to license for transmission) and hardcore pornography (which was, despite what you may have heard, chock full of all the normal fetishes we see today—BDSM, nonconsent, homosexuality, incest, orgies, strange bodily fluids, and animals—it was the aftermath of the 70s, after all).¹⁰

The format wars of the 90s that resolved with the mass adoption of DVD similarly followed the porn studios and their customers picking the winner.

Then, we have the Internet. The Internet started life at DARPA (the military’s advanced weapons research program) and was opened to the public in the late 1980s, but it remained a playground for anarchists and computer geeks until Internet Commerce was legalized in 1991, after which it quickly gained mainstream steam (acellerated when Tim Berners Lee open sourced the World Wide Web).

Guess who the first commercial players on this new platform were?

Yup, you guessed it.

Porn companies.

Pornographic websites worked out how to do payments online.

They helped finance some of the earliest security protocols for those payment systems.

They invented the online “freemium” model—start with a preview to whet your appetite, pay to unlock the whole thing.

The ability to get pornography without having to be embarrassed at the video store (or by having your car seen parked outside the adult toy store) drove consumers online long before Ebay or Amazon existed.

And, at every step, parents who wanted to prove their middle-class credentials by having technologically hip children gave their children the tools to access this content in private, often without considering what they were doing. And those that didn’t?

Well, I can’t speak to what girls did, but when I was growing up I didn’t know a boy who couldn’t bypass parental controls and scrutiny on cable boxes, family computers, school computers, and at libraries (which have always carried materials that function as pornography for young teenagers—from fetishistic fantasy and romance novels to fine art photography books to anthropology texts¹¹—even long before they had internet terminals).

Then came the smartphone, a gadget that nobody needed. Everyone who wanted an iPod or other media player already had one. Everyone who wanted a computer already had one. Everyone who wanted an internet-connected phone already had one. Everyone who wanted a pocket camera already had one.

But nobody had a phone that could serve up pornographic photos and videos and stories on demand, or produce these things for sharing with friends at a moment’s notice.

So porn came to the rescue (commercially speaking) again. The smartphone exploded, and now there are more in circulation than there are people on the planet.

That same year, another technological wonder made its debut. Ebooks had been a struggling market for over a decade, hampered by poor distribution, poor content availability, format wars, and lack of interest among all but the geeky. The Amazon Kindle changed all that. Featuring an e-ink screen and long battery life, it solved most of the problems with reader experience at a price point far below Sony’s offering in the space. But there was still the content problem. Amazon couldn’t get the big publishers to play ball. There were rights problems, author resistance, and publisher worries about diluting the market for paper books. So Amazon opened the Kindle Direct Publishing distribution hub and very loudly marketed itself as THE go-to destination for erotica writers. It also ran ads touting the privacy of the Kindle to consumers: no longer did you have to worry about people on the subway seeing you reading a “spicy romance” novel or a saucy classic like Fanny Hill or Behind the Green Door. You could now get your jollies in public with complete privacy.

Adoption exploded. The bestselling novel of the 21st century up to that point, Fifty Shades of Grey, started its commercial life as self-published porn book on the Kindle.¹²

Technology’s dirty little secret is that it has always been driven by one of two things:

Sex and violence.

Pornography, fornication, and warfare are responsible for the success of every single electronic device and capability in your world (and a hell of a lot of the rest of the technology you live with, from private bedrooms to windows to automobiles).

And, somehow, up until the last generation-and-a-half, we’ve always made it work.

But in recent years, something seems to have changed.

And that’s worth examining.

Phase Changes in Vice

Every time new technology allows a newfound ability to access vice—especially for the lower classes—people panic. This isn’t just limited to sex—it happens with alcohol, drugs, and other dangerous-but-not-exactly-vice-activities (such as extreme sports, firearms, knives, etc.). Innovations in such technologies induce what I call a “phase change” in vice—just as water undergoes a phase change going from water to steam, drinking undergoes a phase change when you go from drinking beer to drinking whisky. The potency of the drug is greater, its features are different, and it becomes (at least for a while) a lot easier to abuse in ways that are deleterious to both the user and to their families and friends.

It’s worth noting that such phase changes aren’t only precipitated by technology, they are also precipitated by prosperity (and the two things tend to move in tandem). A cadet who graduates boot camp and gets a pay bump upon doing so suddenly has the money and the liberty to go out carousing, and it’s not uncommon for freshly-minted enlisted men (or officers) to “drink away” their newfound wealth (whether they actually spend it on drink, on gambling, or on women).

Phase changes in vice are as inherently destabilizing as changes in technology, and for the same reason. Therefore, as much as I am on record (ad nauseam, at great length, over many decades) as categorically opposed to such panics, it is nonetheless true that they happen for a very good reason.

And they emerge, always, from the striver class…again, for a very good reason.

The upper classes do not need help in managing vice. They have cultural traditions that do that, and they have the money to manage the problems that come from unhealthy indulgence. They also have earlier, and gentler, access to technologies that make vice more easily accessible in newer forms, and they thus have more opportunity to adapt culturally before the full brunt of its potential downsides hit their community.

The Victorian blue-noses (and the English Puritans before them) understood this, which is why they framed their ideas about social respectability in an anti-aristocratic fashion. The reasoning goes something like this:

1. The children of aristocrats are easily taken into indolence through overindulgence, because natural barriers to overindulgence do not exist

2. Therefore, if we want to rule the world (which was their ambition) we must build barriers against overindulgence.

3. The best way to do this is to blanketly prohibit anything that is easy to overdo except and unless it already has an established culture around it (such as beer drinking, coffee houses, pipe smoking, or sex during the courting period to ensure fertility before the wedding bells actually ring).

4. And, when we get enough power, we will impose stricter restrictions upon those we rule over, because their level of indolence and dissolution proves they don’t have the moral fortitude (or genetic fortitude) to use things like “culture” to contain their vices.

Some historical examples show why this is an understandable (and, in some respects, reasonable) reaction to a technologically-induced phase change in vice.

Consider liquor.

Before the mid-19th century, liquor was expensive while beer was cheap. Beer is nutritious—some varieties of it (such as stouts) so much so that it can furnish all the carbohydrates a working man needs to carry him through the day. It’s an excellent way to bank grain harvests (beer keeps better in most conditions than does raw grain, and better in all conditions than does bread). Beer has been the go-to beverage for working men, and women, and the clean-water substitute for children (in a reduced-alcohol form called “small beer”) since at least ancient Egypt—and where it was not, wine filled the same role.

Entire religions were based around drinking rituals (one of those religions, Christianity, persists to this day).

Meanwhile, liquor was fairly rare except in periods of high prosperity.

That changed, though, with the opening of the American West.

Beer is heavy and voluminous. Whiskey is not. Cowboys, miners, and other frontiersmen wanted their booze for medicine, for recreation, and for trade, and beer was not easy to come by until an area was settled enough to sustain grain farms.

Enterprising distillers back east met the demand with innovations in whiskey production that turned it from a luxury liquor into cheaper-than-beer. The competition for the new business didn’t just drop liquor prices on the frontier, it dropped them everywhere. Men who were used to going to the beer hall after work and raising a few pints with their friends now increasingly drank whiskey—they spent more money, got more drunk more often, and gambled and picked up whores more while they were drunk. Family indebtedness and insolvency increased, and domestic abuse (in both directions) with it.

It took a full generation for the country to adapt. In that generation moral crusaders arose from the grassroots demanding moderation, but that stance eroded quickly (after receiving financial backing from enterprising preachers and mob bosses) and transformed into a demand for nationwide alcohol prohibition.

Eventually, the Constitution was amended to prohibit the sale of alcohol for consumption outside of religious contexts, and shortly thereafter the Volstead act gave the Treasury Department the power to enforce the ban. (This coincided with a crusade, over the same time period, to eliminate legal prostitution).

Suddenly, humanity’s oldest, most reliable intoxicant was now illegal to consume. Demand didn’t disappear, though—it just went underground. No longer were neighborhood pubs allowed to exist—those that didn’t go under became restaurants and ceased being social hubs. Instead, the speakeasy arose.

These were fashionable night clubs that (unlike the neighborhood pubs they replaced) weren’t set up for conversation—they were set up for music, prostitution, racial mixing (which was, at that time, a moral taboo on par with what child molestation is today), and balls-out partying that allowed the mob to entrap, blackmail, and extend their control over cops, city councilmen, mayors, state senators, and elected Federal representatives. In the space of ten years, thanks to prohibition, the Mob went from being a small-time operation that dealt in extortion and illegal gambling to an international business that controlled large parts of the United States government.

When the Volstead act was repealed (and the 18th amendment along with it), the power of the Mob did not diminish. Both the Mob and the governmental apparatus pivoted to bigger and better things: heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and other hard drugs.

The government was pretty happy with this arrangement, because it furnished the excuse to withdraw constitutional protections from the American public. The National Firearms Act, the prohibition of recreational and folk drugs, money laundering laws (occasioned by the mob using legit businesses to hide their drug and alcohol profits), and the Gun Control Act created a framework that allowed for the progressive and effective elimination of the right to bear arms, the right of free association, financial privacy, freedom of religious practice, the right to protection of ones person and papers against unreasonable search-and-seizure, etc.

This is called the Bootleggers-and-Baptists¹³ dynamic: Baptists seek to use the government to outlaw things they find morally objectionable. Bootleggers support this, because it creates business opportunities outside of legal scrutiny. Lawmakers and bureaucrats love it, because it allows the extension of their own private power, giving them opportunities for self-enrichment (via corruption) and the plenary power to persecute their political enemies (or simply those of whom they disapprove).

Look around you today:

Notice how deeply decayed the social fabric is. Notice how few of your neighbors you actually know. Notice how many laws and forms there are to comply with, and how few of them seem to apply to matter to those who are actually interested in victimizing other people. None of that is an accident: parasites profit from moral crusades up to and including totalitarianism that extends to the atomization, expropriation, and extermination of politically disfavored factions.

History is directional on matters of vice in European civilizations: the more government regulation there is, the more disordered and low-trust the civilization becomes.

But there is still that pesky problem of phase changes in vice.

If they happen because technology or prosperity quickly changes how much access humans have to vice, how on Earth are we to have a prayer of stopping these things from ripping apart the social fabric, short of violent and legal (but I repeat myself) suppression?

Culture.

Particularly customs, cultural protocols, and rituals.

Things which humans are driven to do that—when done poorly—create dangers to other humans (hunting, fighting, and killing; seeking leisure and comfort, entertainment, altered states of consciousness, relationships, orgasm, etc.) are controlled and turned towards productive ends through social context.

Customs around gun handling and manners around weapons are what keep gun nuts safe even though their hobby is handling deadly weapons.

Customs around drinking are what allow people to use alcohol to expand relationships and overcome anxiety despite the fact that they’re drinking a poison that can kill them (either directly through poisoning, or indirectly through stimulating violence or causing car accidents).

Customs around sex are what allow people to have workable sexual relationships despite the fraught differences between men and women where desire, vulnerability, physical power, and status are concerned.

Prohibition (whether formal, de facto, or ad hoc) erodes and replaces nuanced, complex customs and rituals with blunt tools that remove humanity from the equation.

But so, too, can technology.

Technology makes such things easier and cheaper to do/obtain, but some kinds of technology also do something else:

They create such a high privacy fence that it makes social regulation taboo or distasteful—or it makes that which happens behind that fence effectively shameful.

600 years ago, swinging was common in Europe. The social custom of sexual hospitality¹⁴ required that guests in a family home slept in the family bed, and it was expected under some circumstances that spouses would have sexual access to the host couple (this happened quite often in the presence of children, as the custom of separate beds—let alone separate bedrooms—didn’t evolve until later, when a higher level of general prosperity allowed such luxuries to become necessities). This behavior—which now sounds quite illicit—was regulated by social customs and norms specifically because without such customs and norms wife-swapping is very threatening to familial integrity (and without hospitality the pre-modern traveler was at risk of death through mugging or exposure). These customs disappeared after the one-two-three punch of the Black Death, the 15th century syphilis epidemic, and the Protestant Reformation. The ground conditions for regulating vice changed.

Up until the 19th century, it was expected that newly-married couples consummate their union in front of witnesses (or be put to bed by witnesses and then inspected after the deed was done, before rejoining the wedding party—specifics varied by region). This happened because “failure to consummate” was one of the few grounds that newly-married women had for divorce/annulment, so the wedding was not complete until all those there present were satisfied that the newlyweds had seen to matters horizontal.

Sex was, not too long ago, a fairly public matter.

The ubiquity of pornography in the ancient, pre-modern, and early modern world reflects that.

As sex became more private, pornography and masturbation became shameful matters, but up until two generations ago the “private” world that girls and boys inhabited on such matters wasn’t all that private.

Up until recently, it was very unusual to grow up alone, without siblings and neighbors who were close in age, with whom you discovered the weird things that puberty introduced into life. Puberty milestones, masturbation, and pornographic tastes were matters of group experimentation, social boasting, and competition away from the knowing ears and eyes of adults. Among boys, it was the ones whose solo sex lives you didn’t know about who had something weird going on—they were the ones being abused by adults, or who were into seriously deviant shit that made them dangerous to be around. And the men who remembered being boys knew this and told their sons what to watch out for.

But something happened since 2008.

It wasn’t the availability of pornography that changed, nor its nature.

Was it the smart phone and the new privacy of pornography? Privacy breeds deviance, after all: when you’re 14 or 15 and there’s nobody around you to make fun of you for fucking a goat to see what it’s like, you’re more likely to do it. I used to think stuff like that was just the matter of jokes, but when I was in my 20s I met a guy who grew up on a farm who made the mistake of admitting to his boot camp buddies that he fooled around with the critters out of curiosity—he spent his entire military career being called “Goat-fucker” at every post where he served.¹⁵

So is it just the privacy? Or is something else also going on?

The generation that’s now struggling to get laid into their mid-20s, that screams bloody murder about porn, that struggles with impotence and low testosterone (in men) and with attachment problems (in women) and unrealistic standards and emotional dysregulation issues, and is marked by strange, fetishistic attitudes towards sex (in both) is not the first generation to come of age with access to internet porn, or even internet porn on smart phones.

But they are the first generation to have all of the following:

Smart phones, #metoo, COVID lockdowns and social masking, no freedom to socialize outside the internet, dating apps optimized (by gambling psychologists) for maximum commodification, categorical condemnation of male sexual desire, popular demonization of pair-bonding, and no social access to human-friendly means of competition, self-realization, mating, or dating.

Cocaine is one of the most addictive substances on the planet—rats love it. When a rat in a cage is offered cocaine, it will prefer the cocaine to food even to the point of starving to death.

But if you put cocaine in a cage with a functioning rat social group, something different happens: The rats will have the cocaine every once in a while, but they will generally prefer food, play, touching, snuggling, sex, and other forms of socialization to the cocaine.

In any kind of personal and social dysfunction, addiction¹⁶ is never “the” problem—it’s the tiny little point of a problem that’s protruding into visible social space. Addiction itself is a symptom of a deeper, more profound problem: the person who is exhibiting compulsive behavior towards an easy pleasure is doing so because they are malnourished. They lack either the access to, or the capacity to accept, the kind of touch, socialization, interpersonal connection, sexual contact, and emotional gratification that would make for a healthy life.

This can happen because they’ve decided to forgo the difficult work of achieving something worthwhile (it’s easier to win a fight in a video game than it is to win a fight in real life), or because they’ve been crippled, or because they’re not permitted to behave in a healthy fashion and have accepted the prohibition as legitimate.

When the body does not have to work to achieve pleasure, it stops finding that pleasure pleasurable. This is called habituation, and it happens because pleasure is our biological reward for achieving something we need. The greater the challenge, the greater the reward. The pleasure of achieving orgasm with a partner—especially a partner who requires investment—isn’t just a physical reaction to friction, it’s a physical reaction to the satisfaction of a long-sought goal. The reward isn’t just pleasure, it’s increased production of those hormones (testosterone, dopamine, etc.) that increase the strength of desire. “You’ve done well,” says your glands, “now go do it again, and do it better.”

This is how an organism ensures that it continues to seek those things it needs to function properly.

Because of this, overuse of pornography has some pretty predictable downsides: arousal dysfunction (impotence in men, vaginal engorgement problems in women), deadened sexual appetite, low testosterone, and increasingly deviant fantasies (all of these in both sexes)—are of which are readily fixed by putting oneself in real and vital contact with the world: taking risks, achieving goals, touching other people, facing challenges, etc. These are the things that actually stimulate desire (sexual and otherwise), testosterone production, and proper dopamine and serotonin metabolism.

But people don’t do that, because our society isn’t collapsing, it has collapsed. And it won’t un-collapse until parents prefer tickling and wrestling their children to scrolling Instagram, until children are allowed outside to play unsupervised, until neighbors stop calling the cops when eight-year-olds are in the front yard, until neighbors start having barbecues and card games together, until young adults return to bars and bowling alleys and back seats.

And none of that will happen until someone, somewhere, gets so fed up with being alone that they decide they’re willing to suffer rejection and humiliation to solve the problem.

Meantime, there’s a lovely opportunity on offer from this round of Bootleggers and Baptists to trade away your right to free speech, free commerce, and what’s left of your privacy on the altar of Biometric Age Verification For Internet and Computer Use. So, fear not: you have the option of simply trading away your children’s future for the pleasure of some momentary self-righteousness.

Pornography has always been with us. It’s always been easy to find. It’s never been necessary to getting off on one’s own, but for most people it helps. And, historically speaking, it has functioned much like other fictional excitement has: as an occasional delight and escape—a kind of frosting on the cake of life.

We in the modern world have managed a feat that none of our ancestors ever have before us:

We’ve made life so unbearable, so taboo-ridden, so prohibitionist, so status-driven, and so nasty that the majority of the breeding-age population prefers masturbation, video games, and romance novels over going outside, meeting challenges, meeting new people, sweaty naked wrestling, and building a life.

The fault, Horatio, lies not in our porn stars, but in our prudishness.

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1. This is not an exaggeration. The combat was mostly staged, the matches rigged, narratives spun, very few people actually died. The whole thing was a spectacular tableau of dramatic fakery.

2. That is, teenage boys whom the older actors were fucking.

3. Some of them, such as Sweeny Todd, have since been made into respectable entertainment.

4. A note for the pedantic: “Pornography” comes from the Greek “pornea” (meaning “whores”) and “graphos” (meaning “writings”). The distinction between “erotica” and “pornography” is a marketing distinction pushed by publishers in the mid-20th century who wanted an easier time marketing written hardcore and graphical softcore porn to upper-middle class women. In other words, “erotica” is a fake category, and I will not be using it here except to reference a particular market segment.

5. A regular feature in biographies of such writers is the pre-death or post-death bonfire, where all of the original manuscripts for their “potboilers” (i.e. the stuff they wrote just to keep food in the stew pot) were destroyed to preserve their reputations.

6. The same can be said for cinematographers and photographers of the era who struggled to make a living working below the top crust in the film and magazine industries.

7. This tradition was alive and well in the 1950s. In the 1950s, Little Richard made a sanitized version of his club song “Tutti Frutti” into a smash hit. It began life as a number about the joys of anal sex. The original lyrics are amusingly explicit. Some simliarly bawdy tunes from the 20s-40s are “Minnie the Moocher” (about a gold-digging whore with a heart of gold), “The Cutest Little Dinghy In the Navy” (about a perfectly endowed sailor with impeccable sexual technique), and “Makin’ Whoopee” (subject: obvious).

8. It’s also worth pointing out that the mass adoption of the automobile outside of the professional class was driven by teenagers buying up junked cars, fixing them up, and using them as sexual status competition and mobile boudoirs.

9. Video games are the other stand-out. While risque video games existed from the beginning, they never took up more than a novelty-driven corner of the market, just as they do today.

10. This is to say nothing of the phenomenon of Traci Lords, but I’ll let you look that one up on your own.

11. Which contain stuff so wild they would shock even the most porn-brained westerner today.

12. Once the platform got popular, of course, Amazon made periodic public showings of “clamping down” on “erotica,” just as the credit card companies, after making billions from adult websites, were afflicted with the moral vapors as soon as the rest of the Internet was generating enough money that they could afford to give their first partners a hard time.

13. It should go without saying, but “baptists” in this phrase is a stand-in for moralistic crusaders of all sorts.

14. Sexual hospitality customs are common throughout the pre-modern world. In medieval England, it ran concurrently with the tradition of “courtly love” (which idolized a combination of unrequited adultery and chastity as morally ennobling). The classic English tale Sir Gawain and The Green Knight is a humorous satire centered around the collision of these two cultural traditions.

15. This is an extreme, but real, example. The dynamic functions with all sorts of potentially destructive sexual weirdness. It’s also worth noting that when serial killers—such as Ted Bundy—talk about their porn habits as youngsters, the ubiquitous and all-too-often-unnoticed abnormal feature of their disfigured sexual development is the extreme privacy they had on such matters, due to a combination of social isolation and prudish-and-distant caregivers (parents/grandparents/foster parents/etc.)

16. Here defined as compulsive attraction to a destructive behavior that furnishes short term pleasure.