According to Adult Video News, the industry’s leading trade publication, we rent more than 800 million pornographic titles per year, a staggering leap from 1985, when Americans rented 75 million videos. This figure doesn’t even count the thousands of titles available for sale online, a major marketplace for pornography distribution, since buyers never have to leave the privacy of their homes to order.

The ease with which pornography is now available may be a convenience issue for some, but it has religious leaders and morality advocates worried. Porn, they say, destroys lives and families, and indeed this much is true for a small percentage of the population, according to local experts.

The pornography industry, meanwhile, has built itself on free speech rights, arguing that viewership is driven by personal choice and freedom of expression.

With the court system’s approval in hand, the industry has swept into the American way of life, changing our society, mores and sensitivities along the way. While less permissive in our public depictions of sex than Europeans, Americans report having more sex and more sex partners than the people of nearly any nation on Earth, according to studies by the University of Chicago and other universities nationwide, but the numbers could be exaggerated by respondents.

In a 2004 survey on sex in American conducted by ABC news, several respondents reported sexual contact with 100 or more other people, significantly driving up averages. Whether that shift is for good or ill depends on who you ask.

“The Internet (has changed the pornography industry) dramatically,” said Briana Line, a clinical psychologist and co-director of the Silicon Valley Psychotherapy Center in San Jose. Line specializes in human sexuality. “Now with the Internet, things are anonymous. You don’t have to walk into a video store and deal with the embarrassment of going into one. It’s very accessible. Those people that may have never dreamed of going into a video store or even a liquor store to buy ‘Hustler,’ but who are curious, can check things out on the Web.”

The industry produced about 8,000 films per year in 1997, according to U.S. News & World Report. Today that number is more than 11,000, according to CBS, and as the pornography industry has proliferated, so has its need for new markets.

Women in pornography

Traditionally a male-dominated field in terms of viewership, the female consumer represents porn’s newest power broker.

“In the last 10 years, the advancements of digital media and the use of digital media technologies have had a major impact on the economy,” said Tom Kane, executive vice president of Danni’s Hard Drive, the most downloaded software-based adult site on the Internet. “They’ve vastly shifted the primary economic interests to women.”

Prior to popular adoption of the Web, said Kane, men controlled almost all of the production apparatus behind the pornography industry, from production to direction and distribution. Now, just about any woman with a Web cam can become her own business, choosing the degree of explicitness she portrays and claiming “the lion’s share, if not all, of the profit,” said Kane.

Some actresses have turned to directing, and they’re quickly becoming favorites of female consumers. Names like Veronica Hart, Candida Royalle and Chloe have become synonymous with strong female roles in plot-driven films, and they’re hitting top-seller lists.

But the Internet is where the real money waits. Online porn is a $65 billion per year industry, according to Kane, and women control more than 60 percent of its content.

“It’s a result of them being able to understand the power that their body image generates as a result of the stimulation they create in men and women,” said Kane, in reference to the hundreds of home-made sites available online. “They used to not get paid for that. They got looked at, cat called, etc. Now there’s a wide range of women who say, ‘I can get paid for it.’”

Compulsive consumption

For consumers, the results of wider pornography consumption are mixed, said Line. A relationship help according to some couples, viewing pornography generally has little, if any effect on behavior beyond the initial excitement, according to Kane, but for a small subgroup of pornography’s viewers, the result of watching their fantasies acted out on screen can be dangerous and tragic.

About five percent of porn viewers will develop a compulsion, and some would argue addiction, to viewing pornography. Consuming more than 10 hours of such programming per week, they often begin to neglect other responsibilities such as work or relationships.

“For some of these people, it can have the added impact that they have a harder time engaging in real relationships, because real relationships are complicated,” said Line. “You have to deal with the feelings of another, their moods and sort of the things that come with that.

“In pornography, it’s sort of a one-dimensional fantasy that’s all personal satisfaction. What happens is, the more they masturbate to pornography, the more that becomes their sexual choice and the less able they are to deal with the realities of interpersonal relating.”

In about half of such cases, the compulsive viewer begins to lose interest in basic pornography. This segment will generally escalate into viewing either hard-core pornography or into some sort of active paraphelia, or abnormal sexual behavior, such as exhibitionism, voyeurism or involvement in inappropriate or illegal sexual activity.

People who have a very repressed sexual life or who were exposed to excessive amounts of sexual material early in life are more likely to fall into this category than those raised with moderate levels of exposure to sexual content, said Line.

“You can have a lifetime (of repression), and for most people, I think they’re actually more vulnerable that way,” said Line. “They’re kind of walking timebombs because they haven’t had a chance to process these feelings that have been going on for years.”

Widely available,

even to children

Process or not, religious groups are concerned with the wide availability of pornography, especially on the Internet. Most sites require only a credit card as verification of a person’s age, something easily taken out of a parent’s wallet, said Eric Smith, senior pastor of South Valley Community Church.

Smith is also concerned about where used magazines and tapes end up. According to the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, the last of which was convened under the President Ronald Reagan, boys ages 12 to 17 are the largest consumers of pornography nationwide, but the figure is disputed by content purveyors.

“Nixon had a pornography commission and they didn’t seem to find anything wrong with it, so he quashed the results,” said Dr. Carol Queen, staff sexologist for Good Vibrations, a San Francisco-based company that sells sex toys, pornographic videos and sexually explicit books. Queen said that in her 15 years of experience she has found 18- to 35-year-olds are probably the main consumers of pornography.

“I don’t know where the later finding came from,” she said. “I think that adults have much greater access to porn, though. It certainly would be incorrect to say that no teenagers ever get their mitts on it, but that’s been true as long as there’s been any kind of sexy picture hiding around.”

Provided teens who do have access to pornography have supportive networks of teachers, parents and friends to give them more accurate pictures of sex and relationships, they should be fine, according to Queen, who said teens and adults can have their perceptions of ideal relationships harmed as much by the overly romantic notions of Hollywood movies as by pornography. A local pastor, however, disagrees.

“Don’t think it’s innocent fun because it can turn into a destructive behavior,” said Smith. “Desensitization has occurred (in society). It’s kind of made light of or joked about in sitcoms or movies, but it’s not a laughing matter. We have ‘just say no’ campaigns for drugs alcohol, but people think of porn as sort of harmless or, as one friend of mine described it, a disaster-preventing spillway. I think it breaks the dam.”

In his efforts to educate youth about the dangers of pornography, Smith recently invited Mike Foster and Craig Gross, creators of www.XXXchurch.com, to speak at the church.

The pair preaches an anti-porn message in a rather unorthodox style, labeling their Web site “the #1 Christian porn site on the net,” while allowing visitors to screen information about kicking the habit, to post prayer requests for help with masturbation issues and to pick up novelty gear like bobble-head Jesus’ and T-shirts that read “Jesus loves porn stars.”

The concept has inspired plenty of hate mail, mostly from within the religious community, but the pair’s unorthodox style and popular documentary, “Missionary Positions,” have gotten the faithful talking about the issue again.

“I’ve listened to testimonies of people who saw a movie or got a magazine from their older brother, and that’s all it took to start them down the path,” said Smith. “One in three men look at pornography on the Internet. I know a number of cases where it’s led to divorce. Women, in particular, feel they’re being cheated on, and in a very real sense they are.”

But if retailers have their way, women could soon be incorporated into the market, sharing an interest in pornography with their husbands. A trend beyond the seedy cinder block and neon adult video stores of yesteryear is emerging: Wide, clean aisles in well-lit professional-looking shops that aim to attract women to sex products.

At Santa Clara’s Hot Stuff sex supply and video store, the all-female staff watches over shoppers who browse to the sounds of top 40 music with the blinds wide open. And in San Francisco, Good Vibrations offers up a wide selection of sex toys, videos and books with an open-minded and knowledgeable female sales staff on hand to explain the birds, the bees and then some to couples and singles in search of a bit more excitement.

While such shops do sell pornographic material, Queen draws a line between the seedy sex shops that most Americans conjure when they think of the pornography industry and today’s incarnations.

“We do purvey some of the wares made by the adult industry, or the pornography industry,” said Queen, who sees the distinction between a strict porn shop and her company as one of quality. Good Vibrations provides an educational and exploratory environment, she said, encouraging singles and couples to explore their sexuality rather than catering to tastes that have been socially labeled as perverse.

“I do think the mixed message in our culture about sex - on one hand its super-special and you save it for someone you love and on the other it’s dirty and nasty - is unrealistic,” said Queen. “The roots are probably somewhere in our home life, in TV life, in movie life, and in our parent’s views and our grandparents views. It’s something complex that has many different factors … it just depends on who you ask as to what is pornographic. Humans, by nature, are interested in sex and incorporate it into their culture no matter how taboo it is.”

Erotica, porn or whatever, it still isn’t healthy, contends Smith, but he’s quick to point out that Christians aren’t all brimstone and no play.

“As Christians, of course, we’re very pro-sex,” said Smith. After all, “God created sex, not Hugh Hefner. But He created it as an expression of love.”

No matter how much our social mores change, some things stay the same. Even world-famous porn star Jenna Jameson got hitched.

Let’s Talk About Sex

A 2004 survey of sex in America, conducted by ABC news, found some interesting results. See how you match up.

57 Percentage of Americans who have had sex outdoors or in a public place

51 Percentage of Americans who discuss sex their fantasies with their partners

29 Percentage of Americans who have had first-date sex

15 Percentage of men who have paid for sex (the number in single men over 30 is double that)

70 Percentage of American men who think about sex every day

34 Percentage of American women who do the same

20 Average number of sex partners a man will have in a lifetime (the median number is eight)

6 Average number of sex partners a woman will have in a lifetime

25 Percentage of men who think visiting a sex Web site is cheating

42 Percentage of women who feel the same

71 Percentage of people 18-29 who feel premarital sex is okay

30 Percentage of people 65 and over who are in favor of premarital sex

71 Percentage of people 18-29 who discuss their fantasies with their partner

49 Percentage of people 40-49 who do the same

72 Percentage of couples married three years who still have sex several times per week

32 Percentage after 10 years

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