Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Almost a decade later, I still sort of feel that way. Internet porn has replaced going to the moon as the explanation for all that is unexplainable. Here’s what I mean by that: People used to ask rhetorical questions like, “How is it that we can put a man on the moon, but I still can’t get a good martini in downtown Seattle?” Neil Armstrong made everything less complicated than a lunar landing seem plausible. Meanwhile, Internet porn makes everything more reasonable—once you’ve realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it’s erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.

We all like to talk about how the Internet is such a ground-breaking educational tool, but we’re missing what it can teach us about ourselves. Porn sites are the window to the modern soul; they’re glimpses into the twisted minds of a faceless society. All the deviancy Freud tried to deduce through decades of analysis is now completely exposed in seconds (or milliseconds, if you have DSL). When Carl Jung introduced the concept of the “collective unconscious,” he was trying to explain why all humans are inherently scared of things like darkness and vampires —but net porn is the collective conscious. It’s where we all see the things people would never admit to wanting.

And what is it that we want? From what I can tell, that answer is twofold: We want imperfection, and we want heightened reality. The pornography everyone wants to see on the Internet focuses on (a) amateurs and (b) celebrities. We either want a truck stop waitress who’s a little overweight and sort of freakish, or we want voyeuristic shots of Britney Love Aguilera[42] on a private beach in Italy. And some would say that’s simply human nature, but they’re wrong; that’s a reflection of how we’re still trying to understand how this technology works. Ironically—or perhaps predictably—we need porn to do this. It’s what keeps us interested.

Let’s say a guy is sitting in a bar in Des Moines and two women walk in. One of these girls is clearly a model/actress, and she has fake boobs and luxurious hair and a perfectly sculpted body; meanwhile, her companion is just a totally normal, decent-looking person. Who will our hard-drinking Iowan immediately want to see naked? The answer is obvious—he would want to see the model. And if there are twenty-five women in the bar that night and he’s given the opportunity to see any one of them nude, he will pick whoever he thinks is the most attractive. Yet this would not be the case if these women were 2-D thumbnail pics on a Web site called nakedtavern.com. The first female selected would be whoever seemed the most normal (i.e., neither ideal nor repulsive), or maybe the woman with the nicest smile who seemed just a tier below gorgeous. And porn sites are completely aware of this phenomenon. You often see banner advertisements that scream things like, TIRED OF SITES WITH MODELS CLAIMING TO BE AMATEURS? WE GUARANTEE REAL UNPROFESSIONAL SLUTS! This is one of those bizarre paradoxes that could only have been created by the acceleration of culture: Within the realm of their Gateways, men prefer to look at nude images of women they’d normally ignore in real life.

Now, I realize phrases like “the acceleration of culture” tend to be frustrating terms, mostly because there’s a certain segment of the population that throws around this term too often (and usually incorrectly), and there’s another segment that only vaguely understands what it means (they can define the individual words, but the larger concept still seems fuzzy). However, it’s the best explanation as to why amateur porn is more popular than professional porn, which is only the case in the online idiom. Before the Net devastated the smut mag industry, success had always been directly tied to professionalism: In the 1990s, Playboy was forever the front-runner, followed by Penthouse, followed by Hustler, followed by Perfect 10. The same still goes for live erotica: Whenever I hear guys talking about their favorite strip clubs, they always talk about how unbelievably hot the dancers are; I’ve never heard anyone raving about how unbelievably ordinary the dancers look. Yet with computer pornography (much of which is still free), the key is normalcy—the surfer is hoping to see the girl next door in an almost literal sense. This is the product of a technology that has accelerated faster than its user can comprehend.

In less than a decade, millions of Americans went from (1) not knowing what the Internet was, to (2) knowing what is was but not using it, to (3) having an e-mail address, to (4) using e-mail pretty much every day, to (5) being unable to exist professionally or socially without it. For 98 percent of the world, the speed and sweep of that evolution was too great to fathom. Consequently, we learned how to use tools most of us don’t understand. This has always been the case with technology, but not quite to this extent. I mean, I drive a car that I can’t fix and that I could certainly never build, but I still understand how it works in a way that goes (slightly) beyond the theoretical. I could explain how a car works to a ten-year-old. Conversely, I don’t understand anything about the construction of the Internet, beyond those conventional Newsweek factoids that everyone knows (and which still seem borderline impossible). I have no practical knowledge of the “information superhighway.”[43] And I’m not interested in how it works; I just want to feel like I vaguely grasp its potential and vaguely understand how to use that potential to my advantage.

This is why amateur pornography became so integral to the adoption of Internet technology: It not only made people excited about using the Web (because sex is prurient and arousing), but it also made people comfortable with using the Web (because it’s organic and unsophisticated). Sex is so undeniably visceral that anyone can relate to it, assuming what they’re seeing does not appear to be an untouchable, unworldly fantasy. Imperfect, unpaid nudity tightened the parameters of the virtual world; it’s proof that this futuristic electronic network is still operated by humankind. This is not a pixeled construction of some Never Neverland character from Tron; this is some girl you saw at Pizza Hut. Amateur pornography grounds us in our reality.

Of course, it should go without saying that our reality is profoundly fucked-up. Twenty minutes on the Internet cum trade is all it takes to realize that the sexual peccadilloes of modern people are cliched, sad, incomprehensible, and/or a combination of all three. If you are to take “real” porn at face value, you would be forced to conclude that women rarely have pubic hair, except for those who are advertising as having more pubic hair than normal. There seems to be an unabated demand for naked teenage girls, although there also seems to be a tacit understanding that any moderately small-breasted thirty-one-year-old woman can pass for a teenager if she has pigtails and a lollipop. There is an inordinate amount of bandwidth focused on girls urinating on themselves and/or licking their own nipples (is this fun?), and there’s a big demand for interracial sex, first-time anal sex, public flashing, and the ham-fisted implication of incest. What’s most disturbing is the amount of Internet porn that has absolutely nothing to do with sexual desire and everything to do with cartoonish misogyny, most notably the endless sites showing men ejaculating on women’s faces while the recipients pretend to enjoy it; this has about as much to do with sex as hitting someone in the face with a frying pan.

And—of course—there is also a pocket of men who masturbate to images of women getting hit in the face with frying pans. I guess there’s no accounting for taste. But there’s really no purpose in complaining about pornography, either. Yes, it’s socially negative; no, it’s not nearly as negative as Ted Bundy claimed before his execution. The tangible effect of pornography is roughly the same as the tangible effect of Ozzy Osbourne’s music on stoned Midwestern teenagers: It prompts a small faction of idiots to consider idiotic impulses, which is why we have the word idiocy. Arguing about the psychological merits (or lack thereof) of watching intercourse on a Presario 700Z doesn’t interest me. What interests me is how that habit changes the way people think about their own existence—and that brings me back to that second type of image porn surfers want to see: naked celebrities.

You’d think naked Hollywood actresses and naked West Virginia hairdressers would exist on opposite poles, but they’re closer than you think. They’re closer because—in a technical, physiological sense—they’re identical. There are certainly differences between the nipples of Alyssa Milano and the nipples of an Olive Garden waitress in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but the similarities of those nipples greatly outweigh the disparities. Here again, Internet pornography provides a bizarre sense of stability; it reminds us that we’re working in a hard reality; naked from the neck down, your wife and Gwen Stefani have a lot in common. What people want to see with nude celebrities is proof that these superstars are not gods. Web surfers are robbing celebrities of their privacy and—in effect— stealing back power. Psychologically, the Internet is very Marxist: Everyone with a modem has access to the same information, so we all get jammed into a technological middle class. You don’t need to be Lenny Kravitz to know what Lisa Bonet looks like when she steps out of the shower. You don’t even need to wear hemp pants. All you need is a modem and a phone jack.

Now, is aspiring to be as sexually informed as Lenny Kravitz a sad commentary on modern ambition?