Pornification of Everyday Life

The “pornification of everyday life” is a term or concept used to describe what scholars, pundits, and journalists began noticing in the mid-1990s and later characterizing as the ways in which the gestures, styles, and aesthetics of pornographic media had entered into the nonpornographic landscape of the culture. Primarily expressed in media and language use, pornification was characterized by the making public of what was previously a private concern. The use of pornographic terms or styles of photography in nonpornographic contexts made it clear that the rise and growth of pornography's consumption was no longer a small matter, relegated to a minority of the population. To understand the concept, it is important to understand the following interrelated aspects of the “pornosphere”: (1) the changing nature of the media of pornography from writing to film to motion picture to videotape to DVD to CD-ROM and Internet files; (2) the increased consumption and use of pornographic media as these forms multiplied; (3) the normalizing of the perception of pornography consumption by the normative state of its consumption under changing media conditions; and (4) cultural, economic, political, and religious forces that also had an impact on these changes.

Pornography originally meant “writing about prostitutes” and was a form of cheap literature. As media evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries, the meaning of the term changed to include photographic pornography, film pornography, video pornography, and Internet (or digital) pornography. This evolution had key markers that were consonant with both the invention of and the mass mediation of a particular medium, with pornographic content often driving the medium's evolution. Thus, photography quickly became a medium for erotic and pornographic images, and the first pornographic film with motion was created in 1896, only one year after the film projection system invented by the Lumière brothers was perfected. By the 1960s, with advances in birth-control technology and loosening attitudes around sexuality thanks in part to television, European imported films, and the 1953 launch of Playboy magazine, pornography began to enter the culture in different ways. Several states changed their laws to allow for adult theaters. Throughout the 1970s, requiring the consumer to visit public theaters where filmed porn was being exhibited restricted access to pornography.

By the 1980s with the invention and mass mediation of the videocassette, pornography evolved in two significant ways: First, it entered the home and could be consumed privately, and second, it multiplied by virtue of the copyable nature of the medium. Throughout the 1980s, while Playboy and other magazines were able to be received in the [Page 274]home, they nevertheless only showed static photographs of women posing in a state of undress and were legally restrained from depicting explicit sex acts. Various legal cases attempted to define the distinctions between pornography and erotic art and between pornographic film actors and prostitutes, with the latter distinction coming down to the difference between “sex for hire” and “depictions of sex for hire.”

In the 1990s, with the birth and rise of the Internet, pornography entered more American's homes. Many of the bandwidth and video-conferencing technologies that businesses use today were pioneered or perfected by the pornography industry, which is located in the heart of the San Fernando Valley in California (the backyard of the film industry in Hollywood, where thousands of young women go each year seeking success and, given the competition, where they quickly find themselves facing economic insecurity with nothing to offer the market but their youth, beauty, and acting skills). While Hollywood produces 350–400 wide-release films every year, the porn industry produces many hundreds of times that figure in X- to XXX-rated fare. In 2005, the number of porn films produced was 8,000. By 2009, the number had jumped to 11,000, or roughly 30 X-rated films per day. Under these conditions, it became nearly impossible to prevent porn from seeping into the mainstream culture. Not only was porn the thing that everyone had seen but did not want to talk about, but porn stars like Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy were making “crossover” careers by leaving pornography and entering mainstream film and television careers. Since then, the strategically accidental release of the “sex tape” has helped launch the careers of several personalities, such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. Compared to 1988, when the release of a sex videotape could ruin or severely damage the career of someone like Rob Lowe, this deliberate and quasi-legitimate use of a form of porn to advance a “brand” heralded a sea change in the culture's attitude toward porn's ubiquity.

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