Everybody's a Pornographer

For a while I've been noticing with a certain curiosity the amount of porn that is available/linked in the blogs I'm familiar with. A couple of posts over the weekend brought the topic to the forefront of my mind. And I realize there are three parts to the topic: looking, presenting, and performing. As you'll see, I'm wondering about the behavior involved. There are more questions in my mind than answers. And I'm not presenting my moral opinions at this point, just wondering what's behind phenomena which I would not have expected to experience when I was a teenager.

As a general matter, it seems to me that there is much more of this around than 50 years ago. Back then, if you wanted porno, you had to buy a magazine or go to a porno movie house. And I think it's fair to say that most people did neither. So why the change? Is it just that the internet has made it so much easier to distribute and get the stuff, or did the "sexual revolution" of the 1960's actually lead to a change in people's acceptance of it?

Somebody suggested to me that porno is especially prevalent among gay men. I certainly see a lot of interest around here, but I don't know how that compares with straight guys' blogs.

Looking: Certainly, lust has always been with us. So the potential market was always there. But has the increased ease of viewing which the internet has brought also led in a way to an increased appetite? Perhaps, if you never bought a porno mag or went to a porno movie, you didn't feel that you had to see it. But if you come across something on the internet, you begin to develop a desire for it. And has that sexual revolution made people more accepting of, and willing to indulge, their lust?

Presenting: I've been struck by the number of blogs where "eye candy" is routinely part of the posts. I'm not talking about the ones that have pics and videos as their only purpose. I mean regular bloggers who are spicing things up. Considering that what they post is available on the sites they copy it from, I wonder what's the point. To keep people reading he blog? To save readers the trouble of finding it on their own? To show what the blogger likes? To prove that the blogger really does like boys?

Even more remarkable to me are the bloggers who do a "journal" blog for a while and then decide they need to produce a "picture" blog, too (as if the sort of stuff they post on it weren't available  a link or two away). What's that all about?

Performing: This doesn't actually happen on the blogs, so far as I've noticed. But people post either explicitly or implicitly about webcam type contacts in which they've either had someone perform for them or have performed for the other person. And there is the related phenomenon of all the people who send nude photos of themselves to others, many of which end up circulating on the internet.

If lust was always there, and at least a potential audience for porno existed 50 years ago, I very much doubt that many people would have been willing to display themselves for the world to see. So what's happening now? Is it a loss of a sense of privacy? Is it exhibitionism? Do the transmissions in phone-like mode give a feeling of privacy, as if both parties were together in the same room? (Even though we know that the audience is potentially the whole world.) Does it somehow satisfy an emotional need? Maybe there are different motives for different people. And is it different for the viewer than a video from another site?