Sexologist blames "porn creep" on former top U.S. doc C. Everett Koop

[matcom]

<snip>

I saw my first porn movie at age 13. It was an event that involved planning and care: My friend Jenny's sister procured a tape from the Video Ranger while Jenny and I skulked in the aisles of the 7-Eleven down the street, waiting for the handoff. The movie itself, a soft-core affair set in a Club Med-style paradise with no plot, was tamer in retrospect than anything found nightly on the Showtime channel, but to us it was a big deal. We returned the tape the next day tucked underneath the latest John Hughes release, and the video-store owner, his belly straining against his polo shirt, eyed us benevolently and winked. "Enjoy the movie?" he asked. Mortified, we hauled butt out the door.

This is how it was done, once. Your first glimpses of porn were illicit, thrilling and usually brokered by an older relative or school friend. Magazines were passed around, pages from Judy Blume's "Forever" were dog-eared, parents' sock drawers were raided, all for a glimpse into what made the still- fuzzy idea of sex so intriguing and so forbidden.

It was the '80s, when the biggest revolutions pornography had seen were Betamax and VCR technologies that made movies cheaper and quicker to produce, while democratizing porn viewing, making it suddenly the equal province of raincoated pervs and PTA parents (and, ultimately, their kids).

Then came the Internet, whose biggest accomplishment may be that it has made pornographic content instantly available to anyone with a high-speed connection without making them feel like a pop-eyed flesh junkie. After all, when smut is just a mouse click away -- and your e-mail inbox is refreshed on a hourly basis with spam that leads you straight to it -- the act of looking is less of an effort, and less damning. People who would never consider going to a strip club or renting "Shaving Private Ryan" think nothing of logging on to the Internet -- what's a detour or five to peruse the porn offerings?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/07/25/CMGF77DFT31.DTL

[judge_smales]

1. Not Joycellyn Elders?

I'm surprized.

[NashVegas]

2. What's Being Missed

The commercialization of porn - or should I say, the societal-approved over-commercialization - harnesses sexual expression onto the will of our capitalist society.

There are few things on this planet as threatening to society as genuine human sexual expression. And that's just something you're not going to get from most porn films. How many commercial porn watchers would be comfortable to have two live people getting genuinely intimate in their own living room?