Porndemic: How Online Porn Will Be the Death of 'Us'
Source: AOL
Posted: 03/31/09 11:19AM
Filed Under: Television
By CHRIS JANCELEWICZ
The internet is porn. Anyone who tells you differently either hasn't been online in the past ten years, or has their parental controls set to maximum. It's difficult to contemplate something that's bigger than both professional sports and video games, but porn is. In 2006, it was an industry worth $10 billion, and it's only risen in value since.
But wait, you say, at least up here in Canada we're safe from all the horrors and immoral consequences of pornography. Wrong. In fact, Canada's online pornography universe is ever-expanding, even amalgamating with porn distributors in the United States to provide the ultimate sexual experience. More and more adults are turning to pornography to deal with dysfunctional relationships, and teenagers, whose sexual knowledge is limited by an overreaching PC watchdog, find an endless source of material by pretending they're over 18. And the stuff they're stumbling upon isn't your daddy's Hustler magazine.
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PHOTOS |
Director and producer Robin Benger of Toronto-based Cogent/Bender productions explains the new porn in Porndemic. Airing on CBC on April 2 at 9 pm, the doc takes a deep - and at times unsettling - look into the online porn industry. We become voyeurs into the lives of serial porn users and how it has affected their relationships. We also hear from some of the industry's porn pioneers, including Hustler founder Larry Flynt.
Most interesting is Montreal-born Brian Shuster, who is basically the catalyst for the proliferation of online pornography in this country and worldwide. Though he's recently moved out of the online porn realm to found a virtual world www.redlightcenter.com (think Sims with sex), he has incredible insight into the pornographic world.
AOL Canada spoke to the so-called prince of porn, and discussed the changing face of online sexual behaviour.
So how did you end up where you are today?
[Laughs] Well, let's see. The quick version of the story is, I was an internationally-syndicated cartoonist, but I was introduced to the worldwide web in 1994. I initially thought of it as a tool to expand the cartoon. I built a webpage for the comic, and as it started to build traffic, I started to realize that there must be a way to monetize it.
There was no advertising on the internet at the time, so I had to create my own system. I quickly came to understand that the only people looking to pay for online ads were companies in the porn industry. My initial company ran out of money, and then I started up a porn site. It then rapidly became hugely popular - it exploded to become the most popular adult site on the internet, through the late 90s and the early 2000s.
Was that the point when porn started burgeoning worldwide, or was that just with you?
My company really led that revolution, but it certainly was taking off in all directions, not just with us.
It's strange. Your porn site paved the way for the future of the internet, especially in terms of advertising.
It unquestionably did. We developed the technology for everything from streaming video to pop-up advertising to online payment mechanisms. Without the adult industry, streaming video would have appeared years later. When we first started with this advertising business model, there was a huge backlash from the internet community, saying "the internet needs to be a commercial-free zone." Putting up ads was very counter to the culture at the time.
That seems so funny now, since the internet is basically ALL ads.
I know! I wish I had saved some of the emails I received - some of them were even death threats. Man, especially when we created banner ads.
I can guarantee that nobody knows this stuff, and it's one of the most interesting points in 'Porndemic'. Like, no one would think in a million years that porn was the father/mother of the modern internet.
Yeah, you don't really think about the adult industry in that way. Another thing we pioneered were the anti-cheating provisions. For example, in Russia, there's these huge rings of child pornography. That creates problems, because you can't deal with outfits out of Russia without being extremely careful that they're not doing exploitative things.
What steps do you and your company take to prevent child porn? What preventative measures do you have in place?
My company developed a technology which is in widespread use now, for identifying child porn. We have a suite of patents that we call 'Clean Up.' One of the main problems with preventing child porn is you don't want human beings out there looking for it and reporting it, since it's already out there when you do discover it. You want to find this stuff before it goes live. We've developed computerized ways of identifying - through associations and images - sites that essentially have known child porn on them, or suspected child porn on them. Those sites get wrapped up and reported over to the authorities.
It's been used to take down numerous child porn rings, even in Russia. But, of course, the industry I'm involved in now, we don't really run websites anymore; now we're running virtual world web, so now all I have to do is screen so that minors aren't coming in.
How did you come to develop this virtual world? Was it just a natural sort of evolution?
Again, it seems like a natural next step, but it actually involved a leap of inspiration. I had been involved in some online MMORPGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games], and what I observed in playing some of these fantasy games is that you have a bunch of fun with your friends in your guild and you go kill monsters and all that stuff. But if a girl joined the party, suddenly all the guys are flirting and chit-chatting, and it turned into a social thing. It was sort of bizarre.
I started brainstorming with my partner, and we evolved this concept as being a dating site at first. But then we thought, 'why reinvent the wheel?' and decided to model this virtual world after the Red Light District in Amsterdam. We would start it out as adult, and then it would morph into so much more, just like the internet. We also recognized the powerful tool of 3-D immersion, the effect it has on socialization.
Is redlightcenter.com just another porn site, disguised as a virtual world?
There are all kinds of activities going on all the time on redlightcenter.com. It's not a porn site. It's a social platform, really, that has the same things that you have in real life. If you hook up with somebody, in real life you can get naked and fool around, or you can go dancing, watch a movie, go to a concert. It's an extension of a real-world relationship. The activities are just being moved from a real-world setting.
How is your membership doing? Is it increasing?
Membership has just been unreal. It's growing by about 15% a month. We're at the point of exponential explosion right now. It's overwhelmingly exciting. It's consistent with what I've been projecting for months now. The virtual world web will supersede the flat web [meaning 2-D sites]. It's got so much more to offer.
There's a point in 'Porndemic' that made me think - is it at all dangerous to have this site? Will this adversely affect some people who, say, have a social phobia?
I'm glad that you asked that. I spend a lot of my time ensuring that this technology does no harm. What ends up happening is people learn social skills. The community has developed its own mores and rules of acceptable behaviour. It's very easy to drop into the [virtual] world and do things that are, in the real world, very difficult. For some regular guy to approach a girl and start flirting, in real life, it may be outside the pale of what they're capable of doing. Many of them get shut down immediately - you know, they'll say something stupid like 'You wanna f--k?' In the virtual world, it becomes a crash education: you learn to say 'Hi', or 'Can you show me around', or 'I looked through your profile.' They learn how to communicate, how to flirt, and how to mingle.
It becomes almost like a dating school.
The other thing that it's really helpful for is for people with body image problems, or people with real handicaps, like for those who can't really get outdoors without difficulty. This really opens up the entire spectrum of socializing to that group of people.
The biggest reward for me, I think, is for transgendered or closeted gay people. Those people find a real home in the community. They can come in, and be a man or woman, whatever the case may be, or the homosexual can be gay without feeling ostracized. There are no repercussions in the real world of being judged. It provides an internal strength, an internal sense of self-worth. Some of the heartwarming emails I get…in contrast to those earlier emails I would get...they say 'I've found a community, I've found a home.'
It seems like you're getting love instead of hate now.
It makes it all worthwhile in a sense. It's indescribable.
There's an aspect of danger in porn, is there not, especially in terms of affecting future generations and their ability to form healthy relationships?
My honest response, on a very top level, is I think that porn has crossed the threshold. It probably sounds very strange coming from me, but I think that porn is dangerous in the way it's being done today. It's one of the reasons why I couldn't justify staying in the web side of the business. This competition between porn websites has caused this race to become more extreme. The extreme porn is abusive to women. This is harmful, not just for kids growing up, but for adults who are repeatedly exposed to it. It changes their perception of what sexual relationships should look like. The industry has lost its moral compass.
But the broader answer to that question is this: it's not the actual porn that's the problem. It's the internet. It's a very isolating tool that masquerades as a social tool. It's like Facebook. You feel like you're being social because you have all of these friends, and you're following all their activities and seeing all their pictures, but in reality you're sitting in front of the computer. The model of the internet will follow the model of porn, and it will end up becoming really unhealthy, if it hasn't already.
Porndemic airs on April 2 at 9 PM ET on CBC's 'DocZone'.
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