Porn power

If ever you find yourself bored and with 15 minutes to spare, I recommend looking up Pornhub’s annual report, the closest thing you will get to a statistical breakdown of the planet’s libido. Here you will discover that the average visit to Pornhub lasts nine minutes 59 seconds; that the most popular time to watch porn is a Sunday evening; and that sexual tastes for the most part tend to follow cultural lines, with English-speakers prizing lesbian material most highly, and eastern Europeans on the whole preferring anal.

There’s nothing new about porn, and humans have been trying to get their hands on it pretty much since they left the primordial soup. The novelty is in the rate of change.

In the early 2000s, the internet made every-thing freely viewable to watch on computer screens. The big shift in this decade, however, isn’t to do with how we consume porn, but how we create it. This is the decade of the dilettante. Last year nearly a quarter of all videos uploaded on to Pornhub were by amateurs, ordinary folk sprawled out in the comfort of their own bedrooms, cobbling together homemade videos and putting them on free-to-access porn sites for all the world to see. And that number is growing.

Up until recently, a young woman wanting to make a career in porn would sign a contract with a production company and produce a certain number of videos. If she did well, she would sign more, and eventually maybe star in a big-budget feature like Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones (or, to take an example from my own boyhood, Pirates, which did the rounds at my school through the auspices of a soiled black hard drive passed down from year to year). But in 2018, that same aspirant will sidestep the corporate contracts and go it alone, because if she has an iPhone, a bit of editing software and a social media account, she can.