Porn has always existed as countless museum artifacts demonstrate.
Militant feminism and its constant companions the entitlement mentality and The Tyranny Of Cliches (after Jonah Goldberg) has put men off because men, quite reasonably, do not respond well to being called predators, evil, rapists, etc. by complete strangers.
The greatest mystery of feminism is why heterosexual women in search of a mate and a family would be taken in by a leftist philosophy created out of whole cloth by old maids and lesbians. It’s akin to burning lumber on a bonfire before attempting to build a house with it.
That is the VERY resaon why marriage is on the decline. Why would men date women when a female will denounce her male date for sexual harassment, rape, and so on? No wonder why females in college are openly wonder why they can't get dates--militant feminism has made males actually afraid of women at times.
Porn used to be difficult to access and in crude and simple forms, and you could go your entire life without seeing it.
Now it is unavoidable as it is on TV, movies, and billboards and in print advertising.
Porn as we know it, is completely new.
While I agree with everything else in your post and with the top 1/4 inch of the above quote, that's not the whole story. Porn has never before in the history of the U.S. been so widely, deeply and ubiquitously available — nor available to the point of unavoidability even to small children. People had to be of age, and had to go to certain stores and bear the shame of being in those stores in order to get porn up until the rise of Playboy and Hustler and the lawsuits over porn in the late 1960s, when many of us FReepers were already young adults and our values formed.
Now, ads on tv and in print, song lyrics, movies and the internet are awash in the types of imagery that would certainly have been labeled obscene prior to 1970. Every younger girls are wearing obscenely revealing clothing and aspiring to get boob jobs at younger and younger ages. Mothers have actually been petitioning stores over the sexualization of girl and toddler clothing, particularly Halloween costumes. When I went to my niece's dance recital ten years ago, the three-year-old beginners were dressed in sparkly black bathings suits like hootchie mamas, with very bare legs, lurid make-up and feathers on their heads, and did a boom-boom dance, to hoots of appreciation from their relatives in the audience -- in this day of child abuse, I was completely appallled.
There has been a net increase in the open and available imagery of porn, no matter how long the history of its existence.
Well said.
Oh I will take that further. Our laws are now set up that way where men are assumed to be guilty and predatory. Why would men enter into a contract where their wife can get a no fault divorce, take half his stuff, half his future and potential earnings, and take his children away? In this day and age of equality...