Understanding the Paradigms Behind the Development of the Global Porn Industry
There are two very important things in the world: one is sex, the other I don’t remember. With
this statement, American film director Woody Allen once summed up the order of priority of
contemporary Western culture.
Porn cinema has been a part of this premise since its first rehearsals. When cinematography was
just being invented in the late 19th century, filmmakers experimented with recording everyday
situations: trains leaving, people walking. It took a few decades before cinema became a major
industry with production machinery in full swing and genre classifications established. And it
takes much less time before porn appears everywhere in the virtual space. With keywords like
hot blonde, naked upskirt, ebony, and so on, all the related porn content can appear in a fraction of a second in front of the searcher.
However, today we can trace, among the first evidence of its beginnings, films featuring men and
women having sex: the prehistory of what would later be cataloged as pornographic cinema.
Porn stands for the concept of pornography, the colloquial usage of which refers to all material,
images and/or discourse depicting sexual acts with the aim of provoking the erotic arousal of the
recipient. The subgenres put forward by an industry that experienced exponential growth
worldwide, mainly from the US and Europe since the seventies, are now being replicated with a
huge explosion of new agents who are both producers and consumers: amateur pornographers.
Unlike the film industry in general, which has long been thought about and analyzed from
various social science disciplines, pornographic cinema has often received less attention. As
such, pornography has historically been characterized by ongoing conflicts regarding social or
religious morality. Due to its immoral character for the dominant culture but also its small place
in the cultural industry, there has been little reflection on the subject. On the other hand, despite
the fact that censorship is being destroyed in many parts of the world and is undergoing a crisis
in others, empirical sociological studies on its production, circulation or use are scarce.
In the context of this paradigm shift, it is necessary to identify the changes in the ways of
production, circulation and consumption of audiovisual pornography in our country, which are a
consequence of the new context that has opened up in recent years. This is linked to the
technological revolution in communication, on the one hand, and cultural changes in sexuality,
on the other. Both processes are framed within a new individualism that intervenes and shapes
certain social practices. These dimensions strongly intervene in the course of local pornography,
in all its moments of production.
Today we see a new model of porn-making, which blurs the boundaries between the roles of
producer, director, actor and consumer; questioning the industrial model that at the beginning of
the new millennium was comfortably established in a dominant position in what we can call the subfield of porn cinema.
In this sense, considering local porn scenes as objects of study for the social sciences is important.
Autonomy and sexuality
Within the field of social sciences, the study of the production, circulation and consumption of
pornography is a recently explored area. The reason for this may be the moral issues that
intervene and deepen the invisibility of this segment of cultural production that we consider
relevant for explaining the universe of cultural practices, beliefs and consumption that intervene
in various ways in the construction of everyday social practices.
The study of the cultural production of pornography therefore implies moving away from moral
discussions about the legalization or censorship of pornography from a radical perspective, even
from the limits that define what is obscene. On the other hand, this production will be considered
as a manifestation of complex contemporary social processes, in which social subjectivities
manifest the transformations that occur as a result of cultural changes, in the field of sexuality
and in the field of communication.
Pornography, ultimately, must be understood as a cultural practice, inseparable from the
processes of mediation and spectacularization of intimacy. Pornographic practices, especially
those related to users who have become producers and distributors, reflect, in principle,
contemporary transformations in sexuality. But they also reflect broader processes related to the
transformation of individualism since the advent of new technologies.
The pornography industry
In the first decades of the 20th century, a context that responded to the private regulation of
sexuality, and was drawn back to its reproductive function, the seeds of what would later become
a lucrative industry germinated. Lost movie tapes made in those years allow us to speculate
today on the foundations of the pornographic genre. At the time, legal restrictions prevented the
development of the industry, the product circulated clandestinely and marginally, and
pornographic filmmakers had to fight hard against legal and moral censorship. Between the
1920s and 1940s, production expanded and exhibition found its audience in European brothels,
but with the particularity that all this was wrapped in underground circuits and illegality.
And from then on porn continued to be accepted until in the early 2000s the Internet boom boosted it
to the point that it could be enjoyed by anyone as long as an Internet network was available.
The global porn industry was actually conceived in stages and it is a form of evolution that is still
going on today. The ease of access for consumers as well as all parties involved is inseparable
from evolution, which is basically an endless change in mindset and technological development.
