Internet Porn

Hey, guys, quick warning. This episode of our show deals with adult themes and has some strong language. Hello, world. This is Codebreaker. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. If you were going to look at the vast stretch of human history and you wanted to pick one common motivator for technological innovation, what would it be? Here's a couple of hints. The swinger.

The incredible new low priced Polaroid land camera.

Do you know how much bandwidth your business network really needs?

So save time and shop online.

It was broadcast straight to my screen over the Internet. The camera, e commerce, increased bandwidth, video streaming. One thing led to all of these products being a part of our daily lives. And actually this list goes even further back.

Cave drawings, the uses of the printing.

Press, home video, self focusing cameras, cable television.

You know, no matter what era you look at, you see evidence that pornography or that pornographers or adult entertainment not only had an influence, but they then pushed it forward.

Pornography. From origin story to widespread adoption, technological innovation goes hand in hand with porn. You just heard Karen north, director of the Digital Social Media program at the University of Southern California. We were talking a few months ago and she started telling me this story about porn's connection to innovation.

Whether you're for it or against it, when it comes to pornography, it's still fascinating to recognize that that industry throughout the generations has had a tremendous impact on the things that we do care about in everyday life.

If we want to talk about technology and its impact on the world, we should talk about pornography's move to the Internet. On codebreaker, we decipher our complicated feelings about technology by asking straightforward question with a sense of humor, a sense of awe, and, hey, sometimes a sense of dread. This season we've got one question in mind. Three little words. The answer isn't so easy.

Um.

Oh, evil. A little maybe. Yeah.

Is it evil? We're asking this question about one kind of technology in every episode. So today, Internet pornography. Before we answer our question though, we're going to hear about just how much of the Internet is adult content.

Their numbers are like crazy. Their numbers are crazy.

What it's like for the people who have to scrub porn off the Internet.

That made it sometimes hard to go.

To sleep and how the way Internet porn gets organized can make us feel objectified. They just retitled the movie. It's like bearded hipster porn. So Internet porn, is it evil? Hey, remember, there's a code hidden in every episode, so listen closely. After talking to Karen, I wanted to get a sense of the newest products being pushed forward by porn. A Good place to start looking. The shelves of Babe Land. It's a sex toy shop with a location in downtown Manhattan.

Hi, I'm Claire.

I'm Ben. Nice to meet you. Claire Kavanagh is Babeland's co founder. She's been in the sex business since she got out of college. Twenty years ago, we just sort of.

Got some money together, opened a store, and since then we've grown to four stores and a web presence.

It seems to be working because the store literally just like, just opened and there's already people in here.

Yeah, people wait outside. It's like, you know who Tickets. Woo.

Babeland used to sell a lot of porn too, but the move from DVDs to the Internet changed that. Now the front display case at the store is full of toys that look a lot like devices made by big tech companies. And a bunch of these toys can now be controlled by devices made by big tech companies.

Just like every other part of your life, you are going to just start using your sex toys through your phone. It just. It follows.

One thing Claire showed me though, was really crazy and designed with our online pornography appetite in mind. It comes in two parts. The first is what's called a masturbation sleeve. Can we just describe what this is? It looks like a flashlight, but the part where the light would come out normally is actually something is actually modeled after a vagina. And that's where you would insert something.

Right. This, the Fleshlight is masquerades as a mag flashlight. Like so this could be in your shed. You put a little lube in there.

And.

I love these that you describe it as. It could be in your shed.

That's what it is. Like there's a six pack of Bud and your mag flashlight, but the Bud is really lube.

Can you tell me what this other piece is now that we've described? The Fleshlight itself.

Yes. This is the Fleshlight launch pad. It is an accessory to your flashlight. And the Fleshlight attaches to the bottom of this plastic mount for your tablet. So you can be streaming your pornography and it's basically attached to your masturbation sleeve.

It feels like it borders on satire.

You know, it's funny. I think we're at a moment where these do look a little bit like jokes, but this is like what's really going on. Like this is the future where people are going to be integrating what they like to watch. People watch porn all the time and this is going to be and more.

And more on mobile devices.

Yeah, right. Exactly right. I wouldn't be on the subway with this thing.

So after seeing all this, I had to ask, do you think Internet porn is good? Well.

I don't want to say that Internet porn is good or bad.

Do you think it's, do you think it's bad?

No, I think it's useful. I think it has its uses. But I'm an old school feminist and porn makes me a little queasy. I have to say, not just every single piece of it is a good to the world.

You know, a sex positive feminist who owns an adult toy store that sells an iPad holder you can grab onto while you're using your masturbation sleeve. But she's on the fence because even from her point of view, Claire Kavanaugh knows not all of this stuff is good for us. Peter Ponsati knows this too. He deals with the part of porn that most people would agree is evil. His job title doesn't immediately give you a sense of what his responsibilities are.

I work in trust and safety translation.

He manages a team of people responsible for enforcing rules online. Most of the time they are erasing unwanted porn. Ponsati used to do this for an anonymous messaging app that allows people to post and browse messages and photos for without being identified. These apps have become pretty popular. Ponsati asked us not to say which one he worked at, but it was one of the big ones. I started by asking him what the world would look like if people like him didn't exist.

So in non porn sites, people see about 5% of the content that is inappropriate and offensive. 95% of it gets caught. So if people think porn offensive photos on the Internet is a terrible thing, they should be thankful that people people exist to make it okay because it's a really difficult job.

So can you walk me through a day?

We have a whole team. So the team is working diligently searching keywords on the app and then also going through the app looking for different things. At some point they might just be looking for plain pornography. At other times they're specifically looking for predators. Somebody might do something terrible and it's a one off and they just didn't. They used really bad judgment. You know, we would warn them, but then there are people that you'll get to their profile and it will just be a wall of dick pics.

Ponsati and his team are even more focus on scrubbing child pornography and working with authorities to catch the criminals who traffic that kind of content. So the way it works, he alerts the national center for Missing and Exploited Children. They alert the FBI or local law enforcement and they take whatever data Peter can give them from their anonymous app and take it from there. I asked Peter to tell me about someone he caught this way.

The first guy that ever. That we ever found out that got caught because of our. The work we did, at least in part. One of the things that he did that helped the police, you know, identify and catch him was he was posting pictures of little girls. He was just taking them in the mall. But when I was talking to the detective on the phone and I sent him the pictures, he's like, I know exactly where that mall is. And he was a particularly nasty individual. He was a hacker and a child porn person. So he kept getting back onto the. To the site, even though we kept banning him. I'll tell you what, I had never in my life experienced having an archenemy before, but I really felt like I had one with him.

Wow. What's the emotional impact for people on that team? I mean, I can't imagine what it would be like to have your job.

You know, most of the, most of my team were people just, you know, a little bit out of college. So for some of them, they had not actually experienced the severity of what people do online. Some of them had been sheltered. They did not leave sheltered. I dealt with it mostly by reminding myself how important it was to do this. But there were days when I would get a text or a phone call at, you know, 11 o' clock at night and had to deal with something that was happening right then. And that made it sometimes hard to go to sleep. You know, right when you're dealing with something just as you're trying to go to sleep and you have to look at this mess.

If you could press a button and wipe all pornography off of the Internet, would you do it?

No.

No.

No.

That is a surprising answer.

I totally believe in freedom of expression. When there are tons of websites where pornography is appropriate, consenting adults should be able to do what they want. But it's the context of where it's happening that makes it bad or not bad.

Peter Pransati is a digital media consultant. Peter, thank you very much.

Thank you, Ben.

All right, we're still thinking about this, and I know you are too. Stick with us. We'll be right back. Alright, so a minute ago we heard about Internet porn being used in evil ways. How about an example where Internet porn has been a force for good? To be honest, I didn't believe this story until I talked to the guy it happened to.

Hey, how's it going?

That's Mike Iemelli. He's from Boston. And up until his 20s, he lived the life of what on paper would be considered a pretty regular straight guy. Then in 2012, he had a life changing event.

I was working in public relations and I had owned a public relations agency, and I ended up getting really sick. I was vomiting blood every day for about two months. Doctors weren't exactly sure what was wrong with me, and I ended up being diagnosed loosely with severe pancreatitis and infections in four major organs. And, yeah, my friend Garrett at the time, he was a clinical pharmacist, and he was taking care of me, rubbing my back when I was bent over in pain or cleaning up my vomit. And we noticed something was going on, or at least I noticed there was definitely an emotional connection happening that hadn't happened previously. It was while I was still very sick. And I told him that I was feeling some emotions towards him that I hadn't experienced prior, and I wanted to see what he was feeling. He did admit something was going on, and maybe it's something we should think about.

You know, when people talk about their significant other and they say, she's my best friend or he's my best friend, it's cliche at this point. For Imeli, though, the idea of being in love with his best friend wasn't actually great news.

I really had to ask myself some tough questions, like, would I want to pursue this even knowing that I may never want to engage physically or that I may never sleep with a woman again?

Mike identified as a heterosexual man, and so did his friend Garrett. Neither of them had even considered dating another man before. But they decided to explore their newfound feelings for each other.

So at first, it just started out, you know, a lot of just hanging out. And then it moved to a place where we thought, would we want to try something like kissing? And we really didn't like that, or would we want to try just hugging? Is that an expression that feels good to us and that felt okay?

So you tried kissing and it didn't go well?

It didn't go well?

No. And then you tried hugging and you were like, okay, I'm cool with this.

Yeah, I'm cool with that. So that's, you know, feels comfortable to me.

They didn't know what to try, and when they did, it was super awkward. At the same time, they needed a solution, a way to take things slow without freaking out or scaring each other off.

So, yeah, really, this got me to start, you know, exploring and questioning. And I used online pornography as a way to kind of figure out what I could be interested in or what felt safe and good to me. And this really helped me to think about things that I might want to try with him, because I think all couples need to figure out a way to express their love that feels good and right to both parties.

And.

And this was really no different.

Mike says he knows it sounds ignorant, but he didn't know what gay sex was like. And porn answered that.

So I started thinking, oh, there's other things. And so watching that, seeing if it interested me, and maybe some of it did a little bit, and a lot of it didn't, and then letting myself explore whatever I felt called to or interested in exploring at that moment, we started to watch it together, to see what we were both interested in together, to try some things that we weren't comfortable with before, but maybe now that we had been exposed to and we looked at together that we wanted to try, ultimately, we found a level of intimacy that we felt comfortable with through this process.

It's tricky, though, right? Because pornography is often very, extremely unrealistic. Absolutely.

And I.

You know, it's embarrassingly poor sex education. I'm not out here saying porn's the greatest thing ever. It certainly isn't. But that being said, it was more about me learning about myself and really able to explore myself in a safe space and just, you know, view things, view people doing things, thinking about things. Things I had never even considered before or that would never cross my mind because that just wasn't where my mind was going.

Was porn good for you?

Ultimately? I think it was. I think that it was a way for me to really explore and broaden my horizons. I'm not saying that we can just wipe clean and decide to be gay or straight or whatever, but we can decide what feels right to us. And for me, at least, I gave it a shot and really worked for many years at figuring out how to make it work.

Are you in love?

I am in love, yep.

And you're in love partly because of pornography?

No, no, no. I would never say. I mean, I wouldn't say that I was in love before pornography. Pornography just helped me to make my relationship work, to help have some physical intimacy that we felt comfortable with.

Mike and Garrett live in the Boston area. They've been together for four years, and they're still dating.

How much of the web do you think is Internet pornography? I guess 30%. Like, 80%, 29%, 87%. You might as well answer A lot of it. How much of your Internet consumption would you say is Internet pornography?

Maybe 5%, 3%.

Oh, my gosh.

None. 20%. Those were estimates. We still want some clear numbers, though. So we went down to the offices of our partners, Tech Insider, and I sat down with Katie Thompson. She's emerging tech editor at ti. She's covered porn and technology before, and she checked into it again for us. I asked her to give it to me straight, for real. How much of the Internet is porn?

A lot.

It's a lot, but we don't know a ton about exactly how much. Right. It's a little bit hard to pin down.

It's very hard to pin down. It's hard to quantify exactly. But the little glimpse that we get shows us that it's pretty significant.

Can you give me some specific stats?

The number of videos being viewed on porn sites is more than Netflix and Amazon, YouTube combined. It's pretty. These streaming services can't even touch it.

Why is it hard to pin down?

I spoke with an analyst who's actually studies the porn industry, and he couldn't even give me a number of websites. But in general, it seems that there is definitely over a million. Could be anywhere up to 5 million.

Beyond just the number of websites, what are some other web stats that we at least have a sense of when it comes to how much of the Internet is online porn?

Since we don't have a lot of hard data, it's interesting to look at specific porn websites data. And pornhub is actually one of the top five porn sites in terms of traffic and their numbers. Every year they release a report sort of looking back at the previous year, and their numbers are like, crazy. Their numbers are crazy. We've got about 78.9 billion videos viewed just on their platform alone. And to sort of put that into perspective, that comes to 11 videos viewed for every person on earth.

Tech Insider has good traffic, but maybe not that good yet.

We would be really happy with pornhub's traffic.

And increasingly there's like, mobile traffic.

Yeah. And the mobile traffic is really interesting because this is something that has just sort of exponentially grown ever since everyone started getting these mobile devices. And especially since now we have 3G, 4G wi fi. But not only that, people feel like on their mobile devices, they have more privacy. So you may not be logging into a porn site at work on your work computer, but you might have your mobile device and you're able to access it that way. I sort of realized that this was becoming a Huge trend. Last year, I was in a cab and I forgot my phone and I didn't have directions, and I asked the cab driver to borrow his phone.

And.

I opened it up to the browser and was shocked to see what I found. So it just really goes to show, though, that, like, this is something people are doing at all times. This is what my cab driver is doing in his free time on his phone. I dropped the phone.

I don't blame you. How did we arrive at this moment when a cab driver is watching porn on his phone in his cab? The answer can be found in another moment. During the financial crisis of 2008, some have called it one of the most brazen consolidations of power that the business world has ever seen. Because the financial world was coming apart at the seams, it was hard for companies to get access to capital, including porn production companies. At the same time, streaming video was really coming into its own. There were effectively a bunch of YouTube like sites for porn. That's David Auerbach. He writes for Slate and told us this story about how these free sites, also called tube sites, were consolidated. This company started buying up tube sites.

To the extent that that they now own eight out of the top 10.

That company is Mindgeek. You might have heard one of its former names, Mansef or Man Win. This company owns Pornhub, which you heard stats from earlier. David says, in this crucial moment, mindgeek was making tons of money on ads because people were going to its websites for pirated content. And it used that money to buy up many of the companies it was pirating from.

One of the comparisons would be made.

As though the Pirate Bay had bought Sony based on the profits it had made showing ads off of Sony's movies. Why don't you think more people know this story because it's porn? David says another reason this story isn't well known, people who make online porn actors and companies that are owned by mindgeek won't criticize them because they're afraid of being blacklisted or fired. Do you think Internet porn, under what some would argue as a monopoly of this company, do you think it's in a bad place? Yeah, I mean, it seems that the damage I see being done here is by mindgeek's monopoly. And that mindgeek's monopoly and its exercise.

Of power over that certainly comes much.

Closer to what I would describe as evil than anything else in this story, simply because it is hurting the livelihoods of a lot of people who are working hard in this industry. And Who I'm not inclined to judge. We reached out to mindgeek, but they didn't respond to our request for comment. We did talk to a small business owner whose livelihood is directly affected by mindgeek, and we asked her how she feels about her fans going to the company's sites to watch her work for free.

If you're going to consume pornography, stay the fuck off the tube sites.

That is Stoja. As porn stars go, she is kind of famous. She's big on Twitter. Her writing has been featured in magazines. Her early work is often easily found on free tube sites. The content she makes now goes straight to her own website, an Internet porn startup that she co founded, Trenchcodex.

Trenchcodex.com.com is very important.

Trenchcoat X is swimming against a tide of free online porn by asking users to pay a la carte, one video at a time. It's a Stoya versus Mind geek Goliath kind of thing. Stoya has been in the business 10 years. She reached a point where she wanted to get out of the mainstream stuff. She was making good money, but she wanted to change the power relationship. She also wanted to make porn on her own terms instead of being at the mercy of the latest fad.

Gosh, I think it was 2012 was the oil year. Somebody shot, somebody shot a video and she's covered in oil. And then everybody was covered in oil for like a year.

Stoia is definitely pro Internet porn. She says someone with her body type can only have a career because of the Internet, where there's room for more variety. She's built more like a model than your typical surgically enhanced porn star. And the best way for her to make money is on her website.

I don't even sell DVDs at conventions anymore. The best that I can move is a USB drive now instead of having to push to get those DVDs carried by Giggles, exclamation point, brick and mortar store now.

And that you have to go to.

And that you have to go to.

It's V scene going into.

Right now, people can just go into the Google machine.

But there are challenges like maintaining an online Persona as a porn star.

You know, they're the people who tell me they're gonna cut me open and fuck my spleen. Which has always been, if people have a way to say something nasty and get away with it, then some people are gonna say nasty things.

Another problem is that even with the size of the industry, there aren't a lot of advocates for adult film companies or actors to help Fight companies like Mindgeek, AKA Manwin. Does Stoja think there could be?

I really don't know. Do you hope that the people who used to put together those antitrust lawsuits put one together against them? Because, I mean, it's porn. Chase denied me a bank account a couple of years ago because porn, we're not of the sort of standing as an industry that somebody's going to put together an antitrust.

But the consumption is so huge.

And what do they consume? Porn.

Right.

What kind of porn? I don't know. Who's in it? What was the scene like? Well, this. Four minutes this happened. Who made it shrug? Yes. The consumption's huge, but it's consumed like tissues. So I don't know how you fight Manwin. You don't fix something by walking away from it. And so I'll just keep trying until I give up.

Stoya hasn't given up yet. She's hoping that people will keep buying the porn she's making and selling at Trenchcoat X. That's how she stays independent from the tube sites. And she wants to do that because the tube sites have lots of issues that there's one in particular she mentioned.

We really need to stop labeling product based on race.

As it turns out, the way that online porn gets organized brings up some pretty uncomfortable ideas. Tobin Lowe from Marketplace has been reporting on this. Hi, Tobin.

Hey, Ben.

So you came to us with a question you wanted to answer.

Right.

And it has to do with how Internet porn is categorized on tube sites.

Well, more specifically, how it gets tagged. So we have a site pulled up, and what we're looking at is a list of some of the tags that are used on these tube sites. Yep. So, Ben, if you would, would you mind reading them aloud?

Yes, I would, but I will. Anyway. A is for Asian. B is for Blowjob. C is for Cum. D is for Dick. E is for Ebony.

Right. So aside from being the dirtiest acrostic poem you've ever heard, does anything here jump out at you?

Yeah. Well, some of these are sex acts. Right. But some of them have to do with race.

Exactly. How did that get in there? It's kind of odd to have it in the mix with, say, the foot fetish material or bondage. And actually, it's kind of racist. So this brings me to my question.

Okay.

When it comes to the tagging of Internet porn, does it force us to think of race exclusively as a fetish? Or more simply, does it make us more racist?

All right, Tobin, tell us more.

First, there's A couple other questions to answer, like how porn came to be separated into categories in the first place. Is it a recent phenomenon? Not so much.

So this history of categorizing pornography by fetishes, including along lines of race, goes back to bookstores from the 20s and through the 50s, 60s and 70s.

This is Marie Miller Young. She wrote a book about how black women have historically been portrayed in pornography. She says that as long as porn has existed, it's been separated into categories. And that's because back when it was illegal, nobody wanted to talk about it.

So you didn't want to have someone who's a foot fetishist, which is quite a risque or taboo fetish, to have to walk into a bookstore store and say, I need the foot fetish material, please.

So store owners separated pornography into categories to make it easier to find what you wanted without having to ask. And those categories included race. So now we're going to fast forward to the next big shakeup in the porn industry, which happens in the 80s.

What happened in the 80s was that there was this huge explosion in video.

The porn industry goes from a few.

Hundred films a year to making, at the end of the 80s, 11,000 videos a year.

What 11,000 more movies a year means is that there's a lot more material for customers to sift through. So you have porn distributors who become even more invested in dividing these films into categories.

There was quite a bit of interest in making sure that there was a single section that would say, you know, ethnic video. And sometimes it would be broken down with interracial, which meant black and white, or black ebony was often the term used in the 80s. Thanks. Ebony and ivory.

So even as tastes evolve through the 90s, these porn categories that come from the 20s, they stick around. So Internet porn, it's not the culprit when it comes to highlighting race. That's been going on for a while. But when Internet porn does hit the scene, that's when the blame gets shifted a little.

When the tube site started, you had people taking other studios content and then posting it on tube sites.

This is Jack Shimama. He's been in the gay adult film industry for about 12 years, producing films, blogging about them. He says that when tube sites became popular, porn fans became a lot more involved with how porn showed up on the Internet.

Some of the tagging, some of the, you know, like the keyword tagging or the hashtagging isn't gonna be as elaborate or as detailed with the producers as it is with the fans who are Uploading stuff.

That means both the people who make porn and the people who love porn are tagging videos. And in a lot of cases, people uploading content to tube sites are using tags to reinterpret what's in the films. Jack remembers a movie he made showing up on a tube site. It featured two actors who had beards. He says when he made the film, it didn't even occur to him what they looked like.

I wouldn't have ever thought to, like, market this movie as a bearded movie or like a bearded, you know, a movie featuring bearded guys or whatever. But when it showed up online in a lot of the tube sites, some people didn't even put the title of the movie. They just retitled the movie. It's like bearded hipster porn.

So maybe retitling a film bearded hipster porn is not the worst thing in the world. I'm a bearded hipster. I'm not that offended. But the same thing happens with race, which is a whole other story. Videos are being uploaded and labeled with whatever tags the user sees fit.

There are certain code words that imply race sometimes.

Like, you'll see the word jungle thrown in for African American or tribal. Or you'll see a lot of, you know, really problematic racist sort of expressions as a racial shorthand.

So what does that say about the tagging of porn?

It's offensive to think about people being categorized based on what it was that was sexually arousing to a person or, you know, who was watching you have sex, you know, at the same time. That's what the world is.

This is Lenore Zion.

I'm a psy D. That means that I am a doctor of psychology, and I focused on treating sex addiction, sexual compulsivity, love addiction.

What do you. What do you tell people at, like, a dinner party that you do?

I usually say that. And then everybody wants to hear stories, and I tell them whatever stories I have.

Got it.

It's actually great dinner party conversation.

I think what I wanted to know from Lenore was the answer to my question. Pornography that tags race the same way it tags a fetish, does that make us more racist?

Because racism is irrational. It's hard to figure out what's going to fuel it and what's not.

You know, in my envisioning of how this story would go down, someone would be able to definitively tell me, like, yes, this categorization makes people more racist, or, no, it doesn't. And it just sounds like that won't exist.

I think that it's probably more a byproduct of racism than a cause. But I think that it encourages the continuation of racism.

A byproduct, not a cause. Everyone I talked to said basically the same thing. When it comes to tagging, this piece of the Internet pornography puzzle, it's not about how it influences us, but how we influence it. Tagging is someone saying, when I look at this video, this is what I see. And if it happens to be racist, well, we're looking at a screen, we're watching something, but we're also looking at our own reflection.

Alright, it's time for us to take stock. We've learned a lot. Online porn is an innovation, motivator. It's a web traffic behemoth. It brings business to sex toy shops and small startups, and yet it's helping to gut the larger adult film industry. It's part of the currency of predators. It might reinforce some of our ugly ideas about race. It might also help people understand where they are and what they say is kind of a sexual spectrum, a world that isn't simply binary. But is it evil? Anna Sale is The host of WMYC's podcast Death, Sex and Money, and she joins me to talk about this. Anna, thank you for joining you on the porn show.

You're welcome.

Yeah, thank you for doing this. Yeah, it's a weird topic and it's something that I've thought about in recent years just because I feel like anecdotally, it seems like the advent of the Internet has led to a growth in consumption. What were your opinions or thoughts about this before you listened to the stories that we've listened to?

I definitely have a sense that Internet porn is ubiquitous, that it's just like always one accidental click away if you, if you put in the wrong search terms or that it's just so easily accessible, that yes, it seems like it's more of a part of our culture. And the start of the show was very much like, not only is porn more of a part of our culture, but it's been a driver of innovation in our culture. So there's been this pornification of culture in that way as well. And so, yes, it's interesting for as little as we talk about porn in public settings, how much it is shaping not only potentially our intimate lives, but also our technological lives.

Right.

The question of whether it's evil or not, I've been thinking about that a lot. I was most interested in Stoia's story about the industry and trying to carve out a place for herself and just the way it's dominated by a single company. And I think that has shaped my answer to whether Internet porn is evil or not in a big way.

Okay.

It's my preview.

Okay. This story about Manwen. Mindgeek, Man, Ceph, whatever. It's called Mind Geek now, but it's gone through.

Used to be called Manwin.

Manwin.

Let's just sit with that for just a minute.

Yeah. And I think that, that. I think that that's like a coincidence, but it still feels so it's a coincidence.

I don't think it's a coincidence who came up with Manwin and didn't realize it was Manwin.

Yeah, but. So you're coming down with evil.

Okay, here's how I want to say it.

Okay.

I think desire is not evil.

Okay.

I think sex is not evil.

Right.

I think erotica is not evil.

Okay.

I do think Internet porn is evil.

Okay.

I think it's a part of our lives. But I just feel like if I could redesign Internet porn, there are a lot of things I would do to change it.

Should we detail those?

Well, the most basic is, I don't think at this point, the economics and the means of production and the way that the porn industry is working, it's really hard for me to think about where is the place to go for, like, free trade Internet porn where, you know, the performers are consenting adults and are paid well and are safe. That doesn't seem like a key principle of Internet porn. And so I just feel like, you know what? I think if the two choices are, like, good and evil, I feel like Internet porn right now, I'm coming down with evil.

Can you call something evil and have it still be a part of your life and the life of people around you? Yes. Right?

Yes.

I mean, and so it's hard in that way to call something like that evil because it does seem like it's a part of a lot of people's lives, and you don't want to judge people for using it. Right.

Yeah. It seems like you're being sanctimonious and, like, a negative Nancy, because, like, of course Internet porn is. It just is.

Yeah.

And so if you say it's evil, then what?

Right.

Like, but it could be less evil.

It could definitely be reformed to be less evil. But it's like, what's the driver that's going to make it less evil if.

It'S not at the consumer level in some ways. Stoia, also maybe people like Claire Kavanaugh, who, you know, that wants to help people and that is very open and thoughtful about the way that it does business. Right.

Internet porn has been bad for her business.

That's true.

As you pointed out, she's had to get out of the DVD business.

That's true.

There's no money in it anymore.

That's true. I guess those people are our only hope in terms of, like, reforming Internet pornography. Do you think that's gonna happen?

I think. Here's like, let's see.

Look into your Internet porn crystal ball, Anne.

Let's see. I feel like what's sort of an interesting idea is, like, Internet porn has to become less secret to be better, I think. Interesting because as long as it's this sort of, like, vice that people do.

In a private shameful on their own.

And it's like, it's in the shadows and it's in the gutters, and it's not artisanal.

Right, right.

So I think that's what I think would be the thing that would drive at least some larger segment of Internet porn to be. Just feel a little less skeevy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it costs money. That costs money.

That costs money.

You know, you could make the argument that greater access to porn is helping people connect to their sexuality in ways that they have never before.

Absolutely. I mean, literally, someone we talked to.

Said that was true.

Someone in this very show.

So we're saying it's evil. I feel good. I feel good. Do you feel good about this?

I feel like if there was a headline or a tweet, anna Sale says Internet porn is evil.

You wouldn't feel good about that.

I would be embarrassed. I would be like, anna Sale doesn't live in reality.

Right.

But I do think. I think porn on the Internet is getting more evil by the day than less evil.

Okay, cool. I feel good about that. I mean, we won't tweet about it. We'll just say it in this tiny room, and no one will ever know that we both think it's evil. But it's.

Here's my pitch. More people should read erotic fiction.

Oh, okay. That's less evil, definitely.

All right, well, go out to your local bookstore. Support your community. Community small business. Get yourself some erotic literature.

Anna sale, host of WMYC's podcast Death, Sex and Money. Anna, thank you for having this strange conversation with me.

Thank you for having me, Ben.

Next week on Code Breaker.

We could not pay for our electricity and water this month.

And we could get your inhaler. Also, don't forget, if you want to access all of this season's episodes, you don't have have to wait for them to come out. You do have to crack the code embedded in this episode though. We hope you'll love the out of these codes and that you'll put your efforts into cracking them all. Maybe they seem a little at times, but that's what we love to do and we hope they'll get your brains working hard and long on you can't. Once you get it, you can input the code at Codebreaker Codes. Our show is produced by Claire Tennisketter and edited by Dave Shaw. Special thanks to Betsy Streisand. Codebreaker is made in partnership with the nice folks at the website TechInsider IO. You should go there, read, watch, listen to our stories, theirs and more. Just don't believe what they say about us.

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I'm Ben Brock Johnson. Codebreaker is a Marketplace production from APM.