Sex Power Money

by Sara Pascoe

  Quick ident of an old-fashioned computer monitor and dial-up modem noise.

  The presenter is walking around a museum pointing at flared trousers and bell-bottoms. ‘These would have been what the inventors were wearing,’ she says. A calendar flicks through the years until we hit 1973. ‘Disco Inferno’ plays as a computer in London connects with a computer in Norway. Networking is now global. The term ‘internet’ is first used. The presenter gets this fact tattooed on her body.

  Now Queen Elizabeth II is talking-heading. ‘I sent my first email in 1976,’ she says to the camera. The corgi on her lap yawns.

  Words appear on the screen in neon writing: ‘ARPANET’, ‘Transmission Control Protocol’, ‘Domain Name System’. ‘There’s a lot of jargon,’ says the presenter in voiceover.

  It’s 1984 and George Orwell talking-heads: ‘This was the year that William Gibson invented the term “cyberspace”. You should really be speaking to him. I was dead by now.’

  William Gibson says, ‘George Orwell has always been jealous of me.’

  Ident of a real mouse running across a mouse mat while a computer mouse watches.

  ‘1985,’ shouts the presenter from a clifftop, ‘and the first domain name is registered.’

  The presenter is standing holding hands with a hologram of Tim Berners Lee. ‘1990, and this guy –’ the hologram dances and waves – ‘invented HTML.’

  ‘1991’ flashes up on the screen in pink and the presenter lies on a waterbed. She turns towards the camera. ‘This is the year CERN introduced the public to the World Wide Web.’

  The Public is seated in a restaurant opposite the World Wide Web. They both say ‘How do you do?’ and eat lasagne. The World Wide Web begins to explain how next year both audio and video files will be shared via computers and that people will start using the term ‘surfing’ about going online. ‘Can’t surf without water,’ says the Public in a Yorkshire accent. The Web looks sad and misunderstood.

  Ident of a computer mouse running across a desk while a real mouse watches.

  The presenter climbs a fence and talks down the lens to us. She explains that by 1993 there were around six hundred websites, including ones for the White House and the UN. Yahoo! was born in 1994, Amazon, Craigslist and eBay in 1995.

  The presenter double-takes as a rabbit runs past looking worriedly at his watch. The rabbit notices her and the camera crew. He jumps away, the presenter follows and begins falling down a really massive hole. Familiar internet brand names whizz past her face as she falls. Google whacks her between the eyes and leaves a mark that says ‘1998’.

  The presenter wipes away her tears and speaks to camera. ‘We’re here, the year I got my first ever email address.’

  The presenter climbs out of the hole and wipes soil from her burkini. She begins to grapevine while doing a tuneful rap about the technology available in 1998. We STOP the video because we can’t bear white people culturally appropriating nostalgically.

  *

  The internet exists, we all use it. But when did people start using it for porn?

  * The shit bit of the song ‘Spaceman’ by Babylon Zoo is the majority of the song ‘Spaceman’ by Babylon Zoo, but that beginning, holy macaroni. It was a time of great hope for music and what it could achieve, those twenty-nine seconds.

  Who Wanked When?

  I got my first email address in 1998. I remember signing up to Yahoo! and asking what the point of it was. My friend Ben told me it meant you could get messages from people on a computer. I didn’t have a computer, nor did my friends, but now we could message each other whenever we were all in the computer room together. A computer room, a room with a computer in it. Now every room is the computer room, computers are so ubiquitous they’ve become invisible – I AM WRITING THIS ON A COMPUTER AND I HADN’T EVEN NOTICED.

  I went along with it, like I do everything, because I am weak. My email address was Sarayellowhat, inspired by a children’s book I hadn’t read, and the fact I had yellow hair. I don’t check that address any more so don’t think you can crack the code and send me critiques of my rapping.

  1998 was when I became aware of the internet as a thing, but I had no idea people were utilising this technology to access pornographic content. By the end of the nineties the market for internet porn was estimated to be worth between $750 million and $1 billion. That’s a lot of people spending some of their money on porn or Richard Branson* someone less litigious spending all of his.

  Figures estimating porn revenue are inexact because the people making the money often hide their income due to legal restrictions. Most banks and financial services refuse to create accounts for people and businesses who sell sex.

  Estimating the profits of any other industry is as simple as a trip to Companies House. If I wanted to tell you what the building trade was worth in 1998 I could. The figures in porn are curvy much guessier. We must don our monocles and be wary. Ditto with statistics, there are millions out there, enough to support any argument. Too often porn stats are used for dramatic effect by the media. For instance, there was an arresting Time magazine cover in 1995. If you Google it you’ll tremble to see the gaunt and gobsmacked young boy, his skin a pallid semen-blue. ‘EXCLUSIVE’, the magazine tells us; we lean in – we love capitalised words. ‘A new study’, we’re informed, shows ‘how pervasive and wild’ this new pornography is. This cover is designed to trigger concern. It aims to convey that online porn is damaging children, whether we can be bothered to read the article or not.

  The study was conducted by a research group at Carnegie Mellon University. They recorded online activity and claimed there was much more porn on the web than people realised, specifically that ‘83 per cent of images stored on Usenet were pornographic’. Usenet was a kind of bulletin board that preceded internet forums, with thousands and thousands of users, and from this statistic it was extrapolated that over 80 per cent of the internet was porn. The logic was that if three quarters of Usenet was pornographic images, so was three quarters of the rest of the internet. The statistic was ‘sticky’, easily requoted, shocking but believable. You may have heard such a figure yourself. Someone at university told me that 99 per cent of the internet was porn and I believed him. Why wouldn’t I? Statistics sound so correct and mathsy. Sex is a primal instinct, why wouldn’t it dominate any new technology? The guy was wearing a Care Bears tie, how could he be wrong?

  Do a little investigation into the Carnegie Mellon study and you’ll find that the Usenet boards studied were specifically set up for selling porn to adults. To be clear, 83 per cent of images in the porn image section of Usenet were pornographic. That means 17 per cent of the images in the porn groups were not pornographic, and I’m sorry, that is far more intriguing. What were they? Cats? Birthday cakes? Counting the percentage of porn in an online porn shop and presenting the results as perilous for children is like counting the dildos in a sex shop, then screaming on a front page about Toys ‘R’ Us selling rubber cocks to kids.

  Time magazine was forced to print a retraction, which was in small print and without an eye-catching cover image. Wrongness is much more fun than facts. Statistics that inflame emotions are far more likely to be repeated than those with boring qualifiers. We’ll be seeing more examples of this later, don’t worry. Don’t worry about anything – except that 100 per cent of murderers and people with erectile dysfunction have watched porn.

  I looked for a trustworthy graph showing the amount of people who were using the internet for porn in the 1990s and how that has increased until the present day. I wanted a clear idea of how quickly ‘no one has the internet’ became www.weallwatchporn.com. I’m certainly not representative of my generation, having to leave the room when Neighbours gets racy.

  I was struggling to find reliable stats so I changed tack. I decided to email Ben from college. I hadn’t spoken to him for twenty years but he was the person who got me electronic mailing in the first place. I was sure he’d appreciate this random missive asking if he kn
ew about internet porn in 1998.

  He replied so matter-of-factly, I couldn’t believe it: ‘Hey Sara. In answer, porn was available back then. My first sight of it was actually at fifteen when I visited my brother for his twenty-first. That was 1997. Take care.’

  Ben didn’t specify that he saw this 1997 porn online, so it’s not of much use, and he didn’t put any kisses at the end, which is mighty cold. But inspired by how willing he was to answer the question I decided to do a little non-scientific research and post on Facebook:†

  Notice the triple kiss, because I’m not a monster. You may also appreciate the thirty-seven ‘likes’ including my aunty Linda, and that seventy-five people commented – more participants than many studies I’ve seen quoted. I’m the new Alfred Kinsey.

  Most of the replies are people bragging that by 1998 they knew all about internet porn. My friend Aisling has sweetly commented that she didn’t know about it until her twenties, which makes me feel better about my ignorance. Me and Aisling have both been excluded from porny conversations because we are so cool we’re prone to high-pitched sermonising at the first hint of female objectification.

  I learned a lot from these replies. Matt says that in the late nineties he read magazines with a list of URLs in the back that linked to pictures of naked celebs. He says there wasn’t an engine where you could simply search, you had to know how to find what you were looking for. By 1999 he remembers looking at videos that were more like gifs because of file sizes and the time they took to download.

  Ed tells me (and nosy Aunty Linda) that in 1998 he was caught selling porn to boys in the year below at school. They’d plugged their phones into sockets around the school using dial-up to access images, and that was how the IT teacher worked out what was going on.

  Spencer is ten years older than me so was a grown-up with a job in 1998. He worked in computing and had access to new technology. His porn was on floppy disks, which he complains meant very low resolution. He says there was porn online from the mid-nineties but it was slow to load. By the early 2000s it was all much quicker, he rejoices, before mentioning that his first computer had a pornographic game on it called ‘MacPlaymate’, described poetically by Spencer as ‘you dropped items into a woman and she moaned louder and louder’.

  I stare at that sentence for a long time. Women aren’t shopping baskets, in my experience. I hadn’t been researching pornographic computer games because, honestly, I didn’t know they existed. Now I do. Someone helpfully tagged a YouTube link to Spencer’s comment. There’s a video on there that gives you a good look into at MacPlaymate. Here she is:

  Once you’ve entered the game you’ve got a ‘Toy Box’ full of dildo things, a lube tube and two disembodied hands. You click and drag these items and place them creepily on the Playmate’s body, while her breasts vibrate in the air like they can smell it. With the right combination of implements in/on her erogenous zones the Playmate will simulate increased arousal and eventually orgasm. So realistic! I love a pair of men’s hands on me but only if they’ve been lopped off. ‘Hey baby, let’s go to bed, but can you steal from a Saudi Arabian merchant first?’

  There are extra controls along the top: you can dress the woman in fetish gear or peekaboo underwear, provide her with a lesbian lover, print out your handiwork or PANIC. That’s my favourite button. PANIC – ‘I’m lubing a computer animation’s eye.’ PANIC – ‘What if I find real-life boobs disappointing because they hardly pulsate at all?’ PANIC – ‘What if life is a matrix and I exist inside someone’s Mac and all the sex I think I’m having is actually them clicking a dildo on me?’

  You’d be able to see the dildo floating around?

  Not if you’ve got lube in your eye. The instructions explain that the PANIC button is for those Playmating at work. When you press it the screen becomes an innocuous spreadsheet of Apple computer dealers. It’s a really pleasing detail. Technology is great.

  Back to my investigation of nineties porn. Sarah (who went to my school) says she knew stuff was on the internet, not because she’d looked but because porn sites ‘popped up’ all the time. She didn’t seek any out until after university (2003), when she got her own computer. Matthew says a similar thing, that it was easy to stumble on sites, especially if you typed a URL incorrectly, e.g. ‘hot male’ instead of ‘hotmail’ – YEAH RIGHT, MATTHEW. He says that if ‘very motivated’ it was possible to download content overnight, but that you had to be relatively tech-savvy to find things and have patience with connections and quality.

  JoJo is a couple of years older than me. In 1997 she went online with a Yahoo! site that was advertised as free, then earned her a £300 phone bill. The first word she ever searched was ‘cock’, which is hashtag on-brand for JoJo. The picture took twenty minutes to load, but she doesn’t say if it was worth the suspense, or the three hundred quid. Sean explains he had ‘fixed-medium porn’ back then (magazines/video tapes) rather than the internet; ditto for Will, who was working from 1997 but not using porn online until the early 2000s. Eve knew that people looked at sexy pictures on computers but also that they were slow to load. Charlie is younger than me. He says that in 1996 he was eleven and knew porn existed and what it looked like, but didn’t start watching until university in 2003.

  Joel says something interesting: apparently the regulations on porn had to catch up with technology, so ‘whereas porn was hard to access, once you did there was more wrong ’un stuff about if you were a wrong ’un’. By ‘wrong ’un stuff’ I’m assuming he means illegal practices like assault and paedophilia. Perhaps such material was closer to the surface in the early internet days? Howard is my ex-boyfriend Nicholas’s dad, so I’m really glad he’s joining in. Howard says, ‘I was aware of porn from about 1998 when NTL became a new broadband service and my friends at work said they’d been looking at it. Obviously it took an age for anything to load so it was not the most worthwhile activity.’ Howard wanted a quick wank, not a tantric two-hour self-loving session, hurry up internet.

  It’s something I haven’t considered before, but I guess the loading speed is an issue if the person masturbating has little privacy, if they’re living with other people. Someone might wake up, walk in. I guess that’s why people keep mentioning how slow it was, because for many people masturbatory material that appeared over an hour was tantalisingly un-useful.

  Rachel has sent me a private message. She was stripping in the late 1990s and reckons she had a good awareness of the sex industry in general around then. She writes: ‘In 1997 I don’t remember internet porn being much of a thing. What I do remember around that time was chatrooms, and people doing dirty typing in there. Some of the women at the club where I worked used to pre-arrange phone sex with their customers for later that evening, so that was a thing. I don’t remember any customers ever mentioning porn to us.’

  There are lots more messages but most of them are unoriginal, we’ve heard it already. My friend Nick goes off-piste, writing that he used to print pictures of bodybuilders and use the pages as porn, then asks, ‘Is this for material?’ No. 1, Nick, what has your hard-on for bodybuilders got to do with the internet, and no. 2, why would I do stand-up about what gay teenagers get up to with their parents’ printer? I’m a very intellectual act.

  Mark throws a spanner of ‘sexy Ceefax pages’ into the mixture. Ceefax is, or rather was, a text information service on television. It started in 1974 and died in 2012. ‘WTF, where?’ I demanded, and Mark sent me a link to some pages from the nineties. It isn’t porn, it’s pixelated neon-coloured womanly outlines and ads for phone sex. You can find these with a Google search if you want. They all look far too Microsoft Paint to imagine anyone was actually aroused, but it draws comparison with that ancient probable vagina – give a human male any surface, any platform, and he will draw a nudie woman there.

  Annelie says Literotica was available by the late nineties so I suppose we’d better find out what the merry hell that is.

  I love literature and I love sex so I’
m very excited by this mash-up. Literotica is a bright clunky page, all links, no images, and in a bulletin-board format, so potentially it hasn’t changed much in the last two decades. There’s the potential to live-chat with other users, links to stores selling sex toys and then a long list of erotic stories grouped by topic. The categories are what you’d expect for a porn site: ‘anal’, ‘incest’, one that I excitedly read as ‘ferrets’ but is actually ‘fetish’, which makes more sense. Some of the topic titles are intriguing: ‘loving wives’, ‘mind control’, ‘non-human’. If I’m completely honest, all I want to do is explore this website for the rest of my life. I might submit an erotic missive about a comedian writing a book who gets sidetracked reading horny stories about obedient wives loving their alien husbands who have hypnotised them.

  Sara tried to type facts but her hard nipples kept getting in the way.

  Stop it.

  Said the housewife softly to her alien master. His tentacles were getting slime on the curtains she’d made specially from her pubic hair.

  The link I felt drawn to was titled ‘How To’. This must be how Columbus felt when he arrived in America – some random navigation and suddenly a new-found land! Let’s slaughter natives explore.

  * The lawyers said I can’t insinuate that Mr Branson spent his entire fortune on porn in case he sues me. If he doesn’t want people thinking he’s a greedy porn hound, he shouldn’t have grown that beard.

  † A platform for sharing pictures and boring on about your kids that launched in 2004. I’m telling you this in case there is an environmental apocalypse and a paper copy of this book outlasts memory of social media.