In September Joseph Gordon-Levitt released his romantic comedy about a young
man addicted to porn, Don Jon. I know that sounds weird, but yes,
it's a rom-com and one website ("Wired") calls it "the perfect
date movie."
The film actually has an impressive pedigree, starting with Gordon-Levitt as the writer, director, and star, but featuring as well Esquire's 2013 Sexiest Woman Alive, Scarlett Johansson as the vulgar sex kitten; love interest Julianne Moore as the mature woman young enough for hot sex in the car; and Tony Danza as the low-class New Jersey Italian-American father. Charming. And it gets worse.
The Gordon-Levitt lead character is very much a ladies' man, but he can't get good-enough sex with real women, not even with the Johansson character, so he watches internet porn after real sex, so he can have better sex with himself. Sweet, eh? It's the stuff of romance in the new millennium. The perfect date movie.
I won't go into the ways in which the movie may actually be better than it sounds (it is), but I will think a little about the size of the porn industry in America, which is the essential bedrock truth that the movie is built on. Porn is becoming the new sexual norm, not a deviant behavior, not something to be hidden away and ashamed of. Jennifer Aniston's television Friends watched it. Celebrity sex tapes are a dime a dozen. “Normal” couples routinely record themselves in action. And hotel pay-per-view X-rated movies make more money than mini-bars do.
The actual dollars-and-cents size of the porn industry in America is hard to pin down because of the diversity of the products that have different bookkeeping lines in a variety of different businesses, like movies, books, magazines, adult sex shops, internet websites, telephone sex lines, and more. And that doesn't include the entire hooker industry which is clearly related, but apparently on separate pages in the ledger.
Not all the porn profits (obviously) are reported to the IRS, which of course makes it literally impossible to calculate the overall size of smut, its real business value. And yet in a New York Times Magazine article (“Naked Capitalists,” 2001) by the estimable Frank Rich, we learn that if all the numbers were added up, the porn industry earns ten to fourteen billion dollars a year, which, even at the low-end $10 billion figure, makes the porn industry bigger than professional football, basketball, and baseball put together. And that was in 2001.
There are other ways besides dollars and cents to measure porn's popularity, as reported by such websites as CNN, CNBC, and the Huffington Post. As of this writing, it accounts for 30% of all data on the net, for example, with the most popular sites transferring 100 gigabytes of data per second during peak hours. Twelve of every hundred websites are dedicated to porn. At work, 20% of men access porn. Every second, an estimated 30,000 people are watching it, and from a quarter to a third of them are women. It turns out that Don Jon is right on point: art imitates life.
The film actually has an impressive pedigree, starting with Gordon-Levitt as the writer, director, and star, but featuring as well Esquire's 2013 Sexiest Woman Alive, Scarlett Johansson as the vulgar sex kitten; love interest Julianne Moore as the mature woman young enough for hot sex in the car; and Tony Danza as the low-class New Jersey Italian-American father. Charming. And it gets worse.
The Gordon-Levitt lead character is very much a ladies' man, but he can't get good-enough sex with real women, not even with the Johansson character, so he watches internet porn after real sex, so he can have better sex with himself. Sweet, eh? It's the stuff of romance in the new millennium. The perfect date movie.
I won't go into the ways in which the movie may actually be better than it sounds (it is), but I will think a little about the size of the porn industry in America, which is the essential bedrock truth that the movie is built on. Porn is becoming the new sexual norm, not a deviant behavior, not something to be hidden away and ashamed of. Jennifer Aniston's television Friends watched it. Celebrity sex tapes are a dime a dozen. “Normal” couples routinely record themselves in action. And hotel pay-per-view X-rated movies make more money than mini-bars do.
The actual dollars-and-cents size of the porn industry in America is hard to pin down because of the diversity of the products that have different bookkeeping lines in a variety of different businesses, like movies, books, magazines, adult sex shops, internet websites, telephone sex lines, and more. And that doesn't include the entire hooker industry which is clearly related, but apparently on separate pages in the ledger.
Not all the porn profits (obviously) are reported to the IRS, which of course makes it literally impossible to calculate the overall size of smut, its real business value. And yet in a New York Times Magazine article (“Naked Capitalists,” 2001) by the estimable Frank Rich, we learn that if all the numbers were added up, the porn industry earns ten to fourteen billion dollars a year, which, even at the low-end $10 billion figure, makes the porn industry bigger than professional football, basketball, and baseball put together. And that was in 2001.
There are other ways besides dollars and cents to measure porn's popularity, as reported by such websites as CNN, CNBC, and the Huffington Post. As of this writing, it accounts for 30% of all data on the net, for example, with the most popular sites transferring 100 gigabytes of data per second during peak hours. Twelve of every hundred websites are dedicated to porn. At work, 20% of men access porn. Every second, an estimated 30,000 people are watching it, and from a quarter to a third of them are women. It turns out that Don Jon is right on point: art imitates life.
