Humans have been creating images of sex and genitalia for millions of years, but it is only in the past few centuries—since the 1600s, according to historians—that these representations started meeting academics’ preferred definition of pornography, which involves both the violation of taboos and the intention of arousal. The first efforts to make money off of this new endeavor could not have come long after that. [...]
Shira Tarrant: It's hard for several reasons. Official records are hard to come by. Many productions don't even keep official records, and there are very few researchers looking at the economic side of porn, because a lot of times for academics and researchers, pornography is viewed as a sort of LOL, to-the-side kind of thing, rather than the very serious financial and economic matter that it is. This is true for the industry's revenues, but also for pay rates for individual actors. So those numbers get a little fuzzy, even though the industry is willing to say that it's suffering from piracy and after the Great Recession, and things like that. [...]
Making ethical decisions about pornography means knowing where your porn comes from and the labor conditions under which it was made. Those are the sorts of questions that economists are concerned with. If we're willing to be concerned about those issues when it comes to sneakers or food, then we need to transfer those concerns to the adult industry as well. [...]
Tarrant: I like the comparison that you use—that the algorithm is not unlike algorithms that Amazon or Netflix use, or the ads on Facebook based on your browser history elsewhere. Again, there's that part of their rational brain that turns off and they think that pornography is this whole other kind of experience that is unlike the rest of their consumer history online. It starts with how pornography is keyworded. So, people put in search terms, but those search terms aren't all that original, really. Because where do we learn the search words that we're looking for? It's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. And so porn gets keyworded in very stereotyped, often sexist, often racist ways, and also just with a narrow-minded view of sexuality.
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