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The notion that any new communications medium is soon used for sexual purposes is by now well known (Lyman, 2005; Morford, 2005; Stefanac, 1993; USA Today Tech Report, 1997; Weber, 1997). Only in the not-too-distant past did VCRs and video cameras experience a boom in which consumers voted with their pock- etbooks their approval of the availability of sexually explicit fi lms for their private use at home and participation in creating their own amateur productions for their own enjoyment. Similarly, writers in the media have noted that erotic imagery was depicted in cave drawings from 5000 B.C., ancient Greek and Egyptian art, as well as daguerreotype photographs during the American Civil War and libraries of images and interactive erotic multimedia on compact disks (CDs) today. Likewise, Gutenberg’s invention of movable type was soon used to produce erotic books, after his press was fi rst used to print the Bible; and from the technology of silent fi lms, and later those with sound, soon emerged those of the erotic variety. In addi- tion, early cable and pay-per-view television services depended on sexual material to launch these industries, and some services, such as the 1-900 telephone lines used for phone sex, have been virtual gold mines for the telecommunications industry, although this appears to have slowed somewhat as a result of free erotic chatrooms on the Web. As the USA Today Tech Report observed, then, sex on the Internet is just history repeating itself.

That dynamic continues to be felt as new technology has emerged, such as digital versatile disks (DVDs), high defi nition television (HDTV), and camera cell phones (leading to bans on their use, in this latter case, in some gyms and public bathrooms). Most recently, news reports surfaced that indicated that Apple’s new video iPod, Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP), newer cell phones, and similar portable devices would likely benefi t from the availability of miniature erotic fi lms, much to the (at least publicly expressed) chagrin of Apple Computer, Inc., and others (Hansen, 2004; Lyman, 2005; Tharp, 2005). Yet, it is diffi cult to imagine that they would eschew a signifi cant stimulus for sales. As one report noted:

“The degree to which the adult industry adopts iPod or PSP content is going to be an important factor in how the market grows for mobile video,” Yankee Group senior analyst Mike Goodman told MacNewsWorld. “The porn industry makes new markets— entirely new markets, time and time again. When they adopt it, that market grows.” (Lyman, 2005)

5 The Psychology of Sex

Podcasting, the process of downloading audio and video content to such devices from various Web sites, which has become hugely popular, will also be a likely source of “live” portable sexual content in the near future. At the same time, sex has begun to make its way into another recently popularized technology, blog- ging (from Web logs), which often documents in online diaries (blogs) the writers’ public and private lives and ideas in this newest form of journaling that often become online conversations of interested communities, which will be discussed in a later section. In my article on the sexual roots of terrorism (Noonan, 2004d),

I wrote, “Cherchez le sexe to determine the level of intensity with which terrorists will act to impose their visions on others” (p. 1139). Perhaps the same could be said with respect to gauging the potential future of any new technology as well, since popular culture is often driven or shaped by sexuality factors, which in turn shape its

technology and the political and psychosocial responses to both (Noonan, 2004c). Thus, we could say that two of humanity’s apparently primal urges, war and sex, have been important to the Internet, both having been crucial in the initial and continuing development of its technology. War, or at least the fear surrounding the potential devastating effects of the Cold War going hot (an idea perhaps fostered by

a 1964 RAND study, but now questioned, according to a discussion at Wikipedia, 2005), led in the 1960s to the perceived need to develop a communications system that could “intelligently” bypass possible catastrophic breaks in the system (or indi- vidual component failures) by rerouting information through other nodes of the system—hence, the “web” and “net” metaphors for the network by analogy to the web of a spider or a fi shing net. As a result, what was to become the Internet was born, as the ARPANET was initiated by the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) (Hardy, 1993; Moore, 1994). ARPANET was the fi rst wide-scale network using a packet-switched protocol that allowed discrete units of data (packets) to be routed through other computers on the network by whatever path was available to their fi nal destination, where the packets were reas- sembled to form the complete message. Hardy noted that the original intent of the ARPANET to function in the face of catastrophic damage at any point in its path was clearly shown by the Internet’s continued availability following the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, although telephone and other communications services in that area were disrupted. Similarly, the network has since continued to function following other catastrophic events, including the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001, the regional blackout of 2003 affecting several northeastern states in the U. S. and neighboring parts of Canada, and the devastating fl oods of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which destroyed or shut down huge chunks of the network in those areas. Indeed, the “wireless revolution,” still in its infancy, with cell phones and the Web using distant towers and satellites, promises to further enable these technologies in all spheres, as the process of convergence continues to meld the multifunctionality of these

various devices. And sex will be there to help facilitate (and fund) the process.

98 Raymond J. Noonan

Much as war and defense organizations were instrumental in funding the development of the early Internet at both the hardware and software levels, sexuality fueled many of the more recent developments of the Internet, particularly on the World Wide Web, as it became commercialized in the 1990s. The “adult entertainment” industry, another euphemism for sex-related services intended to stimulate erotic fantasies and sexual arousal, either masturbatory or couple-ori- ented, has been cited as one of the primary investors in extending the technology of the Internet (“An Adult Affair,” 1997; Hirsh, 2002; USA Today Tech Report, 1997; Weber, 1997). Sex helps to generate the revenues that both dictate and refi ne the emerging technologies that allow more compelling ways for the product to be delivered, often methods designed to more effectively involve the viewer/partici- pant. Other innovations aim at improving online commercial transactions. Among all these technologies have been videoconferencing, real-time streaming audio and video, online credit-card verifi cation and billing systems, digital compression techniques for interactive multimedia data, increasing broadband access, and so on. Many of these developments have become essential components in mainstream commerce on the Internet, as well as in the delivery of other services online.

Tracking down usage statistics of sexuality sites on the Web remains tricky at this time. Data published in 1995 might be relevant in a static marketplace or even in demographic studies, where supply and demand or population data might fl uctuate with some regularity and stability over many years. But the World Wide Web, which debuted in the early 1990s, was only starting to become popular in 1995 (Pike, 1995). By the closing years of the twentieth century, with both the market and the technology changing so rapidly, the Web had become a vastly different place, as it has become so in the fi rst few years of the new millennium, and as it will likely be even more different as time passes. And, as in most histories of the Internet or the Web, the role that sex has played tends be politely ignored. Nevertheless, some data are available, but keep in mind that reports of such data are often out of date even before they are published; thus, here they provide a glimpse of just a brief period of time from which to make future comparisons.

According to one report (Simons, 1996), adult entertainment sites accounted for about 10% of the merchant sites on the Web in 1996; only computer products and travel services accounted for more, about 27% and 24%, respectively. Forrester Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the few market research fi rms in the technology arena that even acknowledged the impact of sex-related factors, whose data were cited in the 1996 report, predicted that by the year 2000, adult- entertainment revenues would account for about 4% of all sales on the Internet. It would be infl uenced strongly, they said, by the increase in female and senior-citizen users in the coming years. Women, in particular, were expected to access fewer sex- related sites, although, as I anticipated, this proved to be true only with respect to many of the types of explicit sites available in 1996 that were targeted to the 60% of users who were male. The emergence of erotica designed for female audiences

5 The Psychology of Sex

outside the Web around that time suggested that women might enjoy a different kind of pornography, so its nature on the Internet would probably shift to include their interests, while not excluding those that many men seemed to prefer. Davis and Bauserman’s (1993) review of research fi ndings regarding sex differences in viewing sexually explicit materials would also tend to add support for this premise, since sexual explicitness in itself is not necessarily an issue for many women. I cited as an example, Candida Royalle’s Femme Productions (http://www.royalle.com/), which continues to produce such fi lms and has had great success in targeting the women’s market; it has also been hailed by some sexologists for promoting posi- tive sexual role models. Today, more and more informational Web sites on sexual health are also often addressed to women specifi cally, and there is no indication that these sites are not also popular for both women and men in search of such services. Nevertheless, more sites are being addressed specifi cally toward men’s issues, as generic Web sites have become less associated primarily with men, and as men have emerged as a distinct marketing target beyond their traditional boundaries.

The following year, a comprehensive report in Wired magazine (Rose, 1997) helped to put a better perspective on the entertainment aspects of sex on the Internet compared to entertainment products in other venues. They noted that the sex industry generated about $9 billion in revenues in the United States during 1996, more than the $8.15 billion and $5.9 billion garnered by the sale of prere- corded music and movie box-offi ce revenues, respectively, and less than the $11.18 billion spent by consumers on magazines and $26.1 billion on new books. Of the $9 billion spent for sex-related products and services (apparently, only those legally available were considered), a majority (more than $5 billion) was spent on video sales and rentals; $925 million was spent at online sex sites. In fact, sex sites were among the few Web offerings that were making a profi t, according to many observ- ers during those early years, although specifi c data were often lacking because these sites tended to be private, as opposed to public, ventures. And much of this profi t, according to the Wired and other reports, was being used to advance further developments of both the Internet’s infrastructure and the software being used to deliver information and entertainment.

Unfortunately, by 2002, most market research fi rms, including Forrester, cited in the Simon (1996) report, no longer covered the adult entertainment industry, according to Hirsh (2002). Thus, it is diffi cult to clarify how the fi gures have changed. However, CBS News’ 60 Minutes, in September 2004, estimated that Americans were spending about $10 billion a year on adult entertainment, noting further that it was as much as they were spending on professional sports events, buying music, or going out to movies. Thus, we might estimate that maybe there was a 10% increase over the previous eight years. Greenspan (2003) reported that online pornography accounted for $2.5 billion of the $57 billion market world- wide in 2003 (about 4%), and that the number of Web pages had increased over 1,850%, from 14 million in 1998 to about 260 million in 2003. Hansen (2004)

100 Raymond J. Noonan

noted that the research group Visiongain has predicted that “wireless porn” profi ts will hit $4 billion by 2006, refl ecting the burgeoning interest in wireless services in general, including wireless Internet. No research shows us a comparable picture of how many sex-related informational and educational Web sites exist and how many people use them, although one could probably safely assume they are nowhere near as prevalent as the entertainment ones. Here, we might observe that sexual arousal is more potent as entertainment or motivator, which is also a refl ection of life in the real world, than educational pursuits are in general.

T HE I NFLUENCE OF S EXUALITY ON N EW C OMMUNICATIONS M EDIA