The hypocrisy of porn

In public we cringe at the thought of pornography. We turn our noses up to this supposed perverse form of entertainment and present ourselves as being somehow above the low lifes and creeps who view that stuff.
Unfortunately for our mythologized public image, it is more likely than not that we have at some time viewed pornography.
Perhaps more interestingly, it is likely that the person beside you, the professor at the front of the class, your parents or maybe even your girlfriend or boyfriend are avid consumers of pornography.
There are numerous disconnects between the realities of the market for adult entertainment and how people discuss it. It would be hard to find someone who would publicly admit to viewing porn on a regular basis, yet all statistics show that it is popular beyond the scope that most of us realize.
The amount of money people pay to see others frolicking in the nude is staggering. Canadians spend about a billion dollars on pornography a year. Worldwide it is almost a $98 billion dollar industry. To put that in perspective; that is more money than the top technology based companies combined (eBay, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Netflix). For an industry that nobody seems to be consumers of, it seems to be doing well for itself.
We may have an image in our minds of dirty old men in trench coats shopping in the back rooms of adult book stores, but the pervasiveness of pornography is far more basic than that.
The Internet is a virtual cornucopia of pornography, driven by what seems like an insatiable desire that consumers have for it. People often discuss how much of the Internet is pornography (roughly 12 per cent of all Web Pages are porn) but there is a reason for this; people want it.
Twenty five per cent of all search engine queries relate to sex. People joke about accidentally stumbling onto a porn Web site through what seemed like an innocent search, and there is a reason that this happens so often. Search engines are designed to help people find what they are looking for, and evidently what people are looking for much of the time is pornography.
Sex is the most searched for word on the Internet. That may not surprise you, but the fact that women are as likely as men to be searching it might. Women make up a third of all visitors to pornography Web sites. Though this is still far less than men, they are a major economic factor nonetheless.
People often decry the pornography industry as exploitative, and there are often concerns raised about children and contact with this industry. What people rarely realize is that our own repressiveness is what allows for the industry to be that way it is.
We live in a society that has an identity crisis. In the public sphere people are expected to live by some abstract and impossible moral standard. This expectation comes with certain assumptions about their sexuality that are usually fairly repressive. We aren't comfortable imagining other people as sexual beings, nor are we comfortable with others thinking of us that way. Despite this tension it seems undeniable that the cliché "sex sells" is fairly accurate.
Products of all kinds are sold to us using sexual imagery. Every major form of entertainment emphasizes sexuality, regardless of its relevance to the medium. Businesses do this because it works. As the popularity of pornography shows, people are interested in sex.
Our public denial of this creates the conditions where salacious advertising is both pervasive and effective. It is also why people are driven to seek out sexual entertainment and are willing to pay billions of dollars for it.
I think that before we stand on our soapboxes and denounce the adult entertainment industry for all of its problems we need to take some responsibility.
First, we need to be honest about how we may have directly contributed to it. Secondly, as well as realize that by being sexually repressive we are creating a demand for pornography that rivals or surpasses almost every other form of entertainment.