Photograph Source: Sobsz – Public Domain
When was the last time you watched a porn flick? It doesn’t matter whether you are a woman or man, whether straight or gay, whether you watched it alone or with another, or whether it is a romantic, feminist or “gonzo” video. Want to bet you saw it in the privacy of your home, on a digital TV, computer or mobile device like a smartphone or tablet, and that you accessed it via an internet connection?
Over the last half-century, pornography has been increasingly “democratized” and, in the process, transformed. Once upon a time men (and some women), often dubbed “the raincoat crowd,” slinked into shops in down-market parts of town to purchase print porn magazines, 8-mm and 16-mm films, and assorted sex toys. Those days are over.
Nothing contributed more to the “mainstreaming” of explicit sexual materials than home video. By the 1980s, it became a consumer-electronics industry “truism” that no new major programming-driven new-media entertainment product could be introduced without a strong “adult” component. This applied equally to cable TV, DBS, computer software, CD-ROM titles and online services.
No one knows the real size of today’s porn market. The true financial goings-on of the commercial porn industry are like an old Sally Rand fan dance; nothing is really exposed. Estimates as the size of the business range across the board. BedBible estimates the U.S. porn industry revenue for 2024 at $13 billion and the global market at $100 billion.
As expected, males make up more than four-fifths (82%) of viewers while females make up less than one-fifth (18%). It is estimated that the average length of time spent on Xvideo at 15 minutes. From an aesthetic perspective, sadly, most people receive their digital video feeds using low resolution.
DIY or user-generated content (UGC) emerged with the Polaroid camera introduced in 1948, enabling the first-generation amateur still-image pornography. It was followed by the Xerox copier of the ‘60s that enabled the unlimited reproduction of black-and-white pornographic images and culminated with home video that, by 1986, saw DIY porn account for 30 percent of the home video market.
America has been fighting porn wars since before the nation was founded. William Pynchon, the founder of Springfield, MA, published The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, a challenge to Puritan power. The book was banned, copies seized and they were burned in the Boston Common in 1651, the first banned book in American history. In 1873, Pres. Ulysses Grant signed the anti-obscenity law, popularly known as the Comstock Act, that barred all forms of “obscene” materials from the U.S., including medical information about contraception.
Three centuries later, Susan Sontag introduced the concept, “the pornographic imagination,” in a 1967 Partisan Review essay. The article appeared three years after Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously declared, in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), “I know it when I see it,” to distinguish “hard” from “soft” core pornography, obscenity from art.
Now, a half-century later, porn is a booming multi-billion-dollar industry. In 2023, Texas adopted HB 1181 that mandates age verification for any commercial website where more than one-third of the content is deemed “harmful to minors”. In 2025, the Supreme Court ruled, in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, that it was legal for states to restrict access to adult websites like Pornhub and XVideos. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, “The power to require age verification is within a State’s authority to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content.”
Currently, at least 25 states have enacted laws requiring commercial pornography websites to perform strict age verification to prevent minors from accessing adult content. States often require visitors to upload government-issued IDs for age verification.
However, the biggest change in the porn industry might be the use of Artificial Intelligence. According an August 2026 report, 46 states have enacted laws that criminalize AI-generated or computer-edited Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) documented a 1,325 percent increase in AI-generated CSAM reports between 2023 and 2024, representing 67,000 reports. By June 2025, preliminary figures showed 440,419 new reports involving AI-generated child sexual abuse material, up from 6,835 during the same period in 2024. Making matters worse, NCMEC reports that since 2021, “at least 36 teenage boys have taken their lives because they were victimized by sextortion.”
In 2016, Pres. Donald Trump signed the “Children’s Internet Safety Presidential Pledge,” backed by the anti-pornography advocacy group Enough Is Enough. Nearly a decade later, in 2025, he signed the “Take It Down Act” that requires streaming platforms to refrain from carrying “non-consensual sexually exploitative images,” sometimes called “revenge porn,” as well as deepfakes created by artificial intelligence. One can only wonder when the Trump administration will seek to regulate, if not suppress, adult pornography.
