Contemporaneous mundanity and pornography regulation by indifference

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the historical legacy of the decision by corporate video rental stores to not carry adult tapes. Connecting those decisions and their cultural impacts to the contemporary policies enacted by social media companies such as Facebook, the essay examines the long-term impact of indifference as a regulation effect, and how the public has been inculcated into a sense of normalcy surrounding the (physical and digital) demarcation of sexually explicit content. Finally, these impacts and legacies are placed into conversation with the corporate strategies of Mindgeek, parent company of Pornhub, as well as the current pandemic, in order to examine the ways in which the world is currently experiencing online pornography.

KEYWORDS:

• Home video
• social media
• Blockbuster
• Pornhub
• Mindgeek

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Mariah Larsson, Tommy Gustafsson, Peter Lehman, Klara Anberg, Giovanna Maina and Oliver Carter.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Final proof changes were submitted on January 5, 2021. Data from: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html.

2 The well-developed adult landscape that was online prior to the Tube sites included some websites featuring user-generated images; notable among them was Voyeurweb.com, created in 1997 (Lehman 1997). The key difference here, and an important detail in the history of sexually explicit material online, was that the mass dissemination of user-generated streaming video post YouTube began with PornoTube.com.

3 Years later, Barlow (2016) acknowledged the naivete of his original declaration, saying ‘I was susceptible to the view that in the absence of credible law, such “organic” methods of self-regulation might develop in the online world’.

4 I use the term ‘back room’ throughout this article as a stand-in for all the different ways video rental stores offer adult tapes, even though configurations varied widely (Alilunas 2016, 189–190).

5 The Video Vortex in North Carolina, unlike the others in Alamo’s chain, does not charge for video rentals, essentially making it a lending library.

6 The Video Vortex inventories are searchable online at videovortex.com.

7 WordPress parent company Automattic purchased Tumblr in August 2019 (Siegel 2019).