Stardate 20020514.1905

(On Screen): People like sex.

That's quite a revelation, isn't it? Humans love to screw around. We like looking at other people who we think are sexually attractive. And it's even more fun wrestling with them.

And if we can't look at them in life, we like thinking about them, and it's always nice to have help with that.

There has never been a communication medium developed by humans which wasn't used almost immediately for pornography if it could be. Some of the earliest carved objects found in Paleolithic sites include little carved figures resembling wildly-exaggerated female figures. The conventional wisdom is that they're fertility goddesses. I think they're porn.

The Romans had a major industry making and selling books (scrolls) and ones about sexual matters were very popular and always sold well.

When Pompeii was first excavated in the mid 18th century, they were rather scandalized to find quite explicit paintings on the walls there. And nude statues were very popular, too.

Did someone say "Kama Sutra"?

There have always been erotic plays, and erotic dances (Salome?). One book in the Old Testament is full of erotic poetry.

Nude people have been a favorite subject of painters all through history. All in the name of Art, of course...

With the development of photography, one of the first things that got photographed was nude bodies. Motion pictures of nude people were created even before the development of modern movie cameras, by use of banks of still cameras. All in the name of Science, of course...

The only times that this wasn't permitted was when governments stepped in and brutally enforced censorship. Radio has never carried much in the way of erotic material, and neither has broadcast TV in the US (although elsewhere it does). But on cable, erotic TV channels started appearing very early.

It's widely considered to be the case that porn was responsible for establishing the pre-recorded videotape industry and putting a critical mass of VCRs into the home for other producers to address with less (ahem) stimulating material.

And almost as soon as the Internet began to appear, one thing that began moving around on it was pictures of naked bodies. At one time it was estimated that fully one third of the bits moving on the major backbones encoded GIF and JPG files which were, shall we say, not ready for prime time.

This is not confined to the US or Europe; you find this happening everywhere, in all languages and cultures. When given an opportunity, a substantial portion of any and every population will demonstrate a healthy interest in sex and will use any medium possible to seek it.

You'd think that Those Who Lead Us would have figured this out a long time ago, but they're in denial. Kuwait, for instance, authorized the creation of a series of "Internet Cafes", places where those who didn't have their own connections to the net could go to plug in. Then they found out that a lot of the people (i.e. men) going there were hunting for porn (which is, of course, readily available online).

The authorities in Kuwait were scandalized and have closed 50 of said internet cafes. What, exactly, did they expect, anyway? Huge numbers of people reading online copies of the Q'uran?