I’m someone that grew up almost contemporaneously with the popular Internet, perhaps my years marching a little ahead of the Internet’s. That’s to say that I have almost no memory of life-before-the-Internet, and certainly no sexual memory before the Internet – none whatsoever. I wonder how that will affect my generation in the long run?

Pornography has always been amazingly accessible to my cohort – and not just the vanilla stuff of course. I suppose the major danger of such a porn-saturated ‘net is that the chances of young person happening upon some ‘extra-creative’ kind of porn is enormous now, as is all the troubling surprise this could cause. Beyond that though, I wonder what the simple availability of porn does on the scale of generations. I’m reminded of the scene in Brighton Beach Memoirs (1930s) when Eugene is given an old postcard depicting a naked French woman – and how monumentally exciting this is for him. Talk about sexual awakening! But you show that postcard to a pubescent teenager that’s grown up in the internet age? I can’t imagine that postcard would hold much interest. Whether through desensitization or an expectation of technicolor streamable movement, who knows. But this sort of mismatch between how teenagers of various eras were exposed to sex seems to me an interesting one.

If people found this piece interesting, be sure to check out another Aeon essay: Pornucopia.

Sam Dresser

Written by Sam Dresser

Edited by Sam Dresser