Background+A


 * Background of Technology**

**Definition:** ﻿The legal definition of pornography is: The portrayal of sexual acts solely for the purpose of sexual arousal (Duhaime).

**Context 1: Cultural** Pornography would not exist if we did not allow it to exist. The acceptance of pornography from a society allows it to evolve and grow. The American culture has grown from the old days of over religious pilgrims to a high speed internet obsessed culture. Pornography has become more accessible over the years through cable and the internet. According to comScore Media Matrix over a third of websites can be considered part of the adult category. Through this accessibility more people take notice of pornography, creating more need, and even more outlets for pornography. The American culture has been changed by pornography and through changing has allowed pornography to grow. Creating pornography is no longer for women of ill repute, teenagers and your women now perform in front of cameras, and send pictures, usually to someone close to them, but it can quickly spread. With the spread of faster internet connections, the the wide use of webcams and phones with internet accessibility, it is not hard for young men and women to spread pictures of them selves all over the internet quickly. After a pictures is put out into the internet is is near impossible to track down all the copies of the pictures. Some women regret doing this afterwords and must receive counseling (Irvine, 2007).

**Context 2: Historical**

Pornography has, as we have discovered over the last couple of centuries, been around for a very, very long time. We have actually found paintings on rocks over different parts of the world depicting pornographic acts between ancient people. We don’t really have any way of figuring out if this was actually pornography, since there is a possibility that it could just be art, and there is no way that the paintings/drawings could be considered erotic as they are too primitive to do so. The amazing part about pornography is that very little has actually changed since the time that these drawings were painted. The Kama Sutra can be considered the first documented pornography and is actually still to this day one of the most popular forms. The Hindu people were very afraid at the fact that their creation would not survive on the paper it was put on, so they decorated their temples with many statues of people having sex. (Pravda, 2007).

“Porn”, which is a word that came from the Greeks, means “indecent pictures” or “depiction of whores”. This should really come as no surprise as the Greeks are synonymous for painting very explicit and obscene, although were not considered to be so at the time, drawings on the walls of just about all of their brothels. (Pravda, 2007).


 * Context 3: Technological **

Adult entertainment has always been on the cutting edge of technology, and they had to in order to become an over $1 billion a year industry. According to Gross (2010), the adult-entertainment industry has always been one of the first to embrace a new entertainment platform, assuming they didn’t help create it themselves. When the first public screening of a movie was released in 1895, pornography jumped on board and less than two years later the first recorded adult film was released. When the VCR first came out, Hollywood was hesitant in fear of piracy but the adult industry saw it as an opportunity to increase their market. Internet technologies such as Flash, streaming videos and credit-card verification can all be traced back to the adult entertainment industry. Pornographic producers have already integrated even the latest technologies such as the iPad or other tablet PCs and even 3-D televisions. No matter what the technology is, the adult entertainment industry will almost always either use it first or create it in the first place (Gross, 2010).


 * Transition statement: **

Continue on to see the impacts pornography has on society.

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