Porn is changing sex lives around the world

Even up to the middle of the 20th century, ignorance on sexual matters was widespread, not just in India, but around the western world. Up to the early 1900s, most people in England, for example, got their sex education from a sex manual and midwifery book called Aristotle's Masterpiece, a book, needless to say was never written by the famed Greek philosopher. When Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the US, which dispensed information on sex and contraception, she was arrested. It took the sexual revolution of the 1960s to bring sex into the open. But even so, to find out what really turned you on used to be hard work, says Mark Hay at aeon.co. "Figuring out what actually got your motor running required work and guts. You had to dig deep into the bargain boxes of porn shops, open up with strangers (or worse, those you loved), and pray that you could find someone who understood and would accommodate your desires," he writes.
In 2003 Peter Morley-Souter, a British teenager whose hobby was drawing comic strips with his sister Rose, was sent a parody of "Calvin and Hobbes", a strip about a six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger, by a friend. It showed the titular pair having sex with Calvin's mother. Morley-Souter posted his response online: a cartoon showing his shock as he stared at his screen (not shown), captioned "Rule 34: There is porn of it. No exceptions." And now, with websites and browsers tracking every move viewers make, porn sites have more and more information about individual user's kinks and fetishes than ever before, and content that is tailored to that specific kink or fetish is made more easily accessible. And these fetishes are changing sexuality. "Sexuality has always operated in tandem with pornography. Pornography tends to crystallise desires that you might not have articulated," says Michael Stabile, a spokesperson for the website Kink, which specializes in BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Submission and Masochism).
Almost every tube (porn) site now has complex tagging systems to optimise searches or to recommend videos based on your viewing habits, 'trending video' pages, and some kind of program to push certain content via those channels that'll draw and lock in desired users. And with familiarity, fetish becomes normal. "We like to think that we're totally capable of separating pornographic sex from real sex. But, a few decades back, anal was a relatively rare fetish. Today, it's the bread and butter of mainstream porn, and a routine element of everyday Americans' sex lives," writes Hay .