The owners of porn Web sites make more than a billion dollars in annual revenue. Young people growing up in America are almost guaranteed to encounter online porn by the time they are teenagers. Every day, around 130 million people visit the Pornhub Web site, the world’s most popular online porn platform, with the United States generating the most traffic.
Plenty of people—from politicians and activists to sex workers and religious leaders—are outspoken in their beliefs about what we should do about the proliferation of online porn, from how to prohibit young people’s access to removing illegal content and protecting the safety of performers. But as a sociologist, I approach the topic from a different angle.
