Writers are often counseled to lead with a grabby opening sentence, so be advised that this article is about sex. Oh, not the tame, predictable kind most folks practice at home, but $EX of the sort peddled by pornographers. This is about the business of sex and the big business it is. Although, clearly, not all revenues from the sex trade are reported, estimates place industry income between $10 billion and $20 billion annually. To put that in perspective, the lower figure represents more than Americans spend on sporting events and musical performances combined.

Last year, some $2 billion of that business was transacted over the Internet—that’s 5 percent of the nation’s total e-commerce. “Without question,” says Frederick S. Lane III, author of the eye-opening book Obscene Profits, “pornography has been the Word Wide Web’s major economic success.”

With impeccable documentation, Lane makes a compelling argument that the Internet is the best thing that ever happened to pornography and, conversely, that the skin trade is spurring Internet use and innovation.

Sex is one of the most often used search parameters on the Web, and it always returns a lot of hits. By authoritative estimates, there are some 30,000 adult Web sites now in operation, although social and religious conservatives insist the actual number is closer to 60,000, which suggests that they either spend a lot more time looking or are titillated twice as often by what they see.

In either case, as the numbers suggest, the Internet has solved many of the longstanding problems faced by pornographers: No longer do pillars of the community have to worry about someone spotting their car parked in front of Yolanda’s Sex Palace and Pleasure Emporium. The Internet delivers privacy for the customer and anonymity for the provider. It reduces startup costs and eliminates monthly rent or mortgage payments. It skirts property taxes, insurance, and the costly licensing process, which often limit where such business can be transacted. It demands fewer employees, reduces operating costs, negates the chance of getting robbed, and avoids the provocation of virtuous neighbors and indignant communities. No more tacky storefronts in some seedy part of town and no community backlash—just an IP address. From a pornographer’s perspective, what’s not to like?

Any industry that is almost exclusively visual is easily adapted to the Internet. Anything that can be digitized and stored on a computer can be made available to willing

viewers, bandwidth permitting. Pornographers quickly discovered that the high costs of printing and distributing glossy magazines could be eliminated because many more images could be stored online than could be squeezed into a single issue of a publication. Suddenly, Lane notes, caches of nearly worthless old photos and outdated movies became enormously valuable. No longer would a photo be limited to a single issue of a magazine or a sex film confined to a few thousand seedy screens around the country. In a heartbeat, the Internet made them available to 100 million screens.

The organized purveyors of pornography were not the only ones who took advantage of this new technology. For thousands of individuals, the Internet unleashed a long pent-up desire to see and be seen. “In less than a decade,” writes Lane, “anyone with a computer, a phone line, and a credit card could access unparalleled numbers of sexual images and could share their own sexual photos with the rest of the country.” Many did not even bother with pictures but installed Webcams in their bedrooms and broadcast live video of their amorous gymnastics.

The melding of pornography and technology actually began in the late ’70s during the electronic game craze. When Atari introduced the VCS 2600, a unit that allowed people to play games on their television screens, its open standard caught the attention of a Los Angeles adult entertainment firm. Lane recounts that the company released several sexually explicit games in 1982. It sold nearly 750,000 copies at $49.95 each. The race was on.

Likewise, as Lane documents, pornography has ridden the back of computer technology almost from the onset. The Apple II was the platform of choice for text-based erotica, the most popular of which was a program called Softporn. IBM’s introduction of its Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) limited the appeal of standalone text, so the game was updated with graphics and re-released under the name Leisure Suit Larry. Although it featured little actual nudity, the demand for titillation was such that, in one year, it “grossed between $20 million and $25 million.”

Meanwhile, other technologies were being developed that further simplified the production and distribution of pornography, most notably the VCR, the video camera, and later, the camcorder. Digital imaging technology eliminated costly film developing and dramatically reduced moviemaking costs. The VCR made wide-scale, anonymous home viewing possible. The demand was explosive. Lane reports that, between November of 1997 and November of 1998, the adult video industry rented $4.2 billion in tapes.

“Pornography,” says Lane, “played an important role in the growth of the BBS [Computerized Bulletin Board Services] industry.” Prior to the advent of the WWW, bulletin boards provided a popular means of sharing data and downloading images. Early providers like ExecPC quickly discovered that “some of the most popular images were those that featured nudity or sexual activity.” The company decided to give its customers what they wanted and soon amassed what it believed to be “the largest collection of adult material anywhere.” Demand was so great that a competing BBS, Event Horizons, employed 10 people just to scan images.

With the introduction of the WWW in 1994 and the graphical browser in 1995, the last deterrents to low-cost, wide-scale distribution and consumption of pornography were eliminated. Pornographers quickly migrated online and today remain some of the few consistent moneymakers on the Web. Competition, if you’ll pardon the expression, is stiff. Many operate on the fringes of legality, providing increasingly lewd and vulgar content in a rush to out-sleaze competing providers.

As with the tobacco industry, clients are pursued while they’re young. One of the most troubling trends is the proliferation of violent and sexually explicit games marketed to children. Lara Croft, the big-busted, gun-toting heroine of the Tomb Raider series, is little more than a virtual seduction. While the game features little overt sexuality, it is highly suggestive. So great is Croft’s appeal that her digitized bosom has launched dozens of spin-off enterprises, including Web sites with real people competing to see who looks the most like computer code.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s UltraVixen, touted as “the world’s first anime sex game.” The game’s creators advertise it as featuring “ultra sex” and “ultra violence.” Just the kind of thing you hoped your kids would download.

What’s next? Teledildonics for one thing. Teledildonics is a clever geek term for engaging in virtual sex. While we are still decades away from anything resembling Star Trek’s holodeck, the porn industry has made a modest contribution toward that aspiration. Lane reports that, just last year, a company calling itself SafeSexPlus.com introduced an interactive sex toy. The concept is relatively simple. A sex toy attaches to a user and a converter box. The converter is, in turn, “attached to the user’s computer screen with suction cups.” The box, Lane explains, “is positioned over a specific area of the screen, the brightness of which can be controlled by a remote partner.” The remote partner can then vary the brightness, “which makes the sex toy go faster or slower.” I doubt it will replace real sex anytime soon, but who knows?

So pervasive and profitable is cyberporn that it is fueling a quiet sexual revolution at a time when many of us have not yet recovered from the last one. Use of the Internet has hastened a major sociological shift toward the acceptance and dissemination of what just a decade ago was considered smut. It was easy to focus moral outrage when providers of pornographic material were clearly separate from their markets. But as Lane astutely observes, “Consumers of pornography became publishers and distributors.” We have met the enemy, and he is us.

At a recent conference, Lane reported that the president of the American Civil Liberties Union indicated “the tide has turned” in the public acceptance of pornography. Speaking of the $10 billion sex industry, she said, “it’s not 10 perverts spending $1 billion a year.” Indeed.

The moneymaking potential of pornography has not been lost on the mainstream business community. Lane recounts that The Wall Street Journal, never one to let morality intrude on profit, recently applauded the entre-preneurial efforts of a former stripper who now peddles her digitized booty over the Internet to some 17,000 members of her Web site for a tidy $2 million a year.

Telephone companies pick up as much as a half billion dollars a year from phone sex alone. ISPs make money off pornographic Web sites. Convention centers host industry tradeshows. How-to seminars are offered for entrepreneurs eager to get started. Yahoo! displays porn sites under the respectable heading of Business & Economy, giving them an unearned stature. Visa, MasterCard, and American Express allow their images to be displayed on pornographic Web sites as methods of payment. Cable TV makes highly explicit material available for a monthly fee. Traveling business people can now view pornographic films in upscale hotel rooms, and the hotel colludes by discretely keeping the name of the movie off the itemized bill. Everyone, it seems, is making money, and no one is complaining too loudly.

It’s all a rather sad confirmation of Marlene Dietrich’s observation about Americans and sex. “In America, sex is an obsession,” she said. “In other parts of the world, it is a fact.”