What is the 21st-century Pornopolis?
— It's My Bare Lady, a Fox reality television show that will send female porn stars to London this year, where they will "act" in theater.
— It's the Next American Sex Star, an Apprentice -like production on the Playboy Channel, in which striving starlets vie to be part of porn star Jenna Jameson's stable of entertainers.
— It's nude celebrities brooding on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine in February.
— It's even the disturbing images from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, broadcast for all the world to see in 2004.
— It's publishing houses like Harlequin and HarperCollins starting lines of even steamier romance novels.
— It's even the word “porn,” which now is used to describe a variety of relationships consumers have with compelling things. The Canadian province of Quebec, for instance, promoted itself with the tag "Food Porn" in a recent advertising campaign. A Slate.com writer referred to the New York Times' "Vows" column as "bridal porn."
— It's Paris Hilton vaulting from unknown socialite to hot celebrity after the release of a pornographic sex tape involving her and an ex-boyfriend.
— It's Jameson becoming a mainstream "brand," complete with books, television shows, movie appearances and a flourishing media schedule.
— It's nearly everybody having seen hard-core pornography, and many spending a lot of time flirting with it: Teenagers wearing thongs, men at bars popping Viagra like mints to keep them be as energetic as the men in porn, and sex toys trumpeted by porn stars being sold at suburban house parties.
The Pornopolis celebrates sex and sexuality. It encourages everyone, everywhere, to join the party and get nasty.
Tupperware parties are ancient. Now suburban women in the US host sex-toy sleepovers instead. The newest of these "home party networks," Jenna's Playthings, is based in Denver and owned by Jameson's lawyer, who lives in the area.
In the Pornopolis, the hyper-orgasmic, Olympian carnal performances of porn stars get confused with what really does, or at least realistically can, go on in the bedroom.
"There are a lot of younger men in particular who are really struggling with what sex is," says celebrity sex educator and counselor Laura Berman, who is filming a reality TV show with Showtime Network about real couples and their sex lives.
"Before, most men saw National Geographic or a Playboy but learned about what sex was through being with women. Now they are learning about what sex is through porn, which is not a realistic depiction of what women look like, what sex is and what pleasures women.”
It remains an open question whether exposure to pornography influenced University of Colorado senior Brian Beverly's understanding of sex and sexuality.
But there's no doubt the 20-year-old physics major has seen plenty of it.
Where a rite of passage for earlier generations was finding dad's stack of Playboys, for Beverly, it was gathering at the house in the neighborhood with the first broadband connection and watching hard-core pornography movies.
"Playboy now is nothing," he says. "A naked girl — it's nothing exciting. People are so used to hard-core images."
Beverly sat in the student union cafeteria with Olivia Gass, 20, a studio arts major, their table strewn with books and other reading materials.
Gass says pornography doesn't bother her, and she has no problem with people who elect to become actors in the industry. "I don't think of porn as glamorous," she says, "but I can see how someone would."
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