#PodcastPick – The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson
This is a podcast about porn. You might think that listening to a (rich) straight white man talk about the porn industry would be eye-rollingly irritating, but in this podcast series Ronson takes a refreshingly holistic approach.
Whether you’re a weathered porn veteran or a total newbie, you probably don’t know too much about the explosion of free internet porn that took place in the late noughties- which I’ll hereafter refer to as ‘the big bang.’ Up until this point, porn had been relatively hard to come by (forgive me). You could find it on that section of the magazine shelf, or rent it on DVD, but you couldn’t Google a precise combination of search terms which would miraculously deliver your exact brand of porn to your desktop.
In order to fully understand the big bang, Ronson must take a deep dive into the career of Fabian Thylmann, a millionaire mogul who owns the three most popular streaming sites out there - PornHub, RedTube and YouPorn.
This podcast explores Thylmann’s influence on the industry as a whole, but he also looks into the extreme availability of porn, and how that has changed an entire generation’s relationship with sex. In one memorable moment, a male pornstar resorts to watching a porn movie in order to sustain his erection, while a naked female pornstar stands in front of him.
In a world which demands that women conform to impossible physical standards, while rates of erectile dysfunction rise and the percentage of people having regular sex dwindles, it's fascinating to consider that porn might be partially responsible.
You can listen to The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson here.
