The Erotic Engine: Sexual Media and Technology

The shift of adult film from theatres to home video is a standard scene in popular retellings of the 1970s and 1980s, including the Hollywood drama Boogie Nights, in which a veteran director weighs the arrival of videotape. Behind that scene sits a larger claim that sexual content has often been among the first commercial uses of a new communications medium. Canadian author Patchen Barss developed this argument in his book The Erotic Engine, which treats the subject as a serious historical question rather than a joke or an embarrassment.

The book asks not only whether pornography has been influential but why it has been so, and it places the question within the wider history of media and communication.

Early adopters across history

The argument runs that the pattern is far older than the VCR. Cave painting and carved stone, among the earliest forms of recorded human communication, include sexualized figures alongside other subjects. In the modern era, the technologies usually listed in this literature include photography, film, videocassettes, cable television, video on demand, bulletin board systems and many internet applications.

Such claims are debated among media historians, who generally agree that adult content helped fund and popularize several formats while disagreeing about how decisive it was in each case. Other factors, such as price, standards battles, studio strategy and consumer convenience, also shaped which technologies succeeded.

The idea of emergent sex

One idea associated with the book is what it calls emergent sex. The term covers erotic material created by users themselves, as in text exchanges in chat rooms, bulletin boards and virtual worlds. The usual explanation holds that technologies took off because they let people buy and watch adult material privately. Emergent sex complicates that picture, since it suggests that people also adopted tools to connect personally with others.

Institutions and the history they overlook

Scholars of media history note that mainstream companies and institutions often downplay the part adult content played in the growth of new formats and services. Commercial and reputational reasons are commonly given for this reluctance. Whether the lineage is acknowledged or ignored, historians point out that the details of any single case require documentary evidence and cannot be assumed from the general pattern.

Isolation and intimacy

Discussion of the technology also raises the question of whether it has reduced intimacy. Observers describe a trend from public cinemas to private screens that appears to point toward isolation. Others describe how the same tools have given people ways to form connections that might otherwise be unavailable, such as a person in a conservative community who explores identity in a virtual space. Research on the effects of pornography on relationships is mixed, and there is no simple answer.

Public debate also covers access by young people, since online material is reachable by minors. Researchers continue to study the effects of early exposure, findings vary, and Canadian law restricts the distribution of sexual material to minors.

Looking ahead

Virtual worlds and haptic technologies, which transmit touch, are often named as the difficult early-stage tools that adult content has historically adopted first. Historians treat such forecasts with caution, because the record shows that many early technologies never reached mainstream use.