America's love-hate relationship with porn

We consume a lot of porn. We also look down on it.

Porn sign
(Image credit: (Geoffrey Gove/Corbis))

Pornography has been a fixture of human culture since the dawn of civilization, if not before. Yet it's safe to say that, thanks to advances in technology, there's never been a culture that's produced and consumed quite as much porn as ours.

The number of porn-related websites worldwide has been estimated at 25 million, with a quarter of all search-engine requests involving sexually explicit terms. That adds up to a nearly $5 billion-a-year industry, with over half of that amount coming from the U.S. — though that number doesn't fully capture the industry's size, since so much porn is available for free online through massive clearinghouse sites such as YouPorn, PornHub, and Xvideos. The last of these — the single largest porn site on the web — receives roughly 4.4 billion page views per month. That's about three times the size of CNN.com.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.