This is one of those needlessly overwrought questions to which the answer could, in the hands of a more skillful writer, be answered with elegant nuance. I am not one such writer.
The availability of porn is absolutely nothing like it was years ago. Young people genuinely don’t believe how little was available. By way of timeline:
- 1980s
- VHS tapes (and there was only one VHS player in the house, and the tapes were either bought in a sex shop, or brought home by someone’s uncle’s mate from a weekend he spent in Amsterdam
- Abandoned softcore porn magazine found in a hedge along with a Tennants supercan, which for some reason was also objectifying women
- Page 3 of a tabloid newspaper used to have a topless woman (and I know this is hard to believe)
- THERE WAS NO GENERALLY AVAILABLE ONLINE PORN
- 1990s
- VHS tapes, but now they were being duplicated by a lad called Harry on his twin deck VHS machine
- Pictures and very bad GIFs on the new internet thing using a 56k modem (if you were lucky)
- CD Roms with 25 minutes of big-hair semi-soft porn, also duplicated by Harry, but in digital ‘quality’
- Page 3 was still there.
- Sex tapes started being ‘leaked’
- 2000s
- DVDs, duplicated by Harry’s son when Harry was at work
- Videos online on sample sites, or you could pay if you had a credit card.
- Some more aggressive themes
- Beginning of wider availability of fetish themes such as (God help us) inter-racial, bukkake, gokkun etc etc ad nauseam
- Far too many people trying to beat world records
- Page 3 seemed really quaint at this stage.
- 2010s
- The beginning of the hellscape we have today.
- Hardcore, violent porn everywhere
- Porn is five keystrokes away (or less if you programme your mouse and I can’t believe that’s possible but it is)
- Sites like PornHub allow anyone to upload their own poorly filmed production
- Anyone who has ever taken a nude photograph can now see it for free online whether they put it there or not
- Revenge Porn
- 2020s
- OnlyFans has opened ‘being a porn star’ to literally anyone. In reality, it’s opened ‘being a marketing executive’ to anyone at all.
- Porn is everywhere, literally everywhere.
- There might even be porn on this page (there isn’t at the time of writing, but what if the letter M decides to set up an OnlyFans?
A better timeline could be constructed and probably already has, but are we objectifying women differently today? Yup.