This is for all the guys out there.

When I grew up, porn was a pretty strictly defined thing (Wikipedia defines porn as “the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter, especially with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer”).  We didn’t have the Internet, and none of the five TV channels we got showed anything racier than “Dallas.” Even when cable and satellite came along, MTV still showed music videos and they were pretty harmless (check out Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” video - it’s practically as innocent as Hannah Montana).

Porn was pretty much limited to videos (VHS tapes and even film reels) and magazines (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, etc.). To get porn you or your friends had to either find it in your parents’ closet or under your big brother’s mattress or go down to the corner store and look the sales clerk in the eye when you bought the magazine or rented the tape.

These specific things were Porn, everything else was Not Porn, and the line between them was clear.  If someone asked me when I was 15 “Have you looked at porn lately?” the answer was an easy yes or no - if I’d looked at Those Magazines or Those Videos the answer was yes; otherwise, no.

Now, we’ve opened Pandora’s Box and erased the line between Porn and Not Porn.

Network TV used to be Not Porn, but have you watched Dancing with the Stars, or Desperate Housewives, or a dozen other shows?  Or the commercials and promos during otherwise family-friendly shows?

Cable used to be Not Porn, but the sex scenes on The Real World clearly have the “intention of sexually exciting the viewer.”

And online is the most problematic.  It’s easy enough to avoid the dedicated Porn sites (Playboy.com and others).  But what about the “sexually exciting” material on YouTube, or Flickr, or Facebook, or any Google search?

I could ask a guy now “Have you looked at porn recently?” and he could honestly say he hasn’t looked at any  magazines or any videos or any porn sites but still have spent hours each day consuming sexually explicit material through all of these traditionally Not Porn avenues.

So now that porn is out of the box, the questions have to change.  It’s no longer “Have you looked at porn lately?”  It’s “What have you been looking at lately?”  And even moreso, it’s “Do you have X3Watch installed on all your computers?”  And it’s “Do your kids have a TV or computer (aka the Porn Pipelines) in their bedroom?”