I mostly agree with you, but I wouldn't write off page 3 and the like that easily - they were the ones doing the countdowns to 16 year old's 'of age' birthday, when the average reader would have been a middle-aged man. But the fact that newspapers needed to be purchased did keep them generally away from kids, except for when the adults knowingly gave them to kids - or, if they found them in the woods.
Also, I think the nipples were always covered, by hands or a bra, so it's not that. I think the nipple hysteria has been an american import, who were always wound up by that more than the uk or certainly the rest of europe were - we have got to stop trying to americanise ourselves, it's fucking everything up. We kicked out the puritans for a reason.
There have been attempts to make 'feminist pornography' that focus on enjoyment, connection between the performers, etc, and they all fucking fail. So while I know prohibition isn't ever 100% successful it does at least force things back underground and out of easy reach - away from children. I think purely financial barriers now (like the tories' credit card suggestion) would be shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.
The Sun and the Sport’s page threes nearly always had their tits out and nipples exposed.
The mirror and the star usually had the girl being more “modest” but tits were not that big a deal then.
Yes I agree the creepy countdown to the age which they were legal was very sleazy, not that this made it better but it was in plain sight.
Financial barriers won’t work.
Plenty of people download the pictures and videos then put them up on other sites for free and accept ad revenue.
There will always be sites hosted elsewhere, Tor or vpn can easily navigate around restrictions and file sharing could just come back.
The major difference is that there is not the stigma anymore.
Previously, it wasn’t just reaching the age of 18, it was also to get anything other than a fairly soft tits and vadge mag, one had to go to a shady grubby porn shop.
This was also before the days of normalizing sex toys and such as well.
Fetish, porn and deviancy have all be shoved into the mainstream.
In the 70s at least, while swinging was said to be common, swinger parties definitely were behind closed doors and invitation only.
There was of course a crass and nasty element, but people into these things kept it private and it certainly wasn’t the case that swingers parties had a story time or kids corner.
Queen of the second wave herself, Germaine Greer, said that she thought things like Page 3 were cheerful fun. I tend to agree. Hard core pornography used to be seen as the reserve of dirty old men and the chronic masturbator was the butt of jokes.
I don’t think it’s just the Internet to blame, after all Millenials were the first generation to raise themselves via the Internet, and we’re all totally normal, though ease of access and the fast pace of it today seems to have induced a sort of societal attention deficit disorder.
I agree with most of your post but it is millennials who started this batshittery.
Your idea of normal is not the previous idea of normal, and as a late Gen Xer, I can tell!
There were some hints of increasing tolerance of troonery and the like in the 90s, but millennials were definitely behind the mid 2010s ideas of applauding gender identity.