A History of Amateur Porn
The excellent blog SugarBank (NSFW) has a detailed post about the history of internet Amateur Porn:
Today, most people only know newsgroups via services like SkinVideo, but back in the early nineties, when I upgraded to a 28.8K modem and paid $4,000 for a 2GB disk-drive the size of a shoebox, the only way to get images online was to download small files from newsgroups and stitch them together for display on-screen. The difficulty of the process meant that only scientists and perverts bothered. Swingers and strippers, who had a history of being nude in public, flocked to it, and stocked the net with free porn.
I think it’s fascinating how these exhibitionists started making money for doing something they wanted to do anyway: post pictures of themselves having sex on the internet for thousands to see.
What’s really interesting is the fact that what we now view as “Amateur Porn” really isn’t amateur at all. The word “Amateur” has become a style of shooting a sex scene, rather than the lack-of-means to do it artfully.
Related posts: How influential is porn?, The hardships of owning a brothel
