The Butterfly Effect

What a bizarre, tragic, funny, weird journey Ronson takes us on with this, a strange peek into some of the corners and offshoots of the porn industry.

I love Ronson's stuff, but my standard complaint still applies. Ronson digs, finds the most fascinating people, then settles for asking only a handful of questions before moving on to the next. I understand that he's got lots of people to get through, but there's times where we're given only a glimpse, a chance to touch only the surface, without any opportunity to dig deeper, to get to the roots.

That frustrates me, all the time I'm being entertained by what I do get.

Just once, I'd love Ronson to go in depth with a single topic.

Jon Ronson's audiobook (podcast?) is a fascinating peek into a shadowy industry. There are many things wrong about the ubiquity of free, easily Googled pornography on the Internet. Ronson talks to those who have been victimized but don't receive any sympathy: the creators of said pornography and some consumers who have experienced extreme consequences as a result of their indulgences.

[a: Jon Ronson|1218|Jon Ronson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1428023511p2/1218.jpg] is one of my favorite authors. I'll put that out there right now. He's consistently informative and amusing, while still treating his subjects with the curiosity and empathy that I wish more authors had. No matter how absurd the subject Ronson approaches is, he handles it with care. That was no different with this series, which dealt with a very strange subject indeed.

[b: The Butterfly Effect|35841729|The Butterfly Effect|Jon Ronson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1501291693s/35841729.jpg|57352321] focuses upon the invention of free internet porn. In the early 2000s a fellow named Fabian pioneered the service that allowed people to upload their show more own videos to the web. Ronson asked the natural question: How did the invention of free streaming internet porn affect that industry at large? More, what did its butterfly effect spread throughout our culture? How did it affect legislation, children, and porn stars?

This series was enlightening and maddening, fascinating and laden with empathy. Ronson interviewed the man who started it all, and directors, actors, people who purchase custom pornographic films, and the people who purchase sex dolls. He interviewed people charged as sexual offenders for the simple act of sending a text message or playing a game at a sleepover at the age of 7.

Two of the most heartwrenching moments for me throughout the series was a fellow he interviewed who talked about buying a sex doll. The doll resembled his sister, who had long since passed. He bought the doll to put it in a chair in his mother's house, as his mother suffered from Alzheimers and he couldn't bear putting her through the explanation of how his sister died every single day. The other was a fellow who requested a custom pornographic film that only included the woman telling him that people cared, people loved him, and that he didn't need to kill himself. Nothing sexual, just a reassuring message. The people involved didn't charge him, and simply hoped the video got to him before it was too late.

The world is a place both wonderful and strange. I'm forever grateful there are people like Ronson who highlight that fact. show less

The Butterfly Effect is an original Audible documentary. In it, Ronson explores how technology has changed the porn industry and by extension all of us. He begins by interviewing the man who used technology to create what became PornHub, a YouTube-style platform for porn. This discursive approach takes in, among other things, porn stars in the San Fernando Valley, the death of an Italian priest, and a Norwegian stamp collector.

Ronson is a sensitive interviewer, letting people tell their own story. He’s also a great storyteller and each episode has intriguing hooks, twists and a teaser ending so you have to keep listening. I’m almost afraid of giving spoilers, but certain things particularly stayed with me.

In Montreal, the data show more analysts who worked behind the scenes at PornHub were almost oblivious (or in denial) of what they were working on. They just focused on the task. Meanwhile, a whole generation of women lost work in porn because of the search categories that they created in response to the way people access porn. Women under 20 get work in the ‘babysitter’ and ‘cheerleader’ categories, women over 30 get the ‘milf’ roles, but between those ages they are unemployable. (There’s an interesting analogy here with Amazon’s book categories, where discoverability is increasingly driven by genre.)

In another episode, Ronson is on a porn set during the making of a movie. There is an orgy scene and many of the male performers are watching porn on their phones so they can get an erection. It seems watching someone have sex with a porn star is more arousing than the imminent prospect of actually doing it. The analogy here hardly needs stating.

Ronson doesn’t take a position on porn per se but he considers the way in which people ignore the human consequences of porn and the way in which they simultaneously are excited by it and despise the people who work in it. Porn stars report being spotted in the street and facing hostility from the very people who have recognised them.

At one point Ronson sets up an interview which is somehow both poignant and deeply ironic. An old-school San Fernando porn director whose income has dropped dramatically because of piracy challenges PornHub’s founder. The director expresses exasperation at his lack of empathy as free illegal downloads drain away his livelihood, but he asks no such questions about the effect on people of the films he makes.

This documentary is thought provoking and fascinating and I listened to it in one sitting. The stories it tells are sometimes dark, often strange and occasionally moving.

This review first appeared on my blog https://katevane.wordpress.com/ show less

Is this an audiobook or a podcast? I think more the latter, but I applaud Audible's content-generation scheme here. I have seen many reviews chiding this series (enjoyable as a single package) for not coming to a clear, neat conclusion, but I find it typical Ronson gold. His discursive, exploratory assaying of the topic - here the modern Internet age of porn - is thought-provoking, feeling, enlightening, and investigative.

Podcast, collected by Audible. Ronson interviews the guy who took porn video sites to scale; users populated them with unauthorized copies, and in part because of the cultural hypocrisy surrounding porn, porn producers weren’t able to use takedowns even as well as music/video producers have. The guy is unapologetic about the way this has changed porn producers’ lives—there’s a point at the end where a filmmaker says that he knew about the stigma, but he thought when he entered that he’d be able to retire after ten years and do other work, and now he’ll never get to retire because the margins of the industry have dropped so sharply. And for performers, especially women, it’s worse, given the stigma. And unless you have a show more fetish niche, you apparently can’t work between 22 (end of teen) and 30 (beginning of MILF, which also, don’t even get me started). Ronson also talks to an autistic young man forced to register as a sex offender for some ill-advised and threatening texts to a young woman, which Ronson blames on him having learned the language of sex from porn; though I agree about the overkill of the punishment, I'm less convinced that porn is to blame and not bad sex education from other sources. The most interesting parts of the podcast are about customs, porn produced for individual commissioning viewers (which nonetheless apparently can end up on the tube sites). Many aren’t conventionally sexual; there’s a bit about a guy who wants women’s wet hair wrapped in towels then falling down their backs, and a long bit about a guy who wants hot women to destroy a stamp collection, etc. Ronson ends with a custom for a guy who just wants a woman to tell him that it’s hard now but it will get better and that suicide is not the answer; they have to trust that he’s not using that request to get off. show less

I absolutely loved this short, episodic audio book. It was really fascinating and wrapped up in a way that choked me up a little bit. I absolutely recommend it.