4 Ways Your Grandparents' Dirty Movies Changed The World

4

Porn Used To Be The Minor Leagues For Respected Filmmakers

Nowadays, the next huge star might spring out of the Disney Channel or a YouTube video, but it used to be porn. Hardcore stars who can make the leap to mainstream film are rarities, but the business used to be different. Just ask Wally Pfister (amazingly, not a porn name), Christopher Nolan's Oscar-winning frequent cinematographer, who began his career filming such obscure wank material as Secret Games before he got huge.

Axis Films International"A triumph! Pfister is ALL IN!" rave lewd, immature critics.

That wasn't a fluke, either. Before The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola made a few other films almost as mortifying as Jack. Jonathan Demme, the guy who directed The Silence Of The Lambs and Philadelphia, kicked off his career with a lesbian exploitation film whose tagline read "Women's Prison U.S.A. -- Rape, Riot & Revenge! White Hot Desires Melting Cold Prison Steel!"

New World PicturesPrison attire has come a long way since the '70s.

What we're saying, starry-eyed kids, is that porn is absolutely your launchpad to Hollywood.

3

The '80 Porn Boom Helped Create Online Shopping

In the ancient and savage era of the 1980s, if you wanted to see some sexy action, you had to go to a sticky theater or buy a VHS tape from a man with a mustache who would absolutely judge you. There was no other way to pay for it ... until Richard Gordon drifted into the phone sex world and devised a method of paying by phone. Credit card companies were adorably scandalized, insisting that there was simply no secure way to process such payments without physically holding the card in your grubby little fingers.

2

Playboy Introduced Porn Fiends To High Culture

Now the last hope for has-been starlets desperate to stay relevant, early Playboy had insanely impressive cultural cred. The list of contributors for the 1966 holiday issue reads like an English lit syllabus.

Playboy EnterprisesIt's a lineup of such revered cultural and intellectual voices that if it were printed today, Fox & Friends would be bitching about it as we speak.

1

You Can Thank Porn Lovers For The Rise Of Social Media

Practically the whole dang internet was created because people wanted to jerk off, and now ... well, it's mostly still that. The first incarnation of message boards, then adorably called "bulletin board systems" or BBS, were painfully slow peer-to-peer networks like Usenet, which connected one user's computer to another so they could share files. And you know exactly what kinds of files. OK, it wasn't all porn; just 83.5 percent of it.

Did you recognize that term, "peer-to-peer"? Because that's what Napster used. It's what allowed the floodgates of digital media to open. It's what the entire idea of social media is based on. The first version of the social internet was essentially a bunch of scanned copies of Playboy centerfolds.

It was only decades later, after we'd finally finished wiping ourselves off, that we realized we could use the web for a lot of other stuff as well. So the next time some perv slides into your DMs, remember that you have some other, older perv to thank for it.

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