David Michael Miller
Figuring out how to access Amazon’s attempt at branded podcasts (they call them “Channels”) takes some work, but the hiccups in the process are worth it. Through its subsidiary Audible, the media giant delivers fascinating shows like Ponzi Supernova, Breasts Unbound, and Bedtime Stories For Cynics. Their small-but-growing silo of original shows (each released binge-style, a full season at a time) is accessible to Prime members through the Audible app before being released on iTunes a few months later.
The latest show on the network, The Butterfly Effect with Jon Ronson, is a deep dive into the post-PornHub world of pornography from the man who brought us The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Psychopath Test and, most recently, So You've Been Publicly Shamed. A shy-sounding Welshman sporting coke-bottle spectacles, Ronson leans into the feeling of unassuming naïveté his across-the-pond accent provides in order to get his subjects to open up in ways they might not have otherwise. It’s an enviable asset when talking about the world of gun-shy pornstars, an industry that doesn’t attract academic study so much as creeps looking for personal connections with whatever starlet has struck their fancy.
That’s what this show is, for the most part: academic, or at least humanistic. Ronson lays out the case for how PornHub and the other related “tube” sites (the majority of which are owned by the same company) have changed the adult entertainment industry by opening access to hardcore porn, yes; but he also shows how it’s altered the way those who consume that porn interact with the world. The eponymous butterfly effect comes from German tech entrepreneur Fabian Thylmann, who, in the late ‘90s, thought “maybe I can make tons of money by providing free porn.” Subsequent episodes delve in the cascading consequences of abundant, free porn. One episode, for example, is devoted to connecting the decrease in teenage sex with the uptick of underage erectile dysfunction related to consistent overstimulation. In another, we meet a teenager who is now on a sex offender registry for texting the images he saw online to a female classmate.
Within the industry, the effects are fascinating and, in some cases, bizarre. As mainstream content gets dumped on the free sites faster and faster, some producers have shifted to making bespoke videos — one-off films tailored to the demands of whoever is ponying up for them. An Atlanta restaurateur is able to order up footage of women being covered in industrial amounts of condiments, for example; in the most extreme case, a European man commissions films of women burning pages of valuable stamps from his collection. The ties get increasingly tenuous the further out you get from the industry itself, as you might expect, but these interconnected plotlines still function to flesh out a holistic view of how things have irreversibly changed in the past decade or so.
Overall, The Butterfly Effect feels like a cross between investigative longread journalism and an episode of HBO’s ‘90s late-night show Real Sex. Porn has lots of reasonable defenders and detractors, and Ronson manages to hover above the muck and avoid getting mired in those arguments by simply focusing on the people. Despite covering the world of hardcore smut, the show itself never becomes remotely smutty. Miraculously, it paints its subjects as colorfully dynamic real people in a way that is pretty rare on this scale. Whatever your stance on the topic, it’s a well-thought series that balances entertainment with education, that thankfully never drifts towards exploitation.
