Paulita Pappel loves porn. In fact, she grew up wanting to be a porn star.

"It's something I've been trying to figure out with my therapist,"Pappel laughs, taking a drag from a cigarette. "I've been super fascinated by porn since I was 13."

Pappel dabbled in adult modeling during college, but these days, you're more likely to find her behind the camera. The Berlin-based director has dedicated her career to improving the experience of porn production for the women who work in the industry.

The pay-for-play site she runs, Ersties (PS: this link is definitely NSFW), is made almost exclusively by female film students and photographers. Ersties specializes in "authentic porn," featuring amateur models and couples engaging in unscripted, "female-friendly" sex.

And by the looks of it, Pappel is succeeding in her mission.

The porn industry has not been the most hospitable environment for women over the years, though it would cease to exist without them. Many former stars have reported physical and psychological abuse, with tales spanning sodomy, assault, transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, and being forced to work without a condom. Those who come forward are slandered or discredited. While the stigma against women watching porn may have fallen, it's no less taboo for them to make it.

When Pappel was first exposed to porn as a teenager, she found it conflicting.

"Porn is not wrong,"Pappel explains, sitting in her Berlin home office during a Skype video call with Tech Insider. "But the means of production can be completely wrong."

As she watched women be sexualized through what she could only assume was a male director's gaze, she found herself wondering, "Does that woman on screen really want to be doing that?"

So her site, Erstie, founded in 2010 by two semi-anonymous women — Sara and Nina —  seeks to remedy this issue by empowering the models and actresses with creative control.

Why Pappel's porn site is different

When a woman contacts Ersties about appearing in one of its films, Pappel or a cofounder will set up a call and an in-person meet-up with the performer. The team likes the actress to know what she's getting herself into, offering a level of transparency that's rare in Los Angeles.

If the woman wishes to proceed, she receives a contract that allows her to decide where she would like her content to be distributed. A seasoned porn star probably won't mind if Ersties wants to play a trailer from the film on a large aggregation site, such as PornHub or YouPorn, to drive traffic back to the full-length scene. But a first-timer may feel more comfortable if her videos are confined to the members-only, paid area of Ersties.

Of course, there's no guarantee those aggregation sites, called "tube sites," won't torrent the content and play it for free on their web pages. It's the internet. Ersties tries to prevent this from happening by attaching a code to each video, which allows them to track it across the internet. If they find it on a tube site, they contact the site managers to have it removed.

A typical day on set of an Ersties film shoot takes place in a private home. Sometimes, it'sPappel's home; she tells us she's volunteered her apartment "hundreds of times."

And before shooting, there's a long pow-wow with the cast. "If we have a girl-on-girl [scene], we ask [the cast] to tell us what they like,"Pappel explains. "We ask 'is there any part of your body where you don't like to be touched?' 'What turns you on?' 'Are you ticklish?' 'Do you like kissing?'"

Before anyone slated to appear in the film even touches, Ersties interviews each woman on camera, asking about their backgrounds, what they're studying in school, how they spend their free time, et cetera. The Q&A usually relaxes people, and will play before the scene when a subscriber downloads the video.

Pappel likens the format to going on a date.

"It's more exciting to see them f-----g" after the subscriber watches the interview, she says, "because they've gotten to know them a little."

By the time the pair actually has sex on set, they know each other intimately. This familiarity, according toPappel, ensures the actresses will actually take pleasure in filming. They might even orgasm for real.

And if the performer gets cold feet before a video uploads?

She need only raise her concerns to Ersties, and the company will delete it.

She makes what she likes

Earlier this year, I spent the day on set of a high-production porn shoot in the Calabasas hills north of Los Angeles. My experience was different than the one Pappel describes.

A director, lighting and sound technicians, set designers, a costumer, and a hair and makeup artist crammed onto the staging area. The actresses received step by step instructions on how to perform, and paused constantly so the crew could adjust the lighting on their genitals, or clean up lipstick stains.

Neither actress seemed to mind, in fact, the level of professionalism far exceeded my expectations.

But did it look pleasurable? No.

Pappel curates on set what she most prefers to watch. "It's the real thing," she says. She and the camerawoman may toss out suggestions, but otherwise the camera just follows the action — no matter how clumsy it may be.

Pappel says she's not alone in her desire for authenticity.

"I call it 'fur trade porn,'"Pappel says. "Both male and female consumers want to be sure that the porn they're consuming is not denigrating to anyone.

"The people are there because they want to [be]," she adds.

ForPappel, being a feminist and a porn director are not mutually exclusive titles.

By compensating women well — whichPappel says Ersties can do because its production budgets are so low — and providing a safe, comfortable environment to work in, the porn industry can be welcoming.

Toward the end of our video call, the conversation wandered to the first porn she filmed. It was an experience that still inspires the work she does today.

In a grand atelier that belonged to a friend of the director,Pappel shed her clothes and settled onto a mattress resting on the floor. She and two other queer actresses made love in whatPappel calls "one of the best times of my life."

Still, being an adult film model is not for everyone.

"We live in a society where doing porn will stigmatize you,"Pappel says. "It's important every model is conscious of this. I always ask, 'Do your parents know? Would you tell your friends? How do you think they would react?'"

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I watched VR porn in a room full of strangers having a cocktail party at CES, the huge annual tech trade show in Las Vegas.

People were standing around, talking, drinking, and eating. It was like any other cocktail party, except, for a moment, I was a male porn star in a Naughty America adult entertainment movie.I saw everything from the perspective of the male porn star as two female porn stars had their way with me.

Other VR experiences I've tried have been computer animated graphics, but these virtual porn videos are real live videos. That means that I couldn't interact with the the female porn stars or anything else in the video.It's a more immersive and realistic experience than, er, watching a similar video on a screen. My entire field of view was taken up by the setting, which made me not only feel like I was there, but as if I were the male star the female stars lusted over.

And the point of view was much closer to what you'd see with your own eyes if you were in the pants — or lack thereof — of the male pornstar than it would be in a conventional video. Everything appeared "life-size," which is hard to achieve on a computer or TV screen that doesn't cut off the real world around you.The male porn star in the video didn't move at all and kept his arms to the sides to make the experience as neutral and personally immersive as possible. If he moved, it would take away from the immersion, as the movements would be unexpected and not your own. 

Porn aficionados will be glad to hear that they won't need an expensive VR headset for the experience, like the $600 Oculus Rift (although you can watch VR porn with that). Naughty America was showcasing its VR experience using Samsung's $99 Galaxy Gear, a device that's compatible with Samsung's flagship devices. You could even use Google's cheap Cardboard headset, which works with almost any phone, but you'd have to hold the Cardboard while you watch. 

VR is undoubtedly the future of porn. From here, the experiences can only become more immersive and interactive. We might even see porn made for the HTC Vive VR headset, which lets you move around in a room. You could potentially live out one movie's "engaging" storylines!

Unlike a lot of what's showcased at CES, VR porn is already available. You can download the VR videos onto your phone if you have a membership to Naughty America.

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Forced labor is common throughout the world, especially in countries such as North Korea, where entire families are held in forced labor camps for generations.

India is estimated to hold half of the world’s slaves, many in debt bondage for generations of forced labor and prostitution.

Seventy percent of those held in slavery are female and 50 percent are children.

There are estimated to be as many as 30 million slaves in the world today, which means there are as many as 15 million children held in situations of forced labor and prostitution.

Human trafficking is a relatively safe crime. Many countries have lax laws concerning human trafficking and in some cases the victims are the ones treated as criminals. The victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution can be charged under a nation’s prostitution laws and deported back to their country of origin without medical or psychological treatment.

Unlike drugs, a human slave can be sold again and again, providing income for the slave holder until their body breaks down from abuse and disease. Slavery is big business, with big consequences for its victims and big profits with little to no consequences for the criminals. Billions of dollars are made each year from forced prostitution alone.

Canada’s aboriginal women and girls face violence at a higher rate than non-aboriginal women, according to Amnesty International. Many women are forced into prostitution by economic circumstances whether or not they are trafficked. Many aboriginal women are forced into the sex trade in Canada, according to the CBC.

Sex tourism has risen in popularity over the last 25 years, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union. Former Soviet bloc nations such as Ukraine are popular destinations for sex tourists. The feminist protest group FEMEN was started in Ukraine in 2008 with the purpose of fighting sex tourism.

The porn industry takes advantage of human trafficking to feed the ever growing demand for pornography. Sex slaves are used in the making of pornographic films and other materials for the Internet. The Internet has revolutionized the sex industry, globalizing the trafficking of humans for sexual exploitation. The sale of young women for sex online can make perpetrators as much as $1,000 every night.

The obsession of “virgin sex” is typically associated with power and control of men over women and young girls. Two types of men seek out virgins: pedophiles and those of a religious or otherwise upbringing, which teaches them a value system that degrades the rights of women and emphasizes the rights of men.

In order to exert control and fulfill their psychological need of ownership, they will seek out children. Many young girls are sold into sex slavery by their own parents — this is common in nations such as the Philippines and Cambodia. Many sex tourists travel to Southeast Asian nations for the sole purpose of sex with children.

Child brides are common in nations across the Middle East and India, but also occur in countries such as Canada and the US. Religious extremists and cults force young girls to marry against their will or without informed consent.

Child marriage is a crime, its victims are sex slaves, and the perpetrators are criminals guilty of the extreme abuse of children. The so-called husbands are pedophiles regardless of their cultural backgrounds or religious beliefs.

Child marriage is sex slavery of children, causing severe mental and physical problems.

Millions of young girls are forced to marry against their will every year. The world must place a higher value on the lives of young girls than it does on the right of an individual to practice a so-called culture that encourages child marriages.

Why is slavery allowed to continue on such a large scale? The answer has to do with politics and greed. Brothels and traffickers can simply pay officials to look the other way.

Women and girls are being held as sex slaves by ISIS, passed around from one jihadist to the next. It is estimated that ISIS has captured as many as 25,000 women and young girls for their fighters to rape.

Sex slavery in war is far from a new phenomenon. Sex slaves for the imperial Japanese army during World War II has become well-documented.

While there is no end of slavery in sight, simple steps can be taken in your everyday life. Fight slavery with your wallet, only buy items produced without slave labor. Spread the word that slavery is still happening.

Slavery can end with stricter sentences for those who have forced laborers and for those who force others to sell their bodies.

Promote education for at-risk women and girls, poverty alleviation, and harsh punishments for sex tourists. The time is long overdue to end slavery and child marriage.

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The vibrator has never been the smartest device on a woman's nightstand.

They vary in size, shape, and color, but most controls are limited to speed. Some you even have to keep plugged into the wall — the horror!

Fortunately, a new smart vibrator by French internet-of-things startup E.Sensory, introduces 50 shades of innovation into the teledildonics, or smart sex toy, space.

The Little Bird is a cute, egg-shaped vibrator that connects to your phone via Bluetooth and syncs with erotic fiction e-books available for purchase on E.Sensory's app. As the user reads, she can touch the words on screen — or blow on the phone, if her hands are otherwise occupied — to trigger a sequence of vibrations that go along with the story.

E.Sensory engineers choreograph the vibration sequences based on the author's instructions, though the company plans to roll out a publishing platform in the next few months so authors can enhance their own texts.

The Little Bird may be preordered today, and the app launches in March.

When the Little Bird debuted at CES in Las Vegas earlier this month, I saw many convention-goers (mostly male) gawking at the device and taking pictures on their phones.

However, a quick glance at Twitter shows genuine interest among the product's target customers: women.

Gives new meaning to "A little bird told me"... Wish I was going to CES this year after all. :-) https://t.co/ra95AHc1tn

— Kimberly Anderson (@kimandersonsf) January 2, 2016

The Little Bird offers more bang for your buck than most vibrators.

Available for preorder for $99 (which is about $30 cheaper than comparable models by top-selling brand LELO), the Little Bird boasts 10 vibration settings and 90 minutes of continuous use on a single charge. The user can fire it up with or without a reading supplement, and may vary, replay, or stop the vibration sequence at any point.

It's compatible with both iOS and Android devices, and may be controlled remotely from the app should the user want to pass off the controls to a long-distance partner.

Christel Le Coq, creator and CEO of E.Sensory, says the device could help foster a new era in porn.

"Porn movies are only explicit images that [leave] no room for fantasy," Le Coq says. "Reading erotica stimulates both your mind and body by appealing to the most erogenous zone of the body — the brain.

"When you read, you have the ability to fill in all the details you want with your imagination," she continues. "It lets you be part of the characters' lives." 

While Little Bird aims to shake up the routine for single ladies and couples, Le Coq explains it does have its limits.

"Our idea has always been to offer new experiences and to enhance relationships that already exist or create new ones," Le Coq says. "It was never a replacement of human interaction."

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Werner Herzog believes that virtual reality is getting ahead of itself.

“It looked OK, but you get tired of it fairly quickly,” he told the New Yorker of watching VR film.

“The strange thing here is that normally, in the history of culture … you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit.

In this case, we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.”

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Earlier this month, The Adult Video Network (AVN) Awards hosted a three-day pornography extravaganza that celebrates the industry's top talent and coolest innovations. It's like CES meets the Oscars.

Among the eye-popping awards categories was one for the best condom manufacturer. A 2012 ballot measure in Los Angeles County, California — where a vast majority of US porn is made — requires adult actors to wear condoms on-camera. So, who better to judge?

Japanese company Kimono won, toppling big name brands like Durex and Trojan. Trojan has won the category since the award show started in 2014.

For more than 25 years, Kimono has been producing its "MicroThin" condoms, which the company claims are the thinnest on the market. They're supposed to slip on and feel invisible without sacrificing strength or reliability, according to the website.

"I don't know why this condom has not caught on in [the] mainstream market," one Amazon customer wrote in a review of the award-winning product, "because it should. I've used Trojan, Durex, and a bunch of other brands before, but this is the thinnest and feels the best."

"Not one has broken on me," another Amazon customer wrote, adding that the brand boosts his sense of safety and security.

Kimono condoms are made with an au naturale latex extracted from rubber trees and a "brand-secret chemical compound," and tested individually for quality before leaving the factory. A machine sends an electric current through the condom to identify weak spots and "microscopic pinholes," so the unreliable ones get trashed.

Kimono explains additional testing procedures on its website, including a water burst test and a stretch test. Though it's unclear how many or how often its products are subjected to these assessments, and whether or not tests are ever conducted by a third-party.

The brand came out of Sagami Rubber Industries, Japan's original and now second-largest condom supplier, more than two decades ago.

While Durex and Trojan are more well known manufacturers, their condoms aren't necessarily better.

Chrissy Feine, a registered nurse and former director of Semcac Family Planning Clinic, explained in a 2013 video posted to the clinic's YouTube channel that they stock little-known brands like Kimono because it's one of the highest consumer-rated brands available.

"The reason why you haven't heard of a lot of the names [we stock] is because their marketing is more so for public health use and what we do," says Feine, adding that Trojan and Durex spend their ad dollars on consumer-facing marketing.

For wearers, sensitivity is a deciding factor in choosing a brand. Kimono's thinness delivers an unrivaled sensation, according to more customer reviews.

"These are the next best thing to feeling naked," one Amazon customer wrote, adding that Trojan Ultra Thin condoms were "no comparison."

The Kimono MicroThin Plus Aqua Lube, the company's thinnest condom, feels "barely there" at just 0.044 millimeters thick. According to the website, Trojan's Ultra Thin Lubricated and Durex's Extra Sensitive condoms come in 18% and 23% thicker, respectively, which may contribute to less sensitive experiences.

But not everyone was pleased with Kimono's sheer design. Many online reviews we spotted claim Kimono condoms run small and may break if you're blessed in girth. The company's top sellers stretch between 4.05 and 4.10 inches in circumference, whereas the popular Trojan Bareskin goes up to 4.22 inches.

Still, if thinness is your top criteria, the Kimono might be the rubber for you. It's at least a porn industry favorite.

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Utah lawmakers are considering making it the first state to declare pornography a public health crisis, similar to cigarettes.

State Sen. Todd Weiler (R) recently introduced a legislative resolution that would recognize a range of “societal harms” from the pornography “epidemic.”

“I’m hoping this will start educating people that pornography is actually addictive, that it’s harmful to families and relationships,” says Senator Weiler in a phone interview.

Weiler acknowledges First Amendment rights to make and view pornography.

Although the resolution does not put forward any particular policy solution, he says he ultimately “would like to see the US work toward an Internet that is porn free unless you opt into it.”  

The proposal has rekindled age-old cultural battles over sexual norms and morality – but it also pushes the conversation into a broader framework.

Conservatives aren’t the only ones making the case for considering pornography’s role in harming social well-being. Some feminists have been working for decades to raise awareness about what they see as pornography’s contribution to “rape culture.”

Now they are being joined by parents, pediatricians, psychologists, and other professionals who say they are seeing devastating impacts, especially on young people, because of the explosion of online access to graphic and often violent images – and exposure to pornography at younger ages.

“The porn industry has hijacked children’s sexuality, and parents have been asleep at the wheel,” says Gail Dines, a professor at Wheelock College and founder of Culture Reframed, which is working to educate parents, pediatricians, and other professionals about how to talk with children to build up “resilience and resistance to the harms of the culture” of pornography.

Among youths seeking help from an online treatment program for negative impacts of pornography as of July 2015, the average age of first exposure was 11.9.

But while some youths seek out sexually explicit material online, the level of unwanted exposure has decreased, according to a series of studies by the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center.

After an initial increase between 2000 and 2005 (from 24 percent to 34 percent of Internet users ages 10 to 17),  unwanted exposure declined by 2010, to 23 percent of users.

Pediatricians say they are seeing injuries among their young patients that stem from the type of sexual activity commonly depicted in porn, Professor Dines says. 

Most research on the issue can only explore correlations between pornography and behaviors such as sexual aggression, dependency on frequent use, and difficulties sustaining relationships.

There’s an active debate about degrees of correlation, and even more debate on whether pornography has any causal role – with people on either side accusing those on the other of sometimes relying on junk science.

Dines argues that the weight of evidence suggests that viewing pornography (much of which is now the type once labeled “hard core”) is reshaping the way boys think about sexuality and relationships.

Much online pornography depicts anger and contempt toward women, researchers say. In turn, the hookup culture that pornography has helped proliferate on college campuses is “having a profound effect on the self-esteem of young women and girls,” Dines says.

In interviews with college students, Dines has found that men frequently tell her that their favorite sex act is something that mimics a common scene in pornography that she and others find degrading to women – and in some cases is leading to physical injuries. But she says many also tell her they want to stop their porn-viewing habits and don’t know how.

Other feminists push back against the idea that porn is by nature misogynistic, noting that many women enjoy pornography.

During the last wave of strong feminist arguments against the pornography industry, in the 1980s and early ’90s, “the pornographers won that struggle and beat back any attempt to modify public policy,” says Robert Jensen, an author on the subject and a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

But with the proliferation of research on teen development, brain science, and the potential for harmful addictions, the public health framework may get a new hearing.

Pornography addiction is not an officially recognized diagnosis, “but it can fall under the broad category of behavioral addictions,” says David Greenfield, founder of The Center for Internet and Technology Addiction and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut.

Of all the problems associated with the Internet that Dr. Greenfield treats, he says No. 2 is pornography and other online sexual behavior.

When it comes to young people, Greenfield says parents and others need better education about the fact that pornography isn’t a realistic portrayal of relationships, and that repeated exposure can lead to harmful consequences.

That requires some adults to overcome ingrained inhibitions in order to discuss sexuality, he says.

“We live in a culture that celebrates sexuality on an overt level, in ads, movies, music,” Greenfield says. “On the covert side, people are just as inhibited with regard to sexuality as we’ve ever been. The schism … creates sexual pathology.”

Some others in the medical community say blaming pornography distracts from the many other variables that influence sexual behavior.

“People use the term addiction in a manipulative way, to invoke fear,” says David Ley, a clinical psychologist in Albuquerque, N.M., and the author of “The Myth of Sex Addiction.”

“I’m not a fan of adolescents seeing porn…. But if you tell a teenager to be afraid of something and not do it, we are creating a situation where that teen is going to be compelled to be interested in it.”

His reading of various research studies leads him to conclude that “porn plays a tiny role in impacting adolescent behavior.”

“In certain people who are already predisposed to sexual violence … watching violent porn for them probably does increase their risk of sexual violence,” Ley says. “But that is not most people.”

Weiler’s proposed resolution in Utah is based on an idea put forward by The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Morality in Media). The group hosted a national symposium last year, and if Utah’s resolution passes, 10 or more states may follow suit, Weiler says.

The footnoted version of the resolution cites a range of research and writings on the topic, including that of Dines.

But for some critics, the underlying message still appears to be an attempt to reaffirm religious, traditional values. One of the concerns the resolution cites, for instance, is that pornography is “linked to lessening desire in young men to marry, dissatisfaction in marriage, and infidelity.”

The proposal may be “a backlash against a lot of progress we’ve made for the LGBTQ community … in fighting discrimination” in the state, says Susie Porter, director of gender studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

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From coast to coast, Americans are getting their freak on via internet porn. Turns out, they have some pretty diverse preferences.

Pornhub, one of the largest adult websites (it had 21 billion visits last year), just released a ranking of the most searched terms and categories across the US.

Lesbian pornography dominated in search terms, sweeping 30 states predominantly on the coasts. In 2014, girl-on-girl videos jumped seven spots on the charts to place second.

Lesbian was also the most sought after category by Pornhub viewers.

There were some — ahem — surprising choices, as well.

Northern states showed an affinity for soft incest. Pornhub users in Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, and Wyoming searched step-sister most often, while users in Alaska, Kentucky, New Hampshire, and Washington preferred watching step-moms. "MILF" reigns supreme in the lone state of Rhode Island.

Animated porn got a boost in Arkansas, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Vermont, where "cartoon" ranked highest.

To each their own! Without further ado ...

Here are the most searched for terms in the US:

Alabama: Lesbian

Alaska: Step-mom

Arizona: Lesbian

Arkansas: Cartoon

California: Lesbian

Colorado: Lesbian

Connecticut: Lesbian

Delaware: Ebony

Florida: Lesbian

Georgia: Ebony

Hawaii: Asian

Idaho: Lesbian

Illinois: Lesbian

Indiana: Lesbian

Iowa: Lesbian

Kansas: Lesbian

Kentucky: Step-mom

Louisiana: Black

Maine: Step-sister

Maryland: Lesbian

Massachusetts: Lesbian

Michigan: Lesbian

Minnesota: Step-sister

Mississippi: Ebony

Missouri: Lesbian

Montana: Step-sister

Nebraska: Cartoon

Nevada: Lesbian

New Hampshire: Step-mom

New Jersey: Lesbian

New Mexico: Lesbian

New York: Lesbian

North Carolina: Lesbian

North Dakota: Lesbian

Ohio: Step-sister

Oklahoma: Lesbian

Oregon: Lesbian

Pennsylvania: Lesbian

Rhode Island: MILF

South Carolina: Lesbian

South Dakota: Step-mom

Tennessee: Cartoon

Texas: Lesbian

Utah: Lesbian

Vermont: Cartoon

Virginia: Lesbian

Washington: Step-mom

West Virginia: Lesbian

Wisconsin: Lesbian

Wyoming: Step-sister

Read the full report here.

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San Fernando Valley is a sun-drenched, suburban enclave in southern California. You may know it by another name: Porn Valley.

(There's also "Silicone Valley" and "San Pornando Valley." Clever.)

Since the 1970s, the hills above Hollywood have played host to a booming pornography industry. A majority of American sex films are shot there in warehouses and private homes — helping the San Fernando Valley rake in $4 billion in annual sales in its '90s heyday.

How did an out-of-the-way desert suburb become the porn capital of the world? Location, location, location.

At its onset, the porn industry stretched across Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, where the entertainment industry concentrated. As Paul Fishbein, cofounder of AVN Media Network (porn's trade media organization) explained to the Associated Press in 2002, the business migrated to San Fernando Valley because of "low rents and access to the mainstream movie business."

San Fernando Valley is situated just 20 to 30 miles north of Los Angeles. Its proximity helped create a pipeline of talent from Hollywood, which included directors, crew, and actors when they needed a little side income.

The valley's dirty little secret offered particularly attractive job prospects in the '90s, as the mainstream television and film industry began to dry up. Studios were shipping mainstream productions abroad, where they cost less to shoot. Entertainment jobs in Los Angeles shorted, and thousands of employees marched Hollywood Boulevard in protest.

Meanwhile, the days of picking out porn in a curtained back-section of your local video rental store and paying for it started to disappear. The growing popularity of the internet made it easier than ever for people to access adult content. The industry exploded.

While feature film-making plummeted 13% in 1999, adult movie production rose 25%, the LA Times reports. And the funnel between Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley grew even larger.

But times are tough these days in Porn Valley. In 2012, Los Angeles County approved a ballot measure that requires adult actors to wear condoms on-camera — causing a mass exodus from San Fernando Valley. The number of adult video permits filed in the county sunk 90% that year, and many employees fled to Las Vegas, Nevada, where a restriction has yet to be passed.

Porn Valley may not be the porn capital for long.

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Rampant teen sexting has left politicians and law enforcement authorities around the country struggling to find some kind of legal middle ground between prosecuting students for child porn and letting them off the hook.

Most states consider sexually explicit images of minors to be child pornography, meaning even teenagers who share nude selfies among themselves can, in theory at least, be hit with felony charges that can carry heavy prison sentences and require lifetime registration as a sex offender.

Many authorities consider that overkill, however, and at least 20 states have adopted sexting laws with less-serious penalties, mostly within the past five years. Eleven states have made sexting between teens a misdemeanor; in some of those places, prosecutors can require youngsters to take courses on the dangers of social media instead of charging them with a crime.

Hawaii passed a 2012 law saying youths can escape conviction if they take steps to delete explicit photos. Arkansas adopted a 2013 law sentencing first-time youth sexters to eight hours of community service. New Mexico last month removed criminal penalties altogether in such cases.

At least 12 other states are considering sexting laws this year, many to create new a category of crime that would apply to young people.

But one such proposal in Colorado has revealed deep divisions about how to treat the phenomenon. Though prosecutors and researchers agree that felony sex crimes shouldn't apply to a pair of 16-year-olds sending each other selfies, they disagree about whether sexting should be a crime at all.

Colorado lawmakers this week delayed a vote on creating a new misdemeanor crime of "misuse of electronic images" by teens.

Colorado's bill was prompted by a scandal last year at a Canon City high school where more than 100 students were found with explicit images of other teens. The news sent shockwaves through the city of 16,000. Dozens of students were suspended, and the football team forfeited the final game of the season.

Fremont County prosecutors ultimately decided against filing any criminal charges, saying Colorado law doesn't properly distinguish between adult sexual predators and misbehaving teenagers.

In a similar case last year out Fayetteville, North Carolina, two dating teens who exchanged nude selfies at age 16 were charged as adults with a felony — sexual exploitation of a minor. After an uproar, the charges were reduced to misdemeanors.

Colorado currently classifies sexting as felony child exploitation, punishable by up to 12 years in prison and lifetime registration as a sex offender.

"What we want to do is get away from the life-altering and devastating effect of a felony charge ... by having lower-level crimes," said Republican Rep. Yeulin Willett of Grand Junction, who sponsored the new bill.

But the legislation sparked a fiery backlash from teens and researchers who told lawmakers that sexting is so prevalent that even a misdemeanor, punishable by a year in jail, is too harsh.

"All different types of youth do it," said Samantha Dehart, a 19-year-old college student who testified against the bill. "I can count on one hand the number of teens I know that have not practiced sexting."

Amy Hasinoff, a communications professor at the University of Colorado-Denver who wrote a book on sexting last year, called the practice the modern version of a love letter or sexy Polaroid picture.

"Sexting is often portrayed as something that's harmful, but we're not seeing a lot of evidence of that," she told lawmakers. She pointed out that it's legal for two 17-year-olds to have sex, but not to consensually take pictures of themselves doing it.

Several prosecutors who argued in favor of the bill countered that minors aren't capable of consensual sexting.

"Juveniles, left to their own devices ... will do things that potentially hurt themselves," said Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler. "We don't let them own guns. We don't let them rent cars. We don't even let them vote, because we don't trust their judgment."

A Colorado House committee put off a decision on the bill Tuesday. Willett said he would amend his proposal to make teen sexting a petty crime, punishable by up to six months.

Hasinoff warned lawmakers that they will need to address the question soon: "Sexting is very common, and it's not going away."

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On Tuesday April 19, Utah Governor Gary R. Herbert signed a resolution that declares porn a "public health hazard," CNN reports.

More specifically, the S.C.R. 9 concurrent resolution on the public health crises says porn is a "a public health hazard leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms."

While the resolution does not specifically ban pornography in the state of Utah (and can't actually punish anyone who watches it), it does have some harsh words for the industry, saying that porn shows "women as objects and commodities for the viewer’s use" and that it "equates violence toward women and children with sex and pain with pleasure."

It also states that pornography is "potentially biologically addictive" and "is linked to lessening desire in young men to marry, dissatisfaction in marriage, and infidelity."In other words, not only is porn addictive and misogynistic, according to this resolution, but it could be hurting the institution of marriage.

CNN points out the Utah Coalition Against Pornography— a non-profit Mormon church-backed group— was supportive of the news.

"Join us and Governor Herbert as he signs the first resolution in the country declaring pornography a public healthy crisis," the group wrote on its Facebook page. "It will be a time to celebrate and recognize this historic moment!"

While Utah is the home base for the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints — and it's one of the most conservative states in the US — a 2009 Harvard study about conservative states and the porn industry found that Utah's residents were the nation's top subscribers to online adult entertainment services.

In addition to disparaging the porn industry, the Utah resolution — which was sponsored by state senator Todd Weiler — also calls for an increase in "education, prevention, research, and policy change at the community and societal level" to fight pornography, which is an "epidemic that is harming the people of our state and nation."

"I am not trying to ban pornography,"Weiler previously told NBC News about the resolution. "What I am saying is we have taken steps to protect people from tobacco, but we haven't done that for pornography."

Recent research goes against Weiler’s claims, suggesting that pornography may actually make some people less likely to commit sexual crimes, and that moderate pornography consumption, "does not make users more aggressive, promote sexism or harm relationships," according to Scientific American.

Weiler’s resolution is not the only porn-related law to capture headlines in recent years. In 2012, Los Angeles County approved a ballot measure that requires adult actors to wear condoms on-camera — causing a mass exodus from San Fernando Valley. The number of adult video permits filed in the county sunk 90%that year, and many employees fled to Las Vegas, Nevada, where a restriction has yet to be passed.

Governor Herbert will also sign a bill on Tuesday requiring computer technicians who find child porn during their work to report it to law enforcement or else face up to six months in prison.

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A hacker who claims to have breached the servers of porn website Naughty America is offering up millions of accounts on the site for around $300, Forbes' Thomas Fox-Brewster reports.

A purported database of 3.8 million emails and passwords appeared for sale on the dark web forum The Real Deal earlier this week, with the listing claiming that 1.7 million of those came from Naughty America. Others apparently came from sister sites owned by parent company La Touraine, Inc.

Tech Insider was unable to independently verify The Real Deal listing, since the underground forum's security requires new users to have an invitation code. However, Fox-Brewster says he reviewed a small sample of the leak and did confirm at least some of the users in it were legitimate.

Naughty America did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Tech Insider. The company did respond to Forbes, though it would not confirm or deny whether there was a breach. 

“Naughty America has been providing high quality online adult entertainment for over a decade and takes the privacy and data security of its members extremely seriously,” Ian Paul, CIO of Naughty America, told Forbes. “We have launched an investigation and are conducting a thorough scan of our systems and an audit of our security protocols. We will continue to take the appropriate steps to further ensure our customers’ data security."

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A porn parody of "Game of Thrones" has gone viral, and it's even more adult than the original. Like its mainstream HBO counterpart, "Storm of Kings XXX" is an action-packed (and we mean that in more ways than one) series about a quest to rule the throne.

The four-part series by Brazzers, a leading porn production company, has amassed an impressive 1.5 million views to date. It also earned a very serious write-up in Vanity Fair.

"Storm of Kings XXX"isn't the first adult film to mimic the Emmy-winning fantasy drama. But what "Game of Bones" and "Gay of Thrones" lacked, Brazzers delivers: an unwavering commitment to authenticity. The company cast performs that actually look like their characters, invested heavily in CGI, and wrote a script based on years of genuine fandom.

Tech Insider spoke with Andy Paterson, a producer with Brazzers, on how the series came together. Here's a safe-for-work look inside "Storm of Kings XXX."

"Storm of Kings XXX" takes all your favorite parts about "Game of Thrones," jumbles them together, and adds more sex.

"Storm of Kings XXX" follows evil King Jasper in his quest to protect the throne, and those who try to undo him. The cast is packed with familiar faces, including a Jon Snow-like character named John Doe and a new Mother of Dragons, Daniellys Tarus.

Of course, it wouldn't be "Game of Thrones" without some bloodshed.

In the first episode, John Doe decapitates a member of the King's Guard. King Jasper slays the entire family of a Sansa-inspired character right in front of her, reminiscent of the show's devastating "Red Wedding" episode.

"Reviews online, especially from Brazzers fans, have been loving the plot," Paterson says. "It revolves around the key elements: deception, decapitations, and dragons."

The cast looks pretty familiar.

Performers were chosen based on three main factors. (Accent was not one of them. Vanity Fair reports that the Daenerys character has a quintessential SoCal accent.)

"One of the first considerations is their potential to resemble [their mainstream counterpart] through costuming, makeup, and acting ability," Paterson says.

While the blonde, blue-eyed King Jasper makes for a decent grown-up Joffrey, we admit this Khal Drogo knock-off could use some work. At least he has the eye shadow down.

Paterson explains that the performer's ability to take on the character's essence and to perform sex on camera is also taken into consideration.

The project's budget reached into six figures.

The production budget for "Storm of Kings XXX" doesn't come close to that of "Game of Thrones," which costs about $6 million per episode. But it's impressive for an adult film.

Brazzers product director Mario Nardstein told Vanity Fair the project was given a "flexible budget," and that high-profile productions range from $100,000 to $1 million to make. By comparison, a typical Brazzer shoot costs between $10,000 and $20,000.

Where did that money go? Paterson says the company invested a lot of time (and thus, money) into animating the series' dragons and featured them prominently.

They also put up a decent chunk of change on eBay to rent a plastic Iron Throne replica.

An NHS doctor issued a warning to young people on Monday about the dangers of watching too much pornography, the BBC reports.

Psychosexual therapist Angela Gregory said an increasing number of men in their late teens and early 20s were suffering from erectile dysfunction as a result of becoming addicted to watching porn on the internet.

"What I've seen over the last 16 years, particularly the last five years, is an increase in the amount of younger men being referred," she told BBC Newsbeat.

"Our experience is that historically men that were referred to our clinic with problems with erectile dysfunction were older men whose issues were related to diabetes, MS, cardiovascular disease.

"These younger men do not have organic disease — they've already been tested by their GP, and everything is fine.

"So one of the first assessment questions I'd always ask now is about pornography and masturbatory habit because that can be the cause of their issues about maintaining an erection with a partner."

Anyone who is concerned that they may have a problem related to porn should speak to their local GP, Gregory advised.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Former Playboy model Pamela Anderson has teamed with a rabbi to speak out against pornography.

An opinion piece by Anderson and Rabbi Shumley Boteach published by the Wall Street Journal cites the latest sexting scandal involving former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner in calling for "an honest dialogue" about the dangers of pornography and "an honor code to tamp it down."

The essay calls pornography "a public hazard of unprecedented seriousness." It closes by saying "porn is for losers" and calls it "a boring wasteful and dead-end outlet for people too lazy to reap the ample rewards of healthy sexuality."

Anderson has appeared on the cover of Playboy 14 times, most recently in December for the magazine's final nude issue.

SEE ALSO: An NHS psychosexual therapist is warning young people about watching too much online porn

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The UK government has drafted legislation that would require internet service providers to block pornographic web sites if they do not verify users' ages. The intent of the law is to prevent children from seeing adult material on the web.

Free speech advocates will be disappointed to discover that the proposed law has support among both Conservative and Labour MPs, according to The Guardian.

The proposal would apply to all web sites globally — meaning that sites that do not require age checks would be blocked from view in the UK.

The proposed legislation is a radical extension of current British law, which requires internet users to register with their ISPs whether they want adult content blocked or not. In 2014, the government banned outright types of porn that feature violent criminal acts.

It is not clear how such a law would be enforced. Virtual private network services like Hola, which can be added easily to your web browser, make it simple to browse the internet as if you are in another country — thus unblocking sites that are otherwise "banned" in any single country.

It is also unclear how such a ban would affect services like Tumblr or Twitter, which are not porn sites per se but nonetheless contain a huge amount of erotic material.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) will be the regulatory agency in charge of enforcing the porn ban.

Amendments to the Digital Economy Bill will be discussed in parliament next week, according to the Department for Culture. Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, said:

"The Government is committed to keeping children safe from harmful pornographic content online and that is exactly what we are doing."

"Only adults should be allowed to view such content and we have appointed a regulator, BBFC, to make sure the right age checks are in place to make that happen. If sites refuse to comply, they should be blocked."

Pornhub — one of the largest providers of adult video on the web — has already said it will comply.

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Petty Officer 1st Class Gregory Kyle Seerden of SEAL Team 1 was arrested April 3 in San Diego after reportedly recording himself molesting a sleeping girl.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service found the footage while looking into Seerden on an unrelated charge after a woman accused him of raping her in a Norfolk, Virginia hotel near Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story

On February 3, with authorization from Seerden’s commanding officer, NCIS found 78 images and four videos of prepubescent girls and boys performing sexual acts in Seerden’s iPhone, according to court documents.

“At least one image also appeared to involve a naked child and aroused dog and another involved bondage,” the Virginian-Pilot reported.

Seerden has since been charged with four felonies, including the production of child pornography, and U.S. Marshals are returning him to Virginia for his arraignment.

If proven guilty, the pornography production conviction alone will carry a 15-year prison sentence.

Seerden does not currently face any charges in the unrelated sexual assault which prompted the discovery of his alleged kiddie porn stash in the first place.

This is just the latest in a string of SEAL-related misconduct. Earlier this week, Navy Chief Special Warfare Officer Joseph John Schmidt III was discovered to be moonlighting as a porn star.

In early April, CBS News reported that the Navy is investigating widespread drug abuse across the SEAL units. And in March, another Navy SEAL was charged with kidnapping and raping a fellow sailor in a hotel room outside Fort Knox.

SEE ALSO: A Navy SEAL is under investigation for having a side job as a porn star

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Everyone knows about porn’s prevalence, but few realize its true power.

While putting together my new book “The Sex Effect”— which examines hidden relationships between sex and culture — I was surprised by how many technologies have been adopted by the masses because of pornography. VCRs, ecommerce, streaming services, affiliate marketing, and the internet itself all owe a debt of gratitude to the smut peddlers who helped popularize them. Because while the military created the internet, it would not have found a solid consumer base without porn. Think of the military as the inventor and creator of a product and porn as the entrepreneur who brings the product to the masses.

“In myriad ways, large and small, the porn industry has blazed a commercial path that other industries are hastening to follow,” Frederick Lane, author of “Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age,” said.

Although new technologies have usually allowed the porn industry to expand, the internet (even though porn helped popularize it) has been a double-edged sword for the porn industry. It increased porn’s prevalence and popularity, but also facilitated easily accessible free porn and user-created sexual content.

But despite many porn companies going bust over the past decade, the industry hasn’t stopped innovating. Computer-controlled sex toys, virtual reality, and sex avatars are just a few of the products that porn execs are tinkering with.

Porn’s business models have also evolved.

To combat ubiquitous free content, porn companies are creating more live and interactive experiences that require payment. This is done through selling novelty goods from shoots (like the dildo that was used during a specific sex scene), putting on education seminars (to teach couples things such as the dynamics of rope bondage), giving studio tours (live and virtual), opening strip clubs/bars/storefronts/restaurants, live web-camming with porn stars, expanding into podcasts and radio, hosting events, crowdfunding content, and creating custom porn packages in which consumers pay premiums to act as pseudo-directors in pornographic films.

Even though porn has had an outsize impact on the everyday technologies people use, it often isn’t given its due since discussion of porn in society is driven by ideology.

“If it were not for the subject matter, pornography would be publicly praised as an industry that has successfully and quickly developed, adopted, and diffused new technologies,” historian Jonathan Coopersmith wrote. “But because the subject matter was pornography, silence and embarrassment have been the standard responses.”

Although most people have used porn casually, the ones who get quoted in the news about it typically belong to two extremes — pro-porn lobbyists and anti-porn zealots hoping to sway voters to their cause. But until society looks past its steamy content and to its true significance, the actual impact of erotica will remain largely unheard.

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It takes the Bureau of Labor Statistics three weeks to collate its survey data on unemployment and release that information to the public.

Three weeks might seem like a long time — but hey, it's the way things work. Even Princeton economist Alan Krueger tried and failed to speed up the process when he served as President Obama's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in 2011.

In his new book, "Everybody Lies," Seth Stephens-Davidowitz presents this problem as a sort of case study into how the definition of "data" is constantly being reimagined. Sure, survey responses are useful, but what if there were some other — albeit unofficial — way to track people's employment status?

To make a long story short, there is another way. It's the rate of Google searches for pornography.

Let's back up to explain how this works. Stephens-Davidowitz writes that a former Google engineer created a system that used people's flu-related searches to create a picture of the current flu rate — well before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released official data.

While Stephens-Davidowitz was a data scientist at Google, he and Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, used a similar process to paint a picture of the national economic landscape.

By that time, Google engineers had also created a service called Google Correlate, which allows researchers to see what Google searches most correlate with the dataset they're studying. For example, Stephens-Davidowitz and Varian found that when housing prices are rising, Americans tend to search for things like "80/20 mortgage."

Stephens-Davidowitz wanted to know if Google Correlate could also help predict the unemployment rate — so he put the United States unemployment rate from 2004 into 2011 into the system.

The search term most closely linked to unemployment? "Slutload." (It's a pornographic website.)

Stephens-Davidowitz explains: "This may seem strange at first blush, but unemployed people presumably have a lot of time on their hands. Many are stuck at home, alone and bored." In fact, another one of the highly correlated searches was "Spider Solitaire."

Stephens-Davidowitz is quick to note that these searches aren't necessarily the best way to predict the unemployment rate — but they can certainly be part of the prediction model.

The broader takeaway here is that traditional means of collecting data — i.e. surveys — aren't necessarily the most efficient or accurate. For one thing, as the title of Stephens-Davidowitz's book suggests, people aren't always truthful when they respond to those survey questions.

As Stephens-Davidowitz explains later in the book, that's especially true when you're looking for data on, say, the rate of homosexuality. About five percent of pornography searches by men are for same-sex pornography — which is about twice the percentage of American men who indicate on Facebook that they're interested in men.

Stephens-Davidowitz writes: "Frequently, the value of Big Data is not its size; it's that it can offer you new kinds of information to study — information that had never previously been collected."

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Modern advances have made it so many of life's creature comforts can be found at even far-flung military outposts.

For submariners plying the ocean depths, austere conditions remain the name of the game, however.

But two British submarine crewmen reportedly asked UK Prime Minister Theresa May to help them get some relief.

According to The Times of London, the two sailors encountered May at a reception for LGBT community members held at the garden of the prime minister's office on Downing Street. (May was criticized for holding the event after making a deal with the conservative hardliner Democratic Unionist Party.)

May reportedly spoke with the submariners about improving day-to-day life while at sea. They raised the issue of poor internet bandwidth. May replied that it was something "we can certainly look into improving."

"Thank you," one of the submariners said, according to The Times, before his friend offered an explanation that may have gone too far.

"The problem is we can't download any porn," the seaman explained. "We have to take it with us on our hard drives."

May quickly moved on, The Times said, and what impact the revelation will have on British submarines' internet speed remains to be seen.

The US military has its own formal policy regarding pornography access for service members. The Pentagon has a board of military and civilian officials who review the material to determine whether it's "sexually explicit," as it's illegal for hardcore pornography to be sold or rented on US military bases.

The US military doesn't ban all material with nudity — just material that presents nudity in a "lascivious" manner. That term is left open to interpretation, and critics have said the board, which costs the Defense Department $5,500 a year, is a waste of resources and legally questionable.

In the UK, the government is pursuing a controversial policy to limit access to online pornography.

In July 2013, the "Homesafe" system proposed by then-Prime Minister David Cameron to block access to internet pornography was found to be run by a subsidiary of Chinese company Huawei, which allegedly had ties to that country's government. Intelligence committees in the US have labeled Huawei a threat to national security.

The UK said this month that plans to put online pornography behind an age-verification wall would be "fully in place" by April 2018.

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