The Internet Is For Porn - Television Tropes & Idioms

"I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the Internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called 'Bring Back the Porn!'"

—Dr. Cox, Scrubs

The internet is for porn!
The internet is for porn!
Why d'you think the 'net was born?
Porn! Porn! PORN!
—Trekkie Monster, Avenue Q

Let's face it. The Internet, and a lot of people's computers, are full of porn. Whether you're portraying modern days, the VR-laden future, or another universe entirely, any computer network of a sufficient size will have a place where one can indulge in the pleasures of the flesh. Well, actually, unless they develop telepresence devices for implementing ''feeling'',^* all we'll be able to do is watch.

Reality check: it's not actually. It's mostly advertising. See the QI example below.

Partly a result of The Rule Of First Adopters. Related to the Porn Stash.

Examples:

Anime & Manga

Welcome To The NHK — at one point Satou secludes himself from the outside world (even more) to fill his harddrive with porn. When he runs out of disk space, he starts deleting other stuff. Like his operating system files. Whoops.
Chobits — Let's not forget that the main character wanted a persocom specifically to "surf the porn sites"
Paranoia Agent — a sleazy reporter investigating the "Lil' Slugger" case "borrows" a library computer used by two adolescent boys. When he gives it back to the boys, they promptly return to the site they were originally looking at, which is - you guessed it - a Japanese soft-core porn site.
In Real Drive, it is explained that this is the prime reason most of the population supported the development of the Meta-Real Network.
In Bloody Monday the main character tells his younger sister he's looking at porn, but that's only to keep her from peeking in on his hacking activities. Sick, but effective.

Film

The Lifetime Original Movie Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life is a So Bad Its Good story about a teenager who becomes addicted to internet porn and his life is destroyed because of it. It's like a nondenominational live-action Chick Tract about how New Media Are Evil.
- Red Bull as well! Mustn't forget the Red Bull.
A somewhat example with Little Children, where Sarah's husband becomes addicted to a specific porn persona on the internet, going to such an extreme that he is caught by Sarah masturbating to the porn girl with her online bought panties over his face. So Yeah.
In CSA Confederate States Of America slavery is still legal, and online slave trading auctions have pumped millions into the economy...and pornogrophy is still the top selling item on the net.
In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, when trying to explain what the internet is to Jay, it is decribed thusly:
Holden: The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another.
The adaptation of Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant used this as a joke. After Darren is transformed and nearly kills his little sister for blood, he returns to his room where he finds Mr. Crepsley sitting in the corner flipping through a magazine, and Crepsley casually comments "Interesting....I thought they had this on the Internet now."

Literature

Dave Barry In Cyberspace frequently returns to the theme of computers being an excellent media for sexual content.
- In fact, he even devotes a chapter of the book to his visit to "Adult Dex" a trade convention for pornographic computer games.
America: The Book referred to the Internet as a source of communication, information, and "a staggering array of human sexual fetish".
Wally's attempt at making downloading porn his job wasn't the first time Scott Adams satirized the subject. His article, The Holodeck Problem, says that real-life, Star Trek-like holodecks would be problematic because...well, you could probably figure out what the problem would be. He's even quoted as saying "it will be society's last invention." You can read the whole article here.
Hivemind from "The Overlord Protocol" aludes to this trope with this quote: "I was granted instantaneous and total access to the entire Internet, Mr. Malpense. To be honest, I feel... dirty."

Live Action TV

In Joan Of Arcadia, Joan's younger brother was shown to have an addiction to Internet porn.
- However, he blamed it on his less geeky best friend, who did indeed routinely use that computer. It was never made quite clear who stored the porn on his computer.
In Chuck, a bomb is disarmed via a porn site that scrambles the computer of anyone using it.
Scrubs: According to Dr. Cox the internet is for porn, as evidenced by the page quote.
- Somewhat relatedly, at one point Elliot says she created a chatroom called "I hate Cox", then adds the only people who go there are "Me, two interns, and 5,000 lesbians."
Inverted in Dexter : when the show's protagonist (and serial-killer) is interrupted while tampering with the police database, he promptly alt-tabs to a porn site, because that's what you *do*, alone in an office with the blinds pulled down, isn't it ?
- His girlfriend's Julie Benz, and he still looks at porn?
  - You're a woman, aren't you?
House, when the titular character was trying to get out of doing something: "There's a lot of porn piling up on the internet...doesn't download itself!"
House: Sorry - up late. Internet porn.
Dr. Chase: How come you’re not in your office?
House: Because there is a computer in my office. If I log on, romance will ensue. My wrist might fall off.
- Also:
House: Infectious or environmental... all we have to do is check out parasites, viruses, bacteria, fungi, prions, radiation, toxins, chemicals, or it's internet porn related. I'll check the internet, you guys get the rest of the stuff.
- ALSO:
House, to a Fellow: What's the matter? Got a problem with the naked female form?
Fellow: N-no...
Thirteen: Maybe because she's never seen it spooning with the naked dolphin form.
Recent Top Gear running joke -
Clarkson: This week I went on the internet, and I found this!
Odyssey 5. Given that the Sentients increase their artificial intelligence by absorbing code off the internet, they naturally pick up a lot of porn, so the synthetic human the group encounter in "The Trouble With Harry" is more than eager to explore this aspect with a couple of Kurt Mendel's good-time girls.
Referenced in QI, when Stephen Fry asked what makes up 80% of the internet and got the expected response, before revealing that a study shows that less than 1% of the internet is porn.
- 73.79% of traffic is caused by peer-to-peer, 66.7% of this is Bit Torrent and 13.05% of this is made up by porn (so non-bittorrent porn is not counted in the publicly available information). See the Internet Study 2007 by ipoque.
In Coupling the men debate the merits of drugs used in pregnancy, by the stating that there is no such thing as a natural, painless pregnancy, and that the Internet is "research tool."
The holodeck in Star Trek seems to be treated an awful lot like the more cerebral version of this. Considering that at least two characters have had full-on romances on the holodeck...
- And don't forget Lt. Barclay's "programs"...
The Sopranos. When Tony's daughter realises they're likely to be raided by the FBI soon, she advises her brother to erase all that porn he downloaded off his hard drive.
From Will And Grace:
Grace: Hey, what are you doing?
Will: All my plants died. I told Jack to water them while I was away. But I can see how he might hear that as "fill up my hard drive with Internet porn."
On Supernatural, each Winchester brother apparently enjoys watching porn when ~~they think~~ the other isn't looking. Running Gags include bustyasianbeauties.com and Casa Erotica.
Seinfeld: George uses porn as part of his computer sales pitch in The Serenity Now.

Music

Defunct a cappella group DaVinci's Notebook / DVN's-break-up survivor group Paul & Storm and their number Internet Porn, which contains a number of amusing(ly accurate) allusions to the sort of content one can find ("Girl on girl on girl on girl on girl on guy on sheep").
- DVN is fairly well represented on You Tube, including The Captain's Wife's Lament ("What if we spent an entire song setting up just one Incredibly Lame Pun?") and Enormous Penis, making them lampshaders of a demographic they arguably contribute to.
MC Frontalot's "Pr0n Song", which is about all of the various and sundry bizarre porn he's (Or at least the character for the song) accumulated from the internet.

Newspaper Comics

This exchange from Dilbert deserves mention. Wally is setting out his long-range project goals at an annual staff meeting
Wally: My proposed work plan for the year is to stress-test our product under severe network conditions. I will accomplish this by downloading large image files from the busiest servers on the net.
Wally: (after his proposal is rejected) I was this close to making it my job to download dirty images.

Software

The name of Mozilla Firefox's image decoding library? libpr0n.

Theatre

Avenue Q — The Trope Namer.

Video Games

In the Endless Frontier, this exchange occurs:
Reiji:It's funny what you can learn when you spend all day wasting time on the Internet, isn't it?
KOS-MOS:Strange... In my time, the Internet is for—-

Webcomics

In Questionable Content number 112 the Anthro PC Pintsize claims to be objective at judging female breasts because of all the porn he had downloaded for Marten. In a later strip, while he browses his hard drive, he comes across his Porn Stash and gets distracted from his task. And in yet another strip Marten has to take him to be repaired by Marigold, a yaoi fangirl, and she remarks on the amount of porn in Pintsize (then copies the hentai folder).
- Pintsize's hard drive has been described as a 'private universe of porn', and his Twitter account is nothing but hentai and Rule Thirty Four. Which Marigold then rates the artwork of.
The situation is commented on in this page of 21st Century Fox.
Sluggy Freelance:
- "The Sci-Fi Adventure"
  Narrator: As Torg and Riff journey through space on the Confederation starship, they take advantage of the ship's information database to find a way home. As Riff puts it, "It's like the Internet."
  Torg: Hey, there's nothing in here but pornography and fan sites for some show called "The Bleck-Files!" This is nothing like our Internet!
- "The Storm Breaker Saga", "Last Call":
  Riff: What? These aren't owls! They're breasts! Torg, get this smut off the screen and go back to "The Wings of America."
  Torg: I'm a good person. It's the Internet's fault!
- "Torg Potter and the Chamberpot of Secretions":
  (Torg and two parodies of Harry Potter characters are shopping in a magical bookstore that contains every book ever written.)
  Homogenize Milktoast: I can't believe you're wasting this store's vast resources on smut!
  Weaslo Ronsnaps: Not just smut! All the smut ever written!
  Torg: ...What am I doing? I have the Internet!
Steve from Khaos Komix explores his sexual orientation with the help "of [his] friend, Mr. Internet". And after Alex meets Tom, he is soon on the internet, looking for stuff on tattooed guys...

Western Animation

Futurama. "I didn't think it was possible, but thanks to the Internet, I'm bored with sex."
- In the episode "A Big Piece of Garbage", the crew watches a documentary about pollution:
  Fry: You got that on the Internet? In my day the Internet was only used for pornography.
  Professor Farnsworth: Actually, that's still true.
  Woman in video: Now that the garbage is in space, doctor, perhaps you can help me with my sexual inhibitions.
  Man in video: With gusto.
- And in Bender's Big Score, Bender receives a spam email claiming that he could make money from downloading porn. When he clicks on it, he's infected with a total obedience virus.
- In Bicyclops Built Two, the crew went into the Internet and saw scores of adult chat rooms.
The Simpsons:
Lennie: You're the Internet's number one non-pornographic site.
Carl: Which means you're ten trillionth overall.
- Also:
  Geek: I invented a program that downloads porn off the internet one million times faster.
  Marge: Does anyone need that much porn?
  Homer: (drooling) One million times...
- And From "The Great Wife Hope":
  Marge: I simply googled 'girls having fun' and, after 97,000 pages of porn, I found Crazy Bowling.
In Robot Chicken, a sketch involved a virus deleting all the porn on the Internet and people's hard drives. Predictably, there were riots in the streets. And world leaders broadcasting that this wasn't funny, 'please, man, give us back our porn'.
- Apparently they all forgot about the many magazines, videos, and DVD's that also have porn, but then again it IS Robot Chicken.
  - Psh, dead media. In the twenty-first century, you get your porn on the internet.
South Park had an episode where everyone's internet went down, plunging the nation into chaos. In the men's case (particularly Randy Marsh), the other problems were compounded by porn withdrawal (After internet porn, they couldn't go back to Playboy). One group created an "Internet Porn Simulator" by lowering hastily-drawn stick figure pictures into an empty monitor casing.
- Further expanded on in The Movie, when Stan innocently (no, really) asks Kyle to look up "clitoris", without knowing it's a sex organ, and they get 8 billion hits. Including one of Cartman's mom, of course.
- She's the first result on the list, natch.
  - "Scheiser!" "Oh, okay!" "Dude! I shouldn't be seeing this!"
American Dad: "Tyrannosaurus Rex; real. Babe-osaurus Rex; porn. A symposium on the Pangea theory of the Permian Extin-OH, THAT'S SOME DISGUSTING PORN!!!"
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: "I think I'm actually done being horny. *Bestiality turns on* Oh wait... no we're not... no we are not!"

Real Life

The Great IPv6 Experiment, as planned. How else does one support the adoption of and stress-test an internet protocol that has heretofore only seen limited application?
The One Laptop Per Child project, which provides free-ish internet-enabled laptops for the poor children in third-world countries, was dismayed yet unsurprised to learn what the first thing was that Nigerian teenage boys used it for.
According to an advert break bumper on the Discovery Channel UK which offer up random factoids, the internet is comprised of either 69% or 79% pornographic material.
You've seen our Tropers Tales for the Porn Stash trope, right?