None of my neighbors watch porn

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I live on 98th street in Manhattan and I’m lucky enough to have a rooftop terrace. I’ve put a picnic table there and I often sit there and drink coffee, late at night (I also have many parties there ). Maybe it is the warm weather, but my neighbors have had their drapes up lately. I can look across 98th street and see televisions or computer screens in perhaps 20 apartments. And another 5 apartments in the building immediately west of mine, separated from my building by a narrow alley. And perhaps another 10 in buildings looking south. So something like 30 to 40 apartments. And I’ve never seen anyone watch porn.

Maybe this isn’t surprising, but I’ve read so much about people watching porn, sometimes it sounds as if everyone is watching porn. But among the televisions I can see, I have not seen any porn, ever.

Likewise, a few years back when I worked at Timeout New York, the office looked across at a tall glass-and-steel residential building, and many of those residents preferred not to have curtains. And sometimes I would look across and I could clearly see the baseball games and football games on people’s televisions. I never saw any porn.

There is a clearly a lot of porn in the world, and there must be a market for it, somewhere, but I find it offering a bit of perspective that whenever I look in on anyone’s television, I never see any porn. Porn might be a big business, but it has limits, just like the automobile industry is a huge industry, but not everyone owns or uses a car.

Source