The Hidden Cut - S1E3: The Rough Cut
How the cut became the camera’s favorite angle—and what it cost us all.
I grew up in a world where porn was always there—just beneath the surface.
Hidden in VHS drawers, whispered about on the school bus, or quietly loaded on a desktop at someone’s house when their parents weren’t home.
By the time I was old enough to really understand what it was, it had already been normalized.
And I don’t just mean normalized in the sense of being widely accepted. I mean that it had become so embedded in the culture—so ambient—that the idea of a man who doesn’t watch porn was almost… suspicious.
Kind of like a man who’s not circumcised. He’s not wrong. He’s just different.
We’re at the point now where avoiding porn isn’t seen as a choice. It’s seen as a signal. And for those of us raised on high-speed access and low expectations, the line between what’s private and what’s performative has all but disappeared.
So today, we’re going to talk about how porn didn’t creep into American life—it was curated, commercialized, and sold back to us as liberation.
And what it’s cost us… might be a lot more than we think.
✂️ Quick cut: If you’re enjoying this, become a paid subscriber. These essays take time to research and write—and your support keeps the scissors sharp.
Subscribe to follow the thread—from laugh tracks to foreskins to the emotional fallout we’re only just beginning to name.
A Nation of Voyeurs
Porn didn’t just sneak into the American home—it was welcomed, packaged, syndicated, and sold. But the kind of sex we’ve been sold… has always had a hidden cost.
It’s hard to believe, but not that long ago, porn was something you couldn’t even say out loud. You didn’t talk about it. You didn’t admit to seeing it. And if you were caught with it, you might lose your job—or your freedom.
But somehow, over the course of a single century, it went from being a jailable offense… to something you could stream in public, on demand, anywhere at all.
So how did we get here?
The Panic
In the 1800s, America’s relationship to sex was driven by terror—particularly the fear of self-pleasure. Doctors like John Harvey Kellogg warned that masturbation would cause blindness, insanity, even early death. He advocated for circumcision specifically to prevent boys from touching themselves.
And then there was fundamentalist Christian, Anthony Comstock—America’s original morality cop. As a postal inspector, he campaigned against obscene literature, abortion, contraception, masturbation, gambling, prostitution, and patent medicine. He also participated in efforts to suppress fraudulent banking schemes, mail swindles, and medical quackery.
However, it was his legislative crusade against vice that earned him two prominent opponents: activist Emma Goldman and Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger.
Born into an Orthodox Lithuanian Jewish family, Goldman considered herself an anarchist, writing and lecturing on a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality.
Irish-Catholic Sanger, on the other hand, was a first-wave feminist and a member of the eugenics movement. Her birth control efforts from over one hundred years ago led to the founding of the organization that we know today as Planned Parenthood.
Despite Comstock’s crusades and countless arrests for obscenity and gambling, something kept bubbling beneath the surface.
Women’s suffrage. Feminism. Industrialization.
These burgeoning issues would create an indelible impact on American society. But exactly how was anyone’s guess.
Listen to the podcast episode here.
The Leak
Promiscuity didn’t go away—it just went underground.
In the early 20th century, illegal stag films circulated in secret. Dirty magazines were hidden behind the counter. And in the 1930s, the Hollywood Production Code censored everything: no nudity, no queer characters, no visible lust.
Still, the pressure built. By the 1950s and sixties, the cracks had begun to show. The Hollywood Production Code—also known as the Hays Code—began losing its grip after decades of sanitizing American cinema.
Filmmakers and artists started pushing boundaries, and landmark films like The Pawnbroker (1964), which featured partial nudity, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), with its raw dialogue, challenged the censors.
Eventually, the system collapsed entirely. In 1968, the Hays Code was replaced with the MPAA rating system we use today. This transition didn’t just open the door for more explicit mainstream film—it swung the door off its hinges.
Hugh Hefner’s Playboy brought nudity out of the shadows and into living rooms—alongside jazz reviews and interviews with Norman Mailer. His first issue, released in December 1953 under the name Stag Party, featured Marilyn Monroe in a nude calendar shoot from 1949.
Describing himself as having been raised “conservative, Midwestern, [and] Methodist,” Hefner didn’t just reshape American sexual norms—he had to abandon his own to do so. To step into the world of softcore glamour and highbrow hedonism, he had to walk away from his religious inheritance.
That’s the thing about porn in America: for Christians, entry required a break. For Jews, it often didn’t. Their value system already held space for nuance, for commerce, for sacred contradiction.
Where one group had to renounce, the other could reframe.
And so, the all-American sex kitten was born alongside the all-American apostate. Suddenly, promiscuous sex wasn’t just sin. It was sophistication. And it was quickly becoming mainstream.
The Money Shot
The real break came in the 1970s.
Deep Throat. Behind the Green Door. The Devil in Miss Jones.
For reasons no one can quite explain, there was also the strange, short-lived phenomenon of pornographic magazines mysteriously turning up in the woods—a rite of passage for boys coming of age between the seventies and nineties, as if the trees themselves were tasked with handing down the next generation its forbidden fruit.
It felt almost folkloric, like a Grimm’s fairy tale flipped inside out—a wicked witch breadcrumbing little boys not with sweets, but with vice, luring them into her cabin of secrets
These weren’t backroom films anymore—they were showing in theaters, reviewed by critics, and watched by couples on date night.
Porn had gone mainstream. Some called it “porno chic.”
Behind the scenes, Jewish entrepreneurs like Reuben Sturman built vast distribution empires. Al Goldstein turned porn into a political act in direct rebellion to conservative Christian norms.
Loud, brash, and comfortable in the limelight, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt made obscenity a First Amendment issue. In 1977, he made headlines again when he declared himself a ‘born again’ Christian—a surprising pivot that was followed just months later by a highly publicized shooting that left him permanently paralyzed.
When Joseph Paul Franklin confessed to attempting to kill Flynt in retaliation for an edition of Hustler displaying interracial sex, he indelibly connected the issue of racial integration to pornography.
Proponents of porn claimed they weren’t just dirty magazines—they were declarations of independence, pushing back against racial taboos and in defense of free speech.
The Home Invasion: From VHS to The Internet
In the eighties and nineties, home video changed everything. You no longer had to go to a theater. Porn came to you. By the 2000s, it was everywhere.
Tube sites made it free. The internet made it infinite. And then came OnlyFans—porn’s full arrival into the influencer economy. In an unexpected twist, some of the people managing or profiting from online adult content weren’t just tech entrepreneurs—they were religious leaders.
In a notable development, Solomon Friedman, a Canadian criminal defense lawyer and ordained Orthodox rabbi, co-founded Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), a private equity firm that acquired MindGeek—the parent company of Pornhub—in 2023. Friedman now serves as the public face of the company, asserting that he is advocating for transparency, compliance, and ethical reform within the adult entertainment industry.
What began as a hidden vice became a full-blown market, complete with subscription tiers, hashtags, and livestreams.
America, the land of Puritans, had undergone a conversion to become the land of premium content.
Creating The Industry Standard
Now, let’s take a quick look at how mass circumcision didn’t just reshape the male body—but reshaped the male image. Circumcision didn’t just become a medical norm in America—it became a visual standard. In the world of pornography—especially heterosexual porn—it created a default.
No foreskin. No surprises.
The circumcised penis was easier to film, easier to frame, easier to commodify. It was “cleaner.”
More American. More marketable.
And over time, this visual standard became a cultural expectation. Figures like Ron Jeremy—nicknamed “the everyman” of porn—helped normalize it further. He wasn’t a chiseled god. He wasn’t a Hollywood heartthrob. He was hairy, sweaty, and very, very circumcised.
He became the visual shorthand for what men were supposed to do:
Perform. Stay hard. Finish on cue.
But what we didn’t see—what the camera never showed—was what it took off screen to become that kind of man. The emotional detachment. The physical numbing.
The years of unspoken shame that followed a cut made when he was too young to remember it—but never quite old enough to forget. The irony is almost too sharp to name: The same cut that made men camera-ready… may have muted their ability to feel anything at all.
And not just physically. Emotionally.
So we have to ask: Can a generation of desensitized men—shaped by scalpels, studios, and societal expectations—ever find true intimacy in a world that never gave them permission to feel in the first place?
Because this wasn’t just a porn aesthetic. It was a cultural casting call. American men were physically reshaped to match a cultural ideal.
And the camera sealed that ideal into the public imagination—forever.
Sacred, Secular, and Somewhere In Between: How Judaism Views Porn
To understand why so many of porn’s power players have Jewish roots, we have to talk about something most Americans have never considered: the Jewish relationship to sex—and why it’s never looked quite like the Christian one.
Unlike Christianity, which historically embraced celibacy, Judaism has taken a much more progressive stance about sex. Within marriage, sex isn’t just allowed. It’s a mitzvah—a commandment.
The Talmud contains entire sections devoted to sexual frequency, satisfaction, and emotional obligation. In fact, in traditional Jewish law, a husband is required to attend to his wife’s sexual needs, with frequency adjusted depending on his profession.
And while porn and masturbation aren’t exactly celebrated, they’re also not treated with the same fire-and-brimstone condemnation that so often characterized the American interpretation of Christian doctrine.
Take the 19th-century masturbation panic as a prime example. American Jews definitely weren’t filled with the same fear of “getting scripture wrong” as their Christian counterparts were.
Many of the artists, comedians, and businessmen who reshaped American media—including pornography—came from Jewish backgrounds. These were men raised in traditions that believed taboo wasn’t something to avoid, but something to work around.
So when sex became a business, some of those men treated it like any other commodity. Not because they lacked values, but because they found the wriggle room they needed to do it within the structure of their value system.
In the early 2000s, several Orthodox-affiliated men were found to be involved in online porn empires—not necessarily as performers, but as financiers, strategists, and silent partners.
And while this might seem shocking to outsiders, within certain interpretations of Jewish law, the line between sin and business is more flexible than you might expect.
In Judaism, intent often matters more than action. If the act is technically permissible—and if it’s not directly harming anyone—then it can be rationalized within the framework of halacha.
To a Puritan, porn is a straight shot to damnation. To some Jews? It’s a business opportunity.
And maybe what’s most surprising isn’t how many of these men were Jewish—but how few Americans realized that Jewish views on sex could be so radically different from their own.
In a country where Christian sexual norms were once taken as universal, it was easy to miss that your Jewish neighbors weren’t living by the same rules.
They weren’t breaking them. They just never believed in them to begin with.
Circumcised Nation, Desensitized Nation
There’s a theory—quiet, often dismissed, but gaining traction—that says:
If a man’s very first experience of touch is one of pain and clinical detachment…
…how might that shape his ability to feel anything later on?
Research shows that circumcision removes over 20,000 nerve endings from the foreskin—many of which are responsible for fine-touch sensitivity, thermal reception, and sexual arousal.
In practical terms?
That means millions of American men grew up with a body that couldn’t feel as much. So they learned to chase intensity. Harder thrusts. Wilder fantasies.
Because subtlety—the quiet electricity of real intimacy—was never fully on the table.
One man on Reddit put it bluntly: “It’s like I’m always half-numb, like sex is this goal to reach, not something I experience moment to moment.”
These aren’t outliers. This is the quiet confession of a generation raised on porn, shame, and skin-deep sensation.
The irony is painful: We created a culture of hypersexual performance—then surgically dulled the instruments. And when that same culture flooded the mainstream with hardcore imagery—day after day, clip after clip—many men didn’t just adapt.
They overcorrected. They sought sensation wherever they could find it.
Not because they were perverse. But because their body was whispering—and porn was the only thing loud enough to hear.
Meanwhile, intact men—especially those raised outside the U.S.—report a vastly different experience. They talk about nuance. Gradual build. A kind of sensitivity that doesn’t require escalation.
One European man said: “The idea that porn is necessary to enjoy sex seems insane to me. I’ve never needed anything more than touch and breath.”
For the American male, porn became the place he went to feel something—
But he didn’t know what he was missing. He was taught to perform. Not to connect.
So we’re left with a hard truth: We’ve circumcised a nation. And we may have desensitized it in more ways than one.
Sex, Scandal, and the Celebrity Tape
Porn used to live in the shadows. But the moment it collided with celebrity, everything changed. For many of us, the turning point was Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.
A stolen tape. A grainy VHS passed around like contraband. A private moment, leaked without consent. It was scandalous. Shocking. Even illegal.
And yet, it didn’t destroy their careers. In some ways, it made them iconic.
But if Pam and Tommy were the cultural turning point—then Kim Kardashian was the commercial one. By the time her tape “leaked” in 2007, the rules had changed. It wasn’t about shame anymore. It was about strategy.
And no family in modern history has leveraged sex, scandal, and spectacle more effectively than the Kardashians. A family tied to the O.J. Simpson trial—a courtroom saga that taught America to blur the line between crime and entertainment—somehow became the architects of our digital porn age.
They understood something crucial: In a culture of constant surveillance, intimacy isn’t something you protect—it’s something you monetize. The career-ending sex tape was over. Now, it was a launchpad.
In the years that followed, celebrity culture became indistinguishable from porn. The celebrity upskirt era—brief, brutal—turned paparazzi into pornographers. Tabloid headlines became erotic clickbait.
And the line between consent and commercialism? Almost impossible to find.
The average consumer wasn’t watching traditional porn anymore. They were watching celebrities. Influencers. Leaks. Livestreams. Private moments became public currency. And behind it all, people were making money.
Companies like Vivid Entertainment, founded by Steven Hirsch, weren’t just profiting from sex. They were profiting from shame. From the thrill of exposure. From the knowledge that something sacred had been broken—and couldn’t be put back.
So what does it mean when our most viral videos are born in violation? When the thing we watch most often… was never meant to be seen? What does that do to our sense of empathy? Of privacy? What does it do to the soul?
And more disturbingly—
What happens when we start to confuse being watched… with being loved?
The Great Unfeeling
And now, we are watching most recent generations of Americans experience the emotional fallout from decades of pornified detachment and trauma-masked masculinity. The same body that was altered to meet visual norms is the one struggling to feel at all.
America created a man who could perform, but not feel.
Who could climax, but not connect.
Maybe part of the reason American men feel so adrift today is because the institutions that once claimed to give them meaning—faith, family, masculinity—have become punchlines.
Protestant Christianity, in particular, has gone from defining the cultural order… to being the butt of the joke.
From sitcoms to sex ed, from Elaine discovering Puddy's religion in Seinfeld, to purity culture memes on TikTok, we’ve learned to laugh comfortably at Christianity.
But here’s the thing: once something sacred becomes laughable, it loses its gravity.
And when marriage becomes a parody, when God becomes a sitcom trope, when men are raised to be ashamed of their bodies and then mocked for failing to perform with them—what’s left?
Meanwhile, Judaism has managed to maintain a kind of mystique in the mainstream public eye. It’s rarely scrutinized in the same way.
Their norms around sex, family, even modesty, remain intact… and protected.
Could this asymmetry in critique help explain why Protestant Christians now face the highest divorce rates in the country?
While 51% of Protestant Christians in America have experienced
divorce, the numbers drop steeply across other groups—19% for Catholics,
11% for the religiously unaffiliated, 9% for Jews, and just 8% for Muslims—suggesting that the most culturally mocked faith tradition may also be
the one most spiritually fractured.
If the sacred is only ever mocked, then maybe it's no wonder that we’ve lost our sense of how to be devoted. To God. To our partners. To each other.
It’s safe to say that when Kellogg, Remondino, and Sayre set out to circumcise the nation, they weren’t imagining their legacy would climax with high-speed broadband and a million lonely browser tabs.
From Forbidden to For Sale
Given how obsessed 19th-century Americans were with the dangers of masturbation, it’s almost hard to believe we’ve traded that panic for a different kind of fear: the terror of not performing well enough sexually—or at all.
So how did a country founded on sexual repression become the world’s largest producer and consumer of pornography?
Porn didn’t just sneak in through the back door—it walked in through the front, wrapped in a First Amendment flag and flanked by free-market profits. What followed was equal parts capitalist conquest and the growing desire to divorce ourselves from the traditional family unit.
Loosening of public expectations of modesty. Growing individual anxiety and depression, resulting from increasing feelings of isolation.
Porn empires quickly grew, utilizing technology for fast, easy, anonymous access to grab ahold of the American sexual psyche, making itself available to everyone and anyone at all times.
The rising popularity of popping a pill to alleviate the symptoms of a society moving in a vastly different direction than what had once been. In a nation no longer tethered to its puritan past, we find ourselves unmoored—not free from shame, just confused about where to put it.
One had to ask: At what point did Americans agree to allow sex to be for sale?
In the next episode, we’ll talk about what happens when the machine starts to break—and the pills stop working.
Until then, I’m Lisa. And this… is The Hidden Cut—a series about what’s been removed, revised, and left on history’s cutting room floor.
Further Reading & Receipts
The following sources informed and inspired Episode 3: “The Rough Cut.” These receipts trace the long arc from 19th-century moral panic to 21st-century market domination, from circumcision to celebrity sex tapes. Follow the trail—and ask who’s really profiting from what we’ve been trained to desire.
Historical Context: Circumcision, Masturbation, and Control
John Harvey Kellogg, Plain Facts for Old and Young (1888)
Kellogg’s infamous circumcision prescription as punishment for masturbation.
https://archive.org/details/plainfactsforol00kellgoogAnthony Comstock biography – Britannica
Overview of Comstock’s crusade against “obscenity” and vice.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anthony-ComstockEmma Goldman Archive – Anarchy Archives
Goldman’s writings on free love, sexual liberation, opposition to Comstock laws, among other subjects.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/index.htmMargaret Sanger Papers Project – NYU
Birth control, eugenics, and Sanger’s battle with censorship.
sanger.hosting.nyu.edu
From Stag Films to Streaming
What Porn Taught a Generation of Women by Sophie Gilbert – The Atlantic May 2025
Explores how the proliferation of pornography in the late 20th and early 21st centuries profoundly shaped the self-image, cultural understanding, and societal roles of Millennial women. Delves into the era of "porno-chic" in the 1990s and 2000s, examining how media, fashion, politics, and technology normalized the sexualization of women and entrenched male-dominant perspectives in mainstream culture.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/porn-american-pop-culture-feminism/682114/Reddit: We gotta talk about porn in the woods
Firsthand accounts of this strange, brief, American phenomenon.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hdtgm/comments/16z8837/we_gotta_talk_about_porn_in_the_woods/‘Narcissistic objectification’: The problem with the ‘pornification’ of pop culture – The Independent (July 26, 2020)
The sexual marketplace may suggest that women have become more liberated, but is it really liberating, ask Alexandra S. Rome and Aliette Lambert
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/women/pornification-misogyny-sexual-liberation-pop-culture-a9630631.htmlThe Hays Code – Britannica
Explains Hollywood’s production code and its eventual replacement with the MPAA.
https://www.britannica.com/art/Hays-Code
Culture, Desensitization, and the Male Body
Circumcision: What You Need to Know – Men’s Health
Discusses the loss of nerve endings and changes to sensitivity.
https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/a19547922/circumcision-effects/The Effects of Circumcision on Sexual Sensation – CIRP
One of the most cited research summaries on foreskin sensitivity and function.
https://www.cirp.org/pages/anatomy/Porn-Induced Male Sexual Dysfunction – Psychology Today
Explores emotional detachment, porn addiction, and the long-term effects of hyper-stimulation.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/love-and-sex-in-the-digital-age/202407/porn-induced-male-sexual-dysfunctionReddit: r/intactivism thread
Discussions of circumcised versus intact experiences, as well as a variety of topics within the subject of inactivism.
r/intactivism
Porn Industry Figures & Cultural Impact
The Evolution of Pornography – Psychology Today (July 2, 2020)
A brief primer on the history of porn.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/love-and-sex-in-the-digital-age/202007/the-evolution-pornographyHow an Ordained Rabbi Ended Up Owning the World’s Most Famous Porn Company – Time Magazine (September 9, 2024)
A feature on Solomon Friedman, the Orthodox rabbi who now owns adult website Pornhub
https://time.com/7017403/solomon-friedman-pornhub-ethical-interview/The Kim Kardashian sex tape: An oral history – Page Six (March 27, 2017)
A retelling of the story of how the sex tape featuring Ray-J Norwood and Kim Kardashian (Kim Kardashian, Superstar) came to be from some of the parties involved.
https://pagesix.com/2017/03/27/the-kim-kardashian-sex-tape-an-oral-history/The True Story Behind Pamela And Tommy’s Leaked Sex Tape Is Almost Too Crazy To Believe – Elle Australia (May 17, 2021)
A retelling of the series of events that led to the publication of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s leaked sex tape.
https://www.elle.com.au/culture/news/true-story-behind-pamela-anderson-and-tommy-lee-leaked-sex-tape-25256/
Judaism, Sex, and Sacred Contrasts
Jews in the American porn industry – Jewish Quarterly (Winter 2004)
Explores the history of Jewish influence in the American porn industry.
https://www.finalcall.com/docs/Jews_in_porn_abrams.pdf7 of the most famous Jews in porn – The Times of Israel (June 13, 2015)
A list of seven of the most recognizable Jewish people in the porn industry compiled in celebration of adult star Jenna Jameson’s conversion to Judaism.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/7-of-the-most-famous-jews-in-porn/Traditional Sources on Sexual Pleasure – My Jewish Learning
Textual references to the mitzvah of sexual fulfillment within Jewish law.
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/traditional-sources-on-sexual-pleasure/2014 Religious Landscape Study – Pew Research Center
This study provides a comprehensive analysis of religious affiliation and its correlation with various societal factors, including divorce rates.
https://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2015/05/rls-08-26-full-report.pdf
🎬 Continue the Series
← Previous Episode: Comic Cuts
→ Next Episode: The Deep Cut
📂 Full Episode Guide: Cold Open
Think something got left on the cutting room floor?
Add your notes below—we’re still editing in real time.