Story highlights Free pornography makes porn more accessible and more acceptable to us

But with this growing acceptance comes a tolerance for mediocre material

The ethical porn trend is changing the way erotic content is both and consumed

(CNN) For many of us, our first exposure to pornography was surreptitious: a sneak peek at someone else's copy of Playboy or the viewing of a worn VHS tape stolen from an older sibling.

Today, however, porn is everywhere; anyone can jump online and view it with the few clicks of a keyboard. The numbers are staggering: According to data provided by the American Psychological Association, rates of porn consumption range between 50% and 99% among men and 30% to 86% among women.

The popular website PornHub alone logs about 2.4 million visitors per hour -- more than an estimated 6,000 visitors per second.

And guess what? It's all free. Not only does that make porn more accessible, it makes it more acceptable to us: For many millennials, porn is less taboo and simply part of life. In some ways, that's a positive thing. Porn -- or, as we call it in my field, sexually explicit Internet material or visual sexual stimuli -- can be a valuable aspect of a healthy sex life.

A proposed regulation in California would require porn actors to wear condoms while filming. The thinking is that this will not only promote safer sex on set amongst the performers, it will encourage porn viewers at home to follow their lead. But condoms aren't the only way to protect the safety of adult film actors or to ensure that the porn that reaches consumers is of a higher standard overall.

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