Many people object to Zack and Miri Make a Porno director Kevin Smith emblazoning the term porno across bus shelters, billboards and TV screens. But few of us fully understand that he's not leading the way when it comes to introducing America to pornography. He's not triggering this trend. He's just exploiting it.

Porn, in practice, has gone mainstream.

It's the New American Way
Smith was preparing for an interview with Jay Leno—talking to his wife while his 9-year-old daughter, Harley, was off in a corner doing homework. He happened to mention to his wife the abbreviated title of the movie, calling it Zack and Miri.

Quietly, from the corner, Harley finished the title: "Make a Porno," she said.

Smith, according to thedeadbolt.com, turned to her and asked her if she knew what a porno was.

"Yeah," she said. "It's what you do for a living."

Smith's reaction? "So I was like, 'Wow, my kid's really clever but really stupid at the same time,' you know? Obviously not very in tune with what her dad does."

Isn't she?

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is as close to porn as something can likely be without actually being porn—and that's if you use strict definitions. The film's raunch factor is so high that it was originally branded with an NC-17 rating before Smith convinced the MPAA to give it an R.

But that's only part of the story. Today, porn's influence goes well beyond explicitly documented sex scenes, that stack of magazines behind the convenience mart counter or those hard-core films in the video store back room. Pornography, in truth, is everywhere. It filters into everything from TV series to mall merchants. Porn stars are celebrities. Celebrities, sometimes unwittingly, are becoming porn stars.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno, then, isn't so much pushing the envelope as it is simply putting the stamp on a letter already written. Onscreen, the two title characters—best friends in desperate need of cash—decide to make a sexually explicit film in order to pay the bills.

Farfetched? Not so much. In January 2008, ABC News interviewed a 25-year-old interior designer who, twice a month, has sex with her boyfriend and posts the results online. She says she makes about $500-$600 a month for 20 minutes of "work."

"I'm not a porn star," she told ABC. "I don't want to be a porn star. I'm a pretty normal woman."

And she's not alone.

The Internet is filled with "normal women" (and men, too) who willingly expose their sexuality—and many do it for free. Nothing attracts attention quite like nudity, they've found, and in our celebrity-driven culture, plenty of people are disrobing to snag 15 minutes of Web-based fame.

This ethos has plowed into high schools and even middle schools, too: It seems every week or so, children make the newswire by taking explicit pictures of themselves and sending them to their friends. Recently, a 15-year-old Ohio girl was arrested on child porn charges for distributing lewd pictures of herself. She may end up on the state's sex offender list.

Our Cultural Wallpaper
"Porn is very different to young people in their teens and 20s than it is to those over 40," says Carmine Sarracino, co-author of The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go From Here. Indeed, a recent study found that 86 percent of college-age men had viewed porn in the last year, with 20 percent saying they looked at it nearly every day. Women were less prone to be regular viewers, but more than half of the college-age women polled said that porn was an acceptable expression of sexuality.

That acceptance, Sarracino believes, has helped make porn our "cultural wallpaper." Pornified models blanket our advertisements. Middle-aged women participate in pole-dancing aerobics classes. Porn star Jenna Jameson's autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, spent six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Sex sells, and the proof of that is on every newsstand, every television and every movie screen in the country.

The biggest winner? Porn stars, of course.

"Once largely shunned as pariahs by the entertainment industry," the Los Angeles Times says, "porn stars are turning up with increasing regularity on shopping-mall movie screens and in prime-time television shows, underscoring pornography's steady migration over the last three decades from the pop-culture margins to the mainstream." Zack and Miri Make a Porno employed real-life porn stars, but it's merely the latest film to have done so. The film's lead, Seth Rogen, deadpanned that it's hard to make a movie without them these days.

"Pineapple Express is the only movie I've done without porn stars in it," he told the Times. "They're like the director of photography to me, someone you need on set to make the movie."

And this crossover phenomenon is a two-way street. Starlets from Britney Spears to Lindsay Lohan have gotten increased exposure by, well, increasingly exposing themselves. Director Stephen Soderbergh, who cast porn star Sasha Grey in his upcoming film The Girlfriend Experience, says that when Paris Hilton "starred" in a bootleg sex tape, it actually gave her career a gigantic push upward.

"That changed everything," Soderbergh told the L.A. Times. "Or it didn't change everything; it confirmed that everything had changed."

Time to Rebuild the Hedgerow
For many, the idea of America's general pornification is disturbing enough, since pornography's negative effects on adults is significant. But grown-ups aren't the only ones who are feeling the downside of this push toward porn.

"There's been a general breakdown in the culture just in the distinction between children and adults," Sarracino tells salon.com. "Once you have this idea that we're all in it together, then children have no special status and they're up for grabs, literally sometimes.

"Miley Cyrus' parents seemed really savvy, like they wouldn't follow that trajectory, but then there she is in Vanity Fair half-naked, pouting and looking like a nymphet," Sarracino continued. "It's almost as if there's this cultural tide that can't be resisted—the culture demands skin. Even those one might expect to resist it can't."

And the same rule applies to those consuming the stuff. Once restricted to red light districts and seedy alleyway shops, porn was largely put out of reach by hedges organically planted by society to help suppress temptation. Family men, school teachers and pastors wouldn't dare walk down "that street" for fear of being seen—and their families, careers or ministries ruined. A few teens and children were exposed, but most were protected.

Now, little to nothing obscures extreme exposure. Porno is accessible with, as Smith says, a click of a computer button. And even an R rating at the mall multiplex is no longer the wall it once was.

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