Sex and . . . Breakfast Cereal? New Book Looks at Sex’s Remarkable Influence

Here at Adult Empire, it’s a given that sex shapes a lot of what we do as a business. The preferences people have in the bedroom influence the kind of porn they enjoy, which in turn impacts the movies, sex toys, and accessories that we sell. It’s no shock that sex would be a pervasive aspect at a porn company, after all! What’s more surprising is the influence sex has had in other, seemingly unrelated domains of life. That’s the subject of the upcoming book Turned On: A Mind-Blowing Investigation Into How Sex Has Shaped Our World, written by Esquire veteran Ross Benes.

For instance, Benes mentions that the innocuous, wholesome breakfast cereals many of of eat every day were originally designed as a means of fighting runaway libidos. The devoutly religious Sylvester Graham (he of the Graham Cracker) and John Harvey Kellogg (famous for creating the cereals brand that bears his name) were convinced that people needed to lessen the amount of sinful sex they had. “They both believed that diet had a huge impact on people’s sex drives. So they invented the bland vegetarian foods corn flakes and Graham crackers in order to reduce the sinister urge,” says Benes in an excerpt of the book published on EW.com. (This makes the series of cereal-themed movies released by Caballero several years ago all the more amusing.)

The same excerpt also mentions other areas of life that have seen a surprising shift thanks to sex. One is particularly relevant to our day-to-day life at Adult Empire: technology. “Ecommerce, video streaming, affiliate marketing, tracking devices and online credit card transactions are just of the few digital technologies that porn popularized,” writes Benes. While porn’s wide-ranging influence on tech is well known in porn circles, it’s good to see this fact receiving some exposure in mainstream popular press, too! Benes also notes that things such as the crime rate, savings rates, and religions pluralism have all been influenced by sex.

Benes’s book is slated for release in May.