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We aren't? I get that defining "easy access" (how easy? Access to what?) could conceivably be fraught, but it's difficult to imagine a sensible interpretation that doesn't currently put us a mile off the top of the chart of the baseline human experience.
Fair, this is a complex topic and it's somewhat hard to model, especially as you go back further. And it's hard to even talk about with specificity: there's a great wikipedia article on the Erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and I'm also not going to link it because it starts out with a detailed picture of a satyr penetrating a goat and goes downhill from there. Not all of the 'erotic art' is pornographic, there's always a difficult line between erotica and 'fertility rite' (or even genuine fortune ritual), and the natural tendency for history to leave only the most durable artifacts leaves a lot of unanswered and probably unanswerable information, but there's pretty strong evidence that at least citizens could access imagery of nudity and sex in many different venues, and that these competed with direct prostitution or bawdy shows that are believe to at least involve full nudity and (at least in relation to 'ritual') penetrative sex for an audience. Despite all of this, Roman and Greece morals still emphasized male restraint, which doesn't seem what you'd expect from a culture made flaccid at its own hands.
Similarly, Japanese shunga probably wasn't widely available starting from the 1300s simply because of the price and low repeatability of the underlying woodblock painting technique, but by the 1600s was common enough to be commercial items. Restrictions starting in the 1700s were largely ineffective, though eventually more serious bans began to at least drive supply underground later that century. But even then Victorian traders and art-collectors were getting surprise faceful pretty late into the 1800s. And, again, live shows and outright prostitution-for-display were common-enough and tolerated-enough to be pretty well-documented.
These aren't as high-quality as 4k video, nor as easily accessible as the average smartphone; the criticism that the average homebody today has seen more vaginas and variety in vaginas than Gengis Khan or a Roman emperor is mostly true (modulo the variety of all of that goat-and-swan stuff). But in addition to being a more complex explanation than porn at all, this largely pushes matters to just the last twenty years, and for most a shorter time period. And that doesn't really match this chart.
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No kidding. It's just leaps and bounds better now. In the 1970s you had to go to a theater to watch porn. By the 1980s you had videotapes which you had to buy/rent from a store. Remember the curtained-off back area of the video store? By the 1990s you could download image from the internet, where you'd sometimes wait multiple minutes as the image gradually loaded on your screen. In the late 1990s you could visit a site with a gallery of thumbnails, and then you'd click the ones that looked interesting.
We are absolutely the first society that has had easy access to porn.
in the 70s theaters existed solely for watching porn, alongside pg-friendly venues, and people by in large were fine with that. yes, let that sink in. I think the 60s and 70s were as depraved, even more so, compared to today. Drug use, of all kinds, was so common . Social media, the culture wars, and the always-on media means that everything is scrutinized. In the past, the depravity went unnoticed but it was there.
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Even if we say we've had "easy" access to internet porn since...the early 2000s, things have arguably gotten worse (or better) because porn companies are - just like their social media equivalents - getting better at the algorithms.
I also feel like porn delivery has changed. It used to feel much more ad hoc to go browse something random to jack off to. If I go to a big site today I really get the "Youtube" feel where I can see how it's sucking me down rabbit holes with recommendations in a much more effective manner
The "stepsister" fad probably wouldn't have spread during the early days of my porn viewing (from like 2005 on)
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