In the face of yet further attempts to censor the internet, Anastasia of Sexualité makes an excellent point about one major anti-porn bugaboo.
More on the current wave of adult/porn paranoia and calls to ban adult content. There always appears to be an argument that web sites lure people, and it’s something I don’t really understand. It’s an incredible assumption to make, and it’s hardly logical. A porn site ‘luring people.’
My experiences as a blogger of adult content indicate the opposite. People actually enter key words to arrive to their desired destinations
That “luring” thing goes two ways, by the way. For reasons both explicable and inexplicable, beginning when I first posted it the most popular page on this site has been Two Straight Men Doing Anal. It’s about colon-cancer awareness, which, I’m guessing, isn’t what most searchers have in mind when they enter all the possible permutations of, well, “two straight men doing anal.”
Moving in the other direction, while it would take a long time to check carefully, a cursory search through my server logs suggests no one searching with the key words “colonoscopy” or “colon cancer” has been accidentally “lured” to that page. Instead, as Anastasia says, the people who find it seem to know exactly what they’re looking for.
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Note: I might add that for the most part pornographic spam, which often really is objectionable, isn’t actually selling porn! Instead spammers use the promise of porn to lure victims to everything from viruses to discount airline tickets!.
Submitted by 2155 (not verified) on Tue, 2008-05-13 21:59.
You mentioned spam,and that is so spot on. It arrives via email, and it's like the virtual equivalent of unsolicited telemarketing that bugs the crap out of people. There is so much more porn spam using luring tactics (compared to web sites). I forgot about that completely. A part of me can't shake the way governments displace real issues and create scapegoats. It looks like Porn will be the black sheep for a period of time, I'm just wondering how many books the UK will have to amend based on this legislation, because it would be contradictory to have explicit novels and images in books, with their ambiguous definition on porn and extreme porn.
I've had a few friends who've thought that deep throat was extreme (and yeah I've laughed at that), but they're free to express that, but they never campaigned for legislation. They just didn't watch it. Why can't people simply switch off and why can't parents actually monitor what their children are doing? That has bugged me for some time. Some parents whine about the Internet and the time their kids spend on it, then again, they're the ones who buy laptops for their kids, with Internet access. Something has gotta give.
[I know, it's like the bumper stickers around here that say "Don't like abortion? Don't have one!" I'm not saying people are *stupid* for worrying about porn, and I have to admit I have my doubts about the *proportional* popularity of extreme, male-to-female BDSM compared to the proportion of practitioners at large. I just don't think the way to address it is certainly to outlaw it altogether. For instance you'd think there would be more enthusiasm for non-roadblocking, non-worker-intimidating compliance checks but the proposals always seem to be something really draconian. Thanks, Anastasia. --fl]
Submitted by 2155 (not verified) on Wed, 2008-05-14 06:22.
Yeah and they put computers and TVs in their kids' bedrooms. WTF is up with that? The computer my kids have access to is right next to the kitchen, and it will stay that way. What is needed is parents, not netnanny software.
[Agreed. Thats where we let our children do their computer time as well. And not so we can necessarily censor what they see (we *do* manage it pretty thoroughly) but so we can *parent* when it does with context, warnings, and opportunities to discuss. Also to model neither freaking out or falling in when something does show up. Thanks, Mag. --fl]