Internet Porn: Too Much, Too Easy to Get, and Too Extreme
Apart from a reasonably benign image at the start, Natasha’s paper is text so you can open the link without fear of encountering any related confrontational pictures.
I opened the article not really intending to read the whole thing. Usually I just skim the first two or three paragraphs of most stuff and move on—otherwise I would not get through enough and there is just so much to look up on the Internet. But this is not your normal shallow article on Internet or Web porn. Consider these opening sentences from the second paragraph for example.
[Before the Internet] The difficulty of acquiring this material [hard core porn] may have hinted at a great, and therefore pent-up, demand. Then, technology produced the Second Coming: the Internet. And then the Rapture itself: broadband. Pornography is now, indisputably, omnipresent: in 2007, a quarter of all Internet searches were related to pornography.
Following are later passages taken from various locations:
The granting of sex is the most powerful weapon women possess in their struggle with men. Yet in each new sexual negotiation a woman has with a man, she not only spends down that capital [reduces its value], she begins at a disadvantage, because the potential losses are always greater for her.
If a woman thinks of the best sex she’s had in her life … [that’s] not the sex she wants to have throughout her life—or more accurately, it’s not the sex she wants have with the man with whom she’d like to spend her life.
It seems like almost every teenager in America—and hardly just the teenagers—has heard of or taken a dip into sites like RedTube and YouPorn, which alone account for roughly 2 percent of all daily Internet traffic. These are free, open, enormous sites, in which anybody can upload, distribute, and view whatever porn they please …
Up until reading this article I had never heard of RedTube or YouPorn and I spend something like 10 to 14 hours a day on the Web. After reading this article I tested the URLs and both links worked however, at this stage, I have not gone past the “are you 18” warning on the front page as I am sure both these sites are going to be XXXXX rated (see my later comment about X ratings).
One final excerpt from Natasha’s paper before I wrap up:
… ignores the fact that [when it comes to sex] men behave differently than women. It wasn’t just […] stuffiness that prompted generations of dads to warn their daughters not to get into cars with boys. Dads are grown men, and they know that when it comes to sex, most men will take every inch a woman yields [and another half that she didn’t intend to].
What this paper talks about sort of touches on one of my hobby horses over the last five years or so. Since the advent of the Internet, and subsequently the Web, pornography, and in particular hard core porn, really has got out of control. There is way too much of it, it is too easily available, and it has become seriously extreme.
In my day there was X rated ‘porn’, which was not really porn at all unless you count bare boobies as porn, XX rated porn, and XXX rated porn. I feel that now they need XXXX and XXXXX ratings for much of the porn floating around the Internet.
I am not a prude. My first job at 15 was as a stores clerk on a mine site. I started this job in March 1969. I can assure you that I got a very rude and rough introduction to men’s views on sex and pornography there—like it or not. A somewhat rough introduction. Especially for someone who had never heard any of the men in and around the family ever say the “F” word; not even when hitting their thumb with a hammer.
At 17 I was a subscriber to American Playboy. I never liked Penthouse because in my opinion it was too raw and rough. But Penthouse from those days looks a bit like a Cleo or Cosmopolitan magazine now when compared to even the ‘soft’ porn on the Internet today.
Easily available hard core porn on the Internet today is so extreme. I don’t really want to even know that it exists or that my son, and even worse, his various girlfriends, are consuming it.
As evidence of this shown at left is a cropped segment of my current computer wallpaper sent to me by a work associate (using his home e-mail and not his work e-mail). The bits of it that I have cropped off the sides are just plain white as you can see from the insert.
It is a far cry from this tame image of stunning boobies to the hard core porn freely available off the Web. And by freely I mean both easy to find and obtain, and at no cost (apart from your normal standard ISP monthly link cost).
I don't have any smart answers because I work in IT and I know that there really is no way to block access—despite government policy makers around the world who like to think there is. But I do think that this free availability of hard core pornography to any age, whenever they choose to consume it, is a bad thing—and that down the road there is a social and moral price that will have to be paid.
P.S: In her paper Natasha constructs information loaded sentences. I did a Kincaid Grade Score assessment of her paper using Microsoft Word and the Kincaid rating was 15 [which means you need to have completed 15 years of school+college to be able to read and understand it]. So it does take an IQ of about 90 or better to tease out the full meaning of some of her structures. She also uses em-dashes and in-sentence comma delimited lists correctly, which is so good to see.
