[PLUG-TALK] Porn on the Net...

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Tue Oct 27 15:26:11 UTC 2009


On Sat, 24 Oct 2009, Michael Robinson wrote:
> Porn is anything that is likely to cause the average man or woman to be 
> sexually aroused where it is not socially acceptable for them to be so.

Like when your boss wears tight pants and you schedule lots of unnecessary 
meetings?

> Let's look at the pornography is harmless camp for a moment
> and test it a bit.  Is pornography satisfying?  Does anybody
> feel satisfied after viewing the sex act reduced to a base
> mechanical act with absolutely no meaning at all?  Does
> anyone look at pornography for an hour or longer and then
> never go back?

Who looks at pornography for an hour or longer?  I suppose in the days 
before the fast-forward it was common.  Three to twenty minutes, depending 
on my mood and other obligations.

> Does this cut into other important activities that that person could be 
> engaged in?  How hard is it if you are one of the people that pays for 
> porn to stop future charges?  How many people a day are there that get 
> ripped off who are too embarrassed to come forward?

Wait... are you talking about sex videos or online gaming?

> How many of the "models" are forced into this business?

Nearly all of them, of course.  That's the nature of capitalism:  You are 
forced to work for whomever will pay you or you will starve and die. 
Since our civilization has progressed beyond the need for most labor, the 
level of desperation is rising and the amount of degredation a person will 
accept for a decent paycheck is rising commensurately.

> I hear in Alaska that selling children to the porn industry is a common 
> occurrence.

Only in Sarah Palin's immediate family.

In all seriousness, "common occurrence" is, to borrow an analogy, an 
overstatement on the same order of that used on a sign placed at the 
entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel reading "Entering New York:  Population: 
more than 6" is an understatement.

> Even in our area, sex rings get busted once in a while.

These are not, in general, purveyors of internet pornography.  These are 
folks who sell human beings into slavery and sexual slavery just happens 
to be seen as the most degrading type, so it's also the most common in the 
USA.  Sexual assault is about power and domination, not sex.

> Of all the people that go to porn sites, how many will be identified 
> before they are allowed to view porn?

Obviously children shouldn't be using the internet unsupervised just as 
they shouldn't be out roaming the streets alone.  For everyone else, there 
is the "back" button.

> Are there very many sites on the Net that make an attempt to warn people 
> that their content is porn before they show some?

Yes.  A splash page (bypassed subsequently by a cookie) is common.

> What percentage of pornography is literally a mouse click away if you 
> are on a normal unfiltered Net connection?

Depends on how much typing you're willing to do before clicking.

> What would happen if anything that fit my definition of porn
> was not accessible via the Net to anyone without a credit card?
> Could such a law be enforced?

No.  For three good reasons (in reverse order):
It is illegal.
It is impractical.
It is not desirable to the vast majority.

> Even if you don't believe in looking at porn, it can show up
> in unusual places and it can be difficult because of the nature
> of it to leave it alone.

How is it difficult to leave alone?  If you are a normal, sexually healthy 
person, you can ignore porn when you're not in the mood for it.

I think perhaps the problem is that people who don't believe in looking at 
porn (distinct from, say, people who don't like looking at porn) are not 
normal, sexually healthy people.  They have a hang-up that is manifesting 
itself in this repressive self-denial and that leads to more destructive 
(and kinkier) behavior.  It could also be, I suppose, that the people with 
the strangest proclivities have turned that strangeness into self-loathing 
and the desire to repress others because, well, if a "perfectly normal 
person like me is so perverted in private, what must the outwardly 
perverted be like at home?!?".  The louder the televangelist protests 
sexual deviance, the freakier the situation we find him in when his kink 
kills him.  (Remember that Baptist minister and school administrator with 
the freaky necktie bondage gear that asphyxiated him?  His parishoners 
cried that it must be murder because nobody could hog-tie themselves.  Ha. 
One of the many ways in which the church leaves you ignorant.)

> There are billions of dollars being made by porn producers.  I expect 
> that these people are going to fight any attempt to restrict how they do 
> business.  Is porn the number one money maker on the Net?

By a wide margin, I'd guess.

> If it is, that is very unfortunate.

There are good and bad parts.

> Procon Latte is not an effective deterrent because anyone can bypass
> it via safe mode.
>
> Dansguardian isn't effective because one needs to be able to download
> stuff sometimes where Dansguardian generally denies that.
>
> A server that provides the Internet connection which blocks between
> certain hours is a good idea, if you aren't the administrator of it.
[snip]
> Sadly, there is no time of day that is safe for a person who is not
> behind a filter of some kind.  At least with television one knows
> to turn it off after 10:00 pm and that's pretty effective.
>
> BTW:  Is there any way to fix firefox so that it can't browse web
>      pages on other hosts?  I want it on a server for reading
>      documentation and using local web based tools.  I might want
>      to be able to access RFC1918 networks.  I want a version of
>      firefox that one can't run in safe-mode to get around the
>      security.

I left this big bit quoted because it's what convinced me that you're a 
different person than I'd guessed in the past:  While you may be 
interested in stopping others from seeing some things in the internet, 
your real goal is to keep yourself from porn.  I'm sorry you have a 
problem and I sincerely hope you find a solution for yourself.

You asked this list for advice regarding technical and legal solutions to 
your predicament, but allow me to take a different path.

The "solutions" you're proposing are external in nature and will never, 
ever work.  Just as a society controlled by rigidly enforced law is an 
unstable police state, personal behavior controlled by external 
restriction is similarly unstable and unhealthy.  Seemingly restrictive 
cultures have existed for hundreds or thousands of years when the people 
were personally committed to the limited existence their society desired; 
all of the restrictions were internal.  All the evidence says that your 
best chance of success is to gain some self-control and relax your 
self-loathing and self-restriction to create an environmenet where you can 
actually get better.

It's like me with my schoolwork.  I get so tangled up in the anxiety of 
the pending work and the fretting over what's late and what's good enough 
that I don't have the energy at the end of the day to just sit down and 
work.  In order to learn how to improve my actual work, I have to first 
learn to let myself fail and let go of the worry that I will continue to 
fail.  Only in this environment will I be able to take look at my work 
objectively and see that, really, it's not so hard and just a matter of 
working through it.

And you're not going to reason your way out.  You can come up with an 
enormous list of disadvantages and social ills related to pornography, but 
none of it is going to decrease your desire to look at it because your 
desire is not coming from a place of reason.  Indeed, if you have a view 
that sexuality outside of one narrow context is dirty and bad, your 
attraction to the porn could make you think you like things that are dirty 
and bad and, hence, the more reasons you have to loathe it, the more 
appealing it will be.  Perhaps a less restrictive view of sexuality itself 
will allow you to take your analytic reasoning to heart.

Anyway, I hope you're getting some help from real professionals who are 
not going to tell you that you're a moral failure and help you deal with 
the problem.

J.



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