Oh, for heaven’s sake!

The big news of the day is apparently that young lads have been viewing pornographic material on the Internet. I’m not sure what surprises me more, that there is such a beat up of the whole thing based on appallingly low survey numbers (100 girls and 100 boys in a News Poll), or that some unidentified ‘public think tank’ has discovered that online pornography should be ‘filtered to protect children’!

First of all, 84 young men (that’s 84% of 100 young men of 16 and 17 years of age) admit to looking at porn on the ‘net. Gee, what a surprise! And they haven’t been looking at porn at the local newsagency? The ones that are in plain view and not stashed under the counter? What have these people been doing with their lives? What do they think half the lads of that age are watching on late night television?

Besides which, if young men are going to look at this sort of thing, by the time they are 16 or 17 it is too late really to change the desire for a ‘bit of a perv’. It requires education as to why pornography can be a less than positive way in viewing members of the opposite gender. And it needs to start early in a child’s life and from within the home.
To a certain extent, it is to be expected that young lads of this age are intrigued by the lures of this “big thing” that intrudes itself into their lives at this time. But the hysteria that the apparent discovery that young men are ‘looking at “it”’ is just sad.
If parents don’t want their almost adult sons (or daughters) to view this stuff, then it is their responsibility to supervise and set up the necessary filters. And talk to their children as to why they shouldn’t view it (apart from the cost angle).

The trouble is that it is not really that easy to find this stuff unless one is unaware of words that might have two meanings, or if one deliberately goes looking. I cannot see why I, a mature adult female, cannot go and look for this sort of stuff if I want to. Am I to be restricted to looking at dirty postcards of the likes of Botticelli’s “Venus” or Rueben’s “Nude studies” from the great museums and art galleries of the world? Or are these images acceptable because they are old and ‘artistic’?

I must admit, on the few occasions I have ended up on one of these sites due to poor word selection or to a hijacked link, I have usually burst out laughing at the poverty of imagination and shut the browser down as a means to kill the pop-ups or loops that can take over the system. The bigger problem is that this sort of thing that inflicts great cost on businesses in that it costs the customer every time a message is downloaded, and the irritating-ness of those pop-up ads and what-have-you … and spam and pornography just do not have anything to do with the conduct of running a business.

Junk mail in the real world (i.e. snailed junk mail) costs the producer, firstly in its production and then in its delivery. This is fair. These people want to tell me the marvellous benefits of “improving the size of my penis” (though I didn’t know I had one!) I have the advantage of not accepting their generous invitation and deposit it in the recycling bin where it can be composted into something useful. But junk email is a one-way transaction that costs the ‘addressee’ when it is delivered. If there is to be legislation to reduce the junk mail – whether of a pornographic nature or inviting me to reduce my debt by getting another credit card – it should be directed at establishing the source of these emails and charging the senders!

As for restricting access to pornographic pictures, sorry to all you wowsers out there, the picture quality is still better in Playboy and Hustler (both available over the counter) on printed stock. And if you can’t remember what you were doing as a pimply youth gawping at girls at the beach or in their summer negligibles, I really wonder if you grew up in the same world as the rest of us!

Printed restrictions on images or text that fit within the definition of ‘pornography’ can be and are, in general, accommodated by the sites that make it available. They typically call themselves “Adult Content”. This implies that they are for those individuals over the age of consent that choose to view them. Most of the ones that I have come across have some kind of means of restricting access to their more ‘interesting’ pages. If it weren’t so funny, the suspicion is that it has been porn sites and their ilk that have been very much to the forefront of secure sockets and electronic money transfers. After all, pornography is really a means of making money out of one aspect of what it is that makes us human. It is a business, and making money from one’s business is the current basis for our economic wellbeing.
If you don’t like something, educate people as to why it is deleterious; turn it off and encourage others to do like-wise. These sites will not stay online unless they were making enough money out of it!

Personally, I don’t like the imagery. When it inflicts itself on me I turn it off. This could be why I tend not to watch a lot of commercial television either … I find a great number of the advertisements are almost pornographic in their imagery – so I choose not to watch it. I also think it is my job to set my email filters to prevent downloading stuff I don’t want reaching my email program … but I would still like some means of sending it all back to the buggers who send it to me.

By the way, this rant is not looking at the fact that there are some people out there on the Internet that think that non-consensual un-informed sexual practices are ‘fun things’. It is only because I have a real difficulty in describing my feelings about that sort of thing that I am not addressing it.
My particular outrage is the apparent knee-jerk reaction that ‘more regulation’ is the way to handle the whole concept of making a business out of sex, where it is fairly obvious that it is the idea that young people might actually get fascinated by something that bothers their elders is more to the point. Hey, I don’t want to deal with the idea that my kids are one day going to discover the fun to be had in a loving sexual relationship, with all its ups and downs … on the other hand, we have talked about sex and pornography and all the other aspects of the ‘sex business’, including advertising so I am fairly sure that my views about the exploitative nature of pornography are understood by my young adult offspring. What they want to do when I am not watching I don’t really want to know. They have got to the age where I have to trust them so that they can grow into reasonable human beings.
If I prevent them from possibly viewing this material by getting hysterical over the fact that they might come across *gosh!* pornography and its like, I am going to imply that a) I don’t trust them, b) I’m terrified of what they might see and c) I encourage them in the impression that it must be something interesting if an authority figure wants to prevent them seeing it. By all means, restrict access to this sort of material for young children, but it is a parent’s responsibility to supervise their young children until those children are old enough to start making their own decisions.

Argh! It's enough to make one wish for high heels and a good leather stock whip to deal with these 'public think tank' hysterical types! Trouble is, they would probably enjoy it! *sarcastic sniff*