More On NSFW
Long time readers know my views on the stupid NSFW flag that too often accompanies any link to adult material on the American bits of the internet. I was delighted yesterday (after linking to Susie Bright) to discover that she’s written a long and thoughtful rant against NSFW nonsense. My favorite bit:
NSFW has no meaning in print– in paper journalism or publishing. It has no place in a newsroom or the bookstore. It only exists on the Internet– which is ironically notorious for its libertarianism. NSFW, whoever dreamed it up, is a Bowdlerization of the Web, a Scarlet Letter. It exists because fearful people believe in it, like a bad fairy. It says more about the psychological fears and prejudices of the person using it, than it does about the content in question. Why do web authors put up with it?
The “W” in NSFW seems to imply that the “workplace” is an environment where all must be defended against impropriety and loss of efficiency. But surely clock-watching bosses have noticed that employees can just as easily daydream about online seed catalogs as they can about porn.
If said it before and I’ll say it again, there’s no such thing as a website that’s not safe for work. There’s only work that’s not safe for web surfing. And if that’s the kind of work you have, you need better work, not more NSFW ghetto badges to sew on the links that will get you into workplace trouble.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=1892
This is a ridiculous oversimplification. You’ve gotta be kidding me.
I’m not. You got an actual, civil, argument, or did you just stop by to make a naked assertion, rudely?
I can see where you’re coming from with this.. we’re thinking about featuring NSFW content, as a weekly feature, on our site, and have debated whether it’s worth it or not. Something to think about.
I’ll give you a civil argument, even if Jerome won’t.
A “NSFW” flag is useful because you work in a place where casual web surfing is permitted and also a workplace where sexual harassment lawsuits are a real possibility. Dismissing that so casually could result in either a loss of that limited freedom in the workplace, loss of your job, or being named a party in a lawsuit.
Given the offensensitivity and PCness of the modern workplace, and the litigious society that exists nowadays it’s best just to avoid tempting fate like this.
If you have a workplace that let’s you surf porn, that’s great. Nice and good for you. If you have a workplace that’s not so sensitive to the occasional nearly bare tit, or a passing phrase that’s not generally considered polite, then great for you.
The other 95% of us have to deal with the reality that the workplace is monitored by Human Resource departments, Legal departments, and opportunistic and easily offended women (yes, almost always women) with a chip on their shoulders looking to make a quick buck or get even with management they’re unhappy with.
Knowing what’s SFW and what’s not before clicking a link is important to us.
If Bacchus or Susie Bright wants to crusade and change this, great. Let them change society’s views on the subject, and let them change their own workplaces. I don’t mind saving my NSFW web-surfing for home, and don’t see the need to risk my job to get it in the workplace.
The disclaimer that’s been on my blog since about the first month:
DISCLAIMER
This site, and pages linked to by this site, may not be work safe. If this is problem, please find a more liberal work environment :)
Cash, if you’re calling it NSFW content in your mind, you don’t see where I’m coming from. Sorry.
*everyone* wants a better workplace. Many of us would be ahppy with one that let us access adult material form work. Unless you’ve got some examples of these places we can all be assured jobs with, I think posting “NSFW on things I post to my personal journal that are, in fact Not Safe For Work is respectful.
I don’t read your blog at my workplace. It’s Not Safe For Work for me. MstrThoth has the right call on this – until our actual worplaces that pay our bills are safe for things like thiis blog, the NSFW tag is useful to us. It’s not censorship.
You don’t pay my bills, Bachcus, and neither does Susie. Yet you insiste that something that helps us manage to keep inapropriate sex talk and work seperate is a bad thing? What the hell do you want us to do. It’s a fine thing to rant, but what’s the alternative? I don’t see you presenting one, and I don’t see Susie presenting one either.
Are you offended that you’re not safe for my workplace? Go yell at my boss. Not at the nice people who email me links thoughtfully telling me they’re NSFW. They’re thoguhtful friends. You’re just some guy with a website who’s never done a thing for me in my life, much less sign my paycheck.
Thoth, you’re asking the web to be a self-censoring environment for your business convenience. That’s useful … to you.
But I don’t see any good argument for the rest of the world to censor and label and ghettoize sexual discussion just because your workplace is broken.
Josh, I’m not sympathetic to the job culture. You say everybody wants a better workplace, so why not go find or make one for yourself? I did, Susie did, you could too. I’m an individualist, I have faith in your ability to to find a solution.
Meanwhile, I understand that the NSWF tag is useful to you, just like it’s useful to the censorware companies who make the filters that may or may not get sold to your corporate IT department. But “useful” here is not the same as “good”. Indeed, if it helps the forces of sexual repression, it’s not worthy of respect, no matter how useful it is to you or to your bosses.
Why should I yell at your boss? He’s your boss, not mine. Just don’t expect the rest of the world to volunteer for automated censorship in order to make his life, and your recreational workplace websurfing, easier.
Meanwhile, I understand that the NSWF tag is useful to you, just like it’s useful to the censorware companies who make the filters
That’s a false analogy. I don’t *have* filters at work. My boss trusts me to decide what I view while at work. Which is why my friends, who respect that, don’t send material they know I’d catch shit for to me without a tag.
If you’re conflating that with censorware, you’re failing at a valid argument. If you’re trying to imply something else, you’re not being clear.
But “usefulâ€? here is not the same as “goodâ€?. Indeed, if it helps the forces of sexual repression,
My workplace is not an appropriate venue for *some* forms of sexual expression. It’s shouldn’t be one. It’s OK for me to make off color jokes, and some slight inuendo, but there are lines that should not be crossed at work. those lines are good, and important. If you don’t see that, I can’t help you understand.
Why should I yell at your boss?
Because he’s the one who put the policy in place, and you’re the one with the problem with the policy. I don’t care much.
He’s your boss, not mine. Just don’t expect the rest of the world to volunteer for automated censorship in order to make his life, and your recreational workplace websurfing, easier.
The whole point of NSFW tagging is that it’s either voluntary, or put on by a workplace. Workplaces have a right to do that, and a responsibility to do so, not to you, but to either the stockholders or the owners.
You don’t volunteer, you get selected.
So, either you get your site tagged as NSFW, or if I put a link out to people on a mailing list mentioning your site, I tag it with NSFW. You don’t get consent in that, nor should you.
If a reader wants to tag something of mine as ‘nsfw’ they’re free to do so, but if they expect me to add one of those black and white labels, or tag something nsfw, then they’ll have to wait until the next millennium.
Susie makes valid points on the pointlessness of it all. A workplace can screen or limit Internet access, that’s it, rather than permitting Internet access and then having the NSFW enter the equation. But people want to always have their cake and eat it too, and others have to be ‘labelled’ because they’re overgrown babies who can’t handle the adult content. Incidentally, the word ‘adult’ is something that has me perplexed; if I join a directory, the question that’s frequently asked is ‘is your site an adult site’, but they don’t specify the definition; there’s a huge difference between a blog, and a porn site, but some directories classify them the same way.
Therefore NSFW doesn’t have to be limited to porn, ‘adult content’, sexually explicit literature or nudity.
After 911, a person I worked with was caught reading about 911 online, and also busted for reading about the various terrorist cells that were on the news round about that time. The guy was practically accused of being a terrorist sympathizer based on someone just passing by, viewing the content. So that type of content wasn’t considered worksafe, not for the person to be labelled, and further down the track ostracised (until they had to find another job, because of the climate).
If adults honestly think that sexual content, the ‘softer’ content that adults usually access at work is going to destroy humanity, then they better wake up to themselves.
Decidedly not a false analogy, Josh, because I acknowledged that the filters “may or may not” be in place in your workplace. My point is that tagging helps the people who build the filters, which I believe are a socially repressive (which is to say, bad) thing.
I understand completely that there are some topics which are inappropriate for some workplaces. That says nothing about whether the broader society ought to engage in repressive measures to meet that workplace need, rather than leaving the workplace to solve its own problem without social help. And if the workplace can’t solve that problem without self-censorship by the broader society, it is indeed broken.
When you claim I have a problem with your workplace policy, you misunderstand my argument. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass what the policy is at your workplace. I’m saying that for folks not affiliated with your workplace to behave in sexually repressive, self-censoring ways in order to support the policy at your workplace makes no sense.
Of course the NSFW tagging I’m against is voluntary, and doesn’t need my consent. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get to argue against it, or to riducule it, or to otherwise argue that the people who do it are doing something foolish or dangerous to broader social goals or (as Susie said) revealing more about their own prejudices than about the content they are labeling.
I’m not saying people don’t have a right to tag, I’m saying they shouldn’t tag, for various reasons (elaborated much more eloquently by Susie than by me) that seem, to me, much more important than the concerns of conservative corporate America.
Hey everybody, I just realized that there’s a hard kernel at the center of the argument Josh and I are having. And that kernal is a fundamental disagreement about the extent to which society ought to be arranged for the convenience of corporations and their employees.
They used to say “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” — and they believed it when they said it.
Thoth and Josh both seem to suggest that if NSFW tagging is useful in the workplace, that ought to be the end of the analysis, and be damned to any problems it causes out in broader society. It’s good for General Motors and that’s good enough for them.
Obviously, I’m less impressed by corporate “necessity”. I respect corporations as highly-efficient tools for the employment of capital. But — when it’s not my capital being employed — I simply have no incentive to conform to corporate needs, and no respect for the argument that anyone ought to, when it’s otherwise to their own detriment.
We don’t care one way or the other if it’s good or not good for General Motors. It’s good for us, the same people who surf your site.
We, as people, find the NSFW label and similar tags useful to us, just as we find such tags as “diet” “sugar free” “100% cotton” and “Rated G” useful.
What you’re ranting against is information that helps us to make an informed consensual decision.
Now if you choose to not use the tag, either as a writer or as a reader, that’s perfectly fine with us, but we happen to find it useful
As for “ghetto”, he people who need to take pride in their porn in this case isn’t us, it’s you and Suzie. The very use of “ghetto” in describing the tag tells me more about how you feel about what you do than we do. NSFW to me means more like a “Ghirardelli chocolate” label. “Save this stuff till when you get home because your co-workers just wouldn’t appreciate the good stuff”.
So rant all you want, but when sex writers are against information that helps people make consensual decisions, they need to start getting a lot clearer on why they’re looking for that information and to be censored. If you’re worried about filters, then remember that filters serve a purpose for people who don’t want Ghirardelli chocolate in their lives, poor hopeless souls that they are. And those people, much as we may not understand them, have some rights too. It’s as wrong for us to force our way of life on them as it is for them to force their way of life on us.
Ken, you’re the only one here who is talking about “forcing” anyone to do anything. Just to be clear about your straw man argument.
And you’ve utterly overlooked the historical significance of the word “ghetto” and the sense in which I’m using it. I’m not talking about the modern American usage in which it’s a sort of imprecise synonym for “slum”, and so your talk of “taking pride” is inapt.
Rather, I was referring to the European ghettos where Jews were concentrated in the early mid 20th century so that (each of them wearing a Star of David badge as required by law) they could later be rounded up and “dealt with”. Those “ghetto badges” were very useful for the enemies of the Jewish people, just as NSFW tagging is very useful for enemies of free speech and sexual expression.
In case it were not obvious, I’m damned proud of the material I’ve assembled here over the last five years, and I certainly don’t consider it “ghetto” in the derogatory urban-American sense. Which is why I’m unsympathetic to folks who defend my being labeled for easy ghetto-ization in the 1930s European sense, merely because it enhances their daily convenience. I can’t prevent it, no; but I can surely speak out against it.
The NSFW tag is information. That’s all it is.
While you and I may not like what some people do with the information or with any other tool, the problem is not the tool or the information itself.
Yes, bad people can use NSFW tags in a bad way. And bad people can use a nail file on an airplane in a bad way. The problem isn’t and never has been the NSFW tag or the nail file. And yet, somehow, eventually, that’s where the battle moves to.
It’s the wrong battle to fight. We should fight for more information, more communication, and more open honesty. If that information is being misused then we should fight against it’s misuse, not the information itself.
Decidedly not a false analogy, Josh, because I acknowledged that the filters “may or may notâ€? be in place in your workplace. My point is that tagging helps the people who build the filters, which I believe are a socially repressive (which is to say, bad) thing.
I understand completely that there are some topics which are inappropriate for some workplaces. That says nothing about whether the broader society ought to engage in repressive measures to meet that workplace need, rather than leaving the workplace to solve its own problem without social help. And if the workplace can’t solve that problem without self-censorship by the broader society, it is indeed broken.
Filtering software, which I agree is annoying, and abhorrent, *is* a marketplace solution. It’s not mandated by the government. It’s a product that gets purchased by a private company to regulate internet use by an employer.
So how do you expect a workplace to meet the standards you’d like? What would this workplace look like? What’s permissible, non-permissible, and how do you enforce these ideas? Filtering software is one way, but it’s invasive, and frequently stupid
Another way is to trust your employees not to access material that is inappropriate at a workplace, which has them using the words “NSFW” in email and web contacts, and expecting friends to preface links or images of things that are NSFW that way out of respect.
Let’s say I have a friend who works for a Child Care service. He checks his email at work. I see something interesting on a porn site, and send him a link in email with “NSFW” in the title. He waits until he gets home, opens it, and is never in trouble. He not only would, but should have been in trouble had he opened a link to a hardcore porn site at work, where kids would have seen it.
When you claim I have a problem with your workplace policy, you misunderstand my argument. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass what the policy is at your workplace. I’m saying that for folks not affiliated with your workplace to behave in sexually repressive, self-censoring ways in order to support the policy at your workplace makes no sense.
The only people who contact me with work unsafe material while I’m at work are the ones who email it to me. They have a vested interest in me keeping my job.
Again, you are 100% free to not use NSFW tags on your site. No one is forcing you to. Other services may do so for you to inform subscribers, but they have that right. You keep makoing it sould like people are forcing *you* to tag your site. If you’ve got evidence of that’, I’ll stand with you against it. Otherwise what you’re doing is criricizing a social movement, which is your right, but I disagree with eleements of your criticism.
Of course the NSFW tagging I’m against is voluntary, and doesn’t need my consent. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get to argue against it, or to riducule it, or to otherwise argue that the people who do it are doing something foolish or dangerous to broader social goals or (as Susie said) revealing more about their own prejudices than about the content they are labeling.
I disagree. I think in a healthy workplace have a vague ‘NSFW’ standard may allow pepole more freedom of sexual speech in that the concept of NSFW is elastic from situation to situation. Whats SFW when my boss and co workers are in the room may be NSFW when the CEO is in the room. Grey areas in social interaction a really useful.
I’m not saying people don’t have a right to tag, I’m saying they shouldn’t tag, for various reasons (elaborated much more eloquently by Susie than by me) that seem, to me, much more important than the concerns of conservative corporate America.
And I’m saying that you fail to give an alternative for those of us at workplaces like mine, where some edge walking around NSFW/SFW is accepted. My workplace does not have an uncommon atmosphere.
The alternatives (that I wish you and Susie would talk about) are to just not read anyone’s email from outside of work, not surf, not IM, etc… I know well enough not to go to blatantly sexaul sites while I’m at work, but random links show up in my inbox. Sometimes I click on them when a friend sends me them. If someone I trust sends me a NSFW link without labeling it, I jsut don’t check what they send me at work ever again. It’s that simple.
Now, if I understand you, you claim you have no respect for the argument I’m making that (a) I ought to follow the fairly lax rules at work, because they make sense, and keep inaproriate material out of the workplace, and (b) if friends mail me NSFW links, they tag them as such out of respect for my desire to comply with what I think are sensible rules.
Well, I can live eith that. You’re not someone who’s respect is important to me. You’re not my friend, and you’re not my boss. I see no incentive to want your respect, or to modify how I do things. Contrawise, as most of my freinds are in similar work conditions, I see a large net benefit to me and to them in tagging things NSFW is sending them to an email I know they check at work.
What I am confused about it what you’d have us do as an alternative, short of quitting our jobs and working for ourselves, which only allows us personally to get NSFW stuff at home, not to share it, because we’ll always have friends who work in offices.
But let’s address some words you put into my mouth:
Thoth and Josh both seem to suggest that if NSFW tagging is useful in the workplace, that ought to be the end of the analysis, and be damned to any problems it causes out in broader society. It’s good for General Motors and that’s good enough for them.
No, what I suggested was that it has a good side – it allows for a grey area, where the option presented by corporate America is to just cut off access altogether. I’m not sure what your alternative is because you don’t present it.
Anyone *working* for corporations really has to conform, beucase that’s what employment is, other than production and labor, it’s an agreement that you behave a certain way beyond just producing and laboring.
Employment is a negotiation – if individual X is unwilling to behave a certain way, or fails to look a certain way but individual Y is, Y gets the job if production is equal, and in many cases, even if X is a better producer.
In using NSFW tagging, if it’s not my capital that’s at risk if that link is open in an unfriendly workplace, it’s the capital of people I *care* about. I think this may be what Bacchus isn’t seeing. There’s a net gain to my whole community, and no real harm to us done by using that tagging.
In fact, I’m not sure who is harmed by NSFW tagging, and how specifically that harm works.
Hey everybody, I just realized that there’s a hard kernel at the center of the argument Josh and I are having. And that kernal is a fundamental disagreement about the extent to which society ought to be arranged for the convenience of corporations and their employees.
“Society”, in my examples is made up my my friends and myself, who tag things as NSFW because we choose to. I think I explained the reasons behind this, but if you’re not getting it, I’ll be happy to explain.
Is it an issue that we use NSFW tags on our email? If so, why, and what shold we do instead, that dosen’t’ involve quitting our jobs or violating standards in our workplaces?
As a webmaster I’m with the owners. I never tag, people have to sort their own stuff out.
Josh, I’m not sure we’re going to be able to talk about this in a useful way. I’m concerned with a society that’s larger than “your friends and yourself”, you keep asking me how to solve workplace problems that simply don’t strike me as important enough to justify repressive measures in that society that’s bigger than you and your friends, and you claim not to understand “who is harmed” despite Susie’s eloquent explanation of the harms caused by NSFW tagging. I can’t say it better than she did, and if you can’t comprehend that, I don’t see any hope for this argument. I’m just not going to reach you.
I think the main point here is that the NSFW tag is a tool of the blogger that helps them keep traffic coming to the site. The fact is, if a site that had NSFW tags on possible offensive material suddenly stopped using it, I would be forced to not to read that site anymore at work, which means that a lot of my blog reading time is cut out of your pie. I know that I am not alone here, in fact I would bet I am in the majority.
So Bacchus, you keep saying my boss’s hang-ups are not your concern, but like any business you must in the end work to appease your customers, and if my bosses hang-up’s are my concern, and that concern affect your business you need to provide a solution to the problem or accept that you are going to lose a large part of your readership. So, we came up with the simplest solution, you give me the information we need to self regulate, and most people keep coming back to your site because they are effective at self regulation.
I can understand why you would be opposed to this in theory, because it is a compromise. But sometimes when we live in the real world, compromise is necessary.
Knowing how much you hate the term NSFW, I label my link to your site as “NC17”, since that’s the rating I figure it would get if it were a movie (at least, as I understand the rating system).
Not sure if that avoids the problem or not, but my intended purpose is to be more objective and less judgmental.
Josh, I’m not sure we’re going to be able to talk about this in a useful way. I’m concerned with a society that’s larger than “your friends and yourselfâ€?
Well, I work in an office, so I have to be concerned with these issues, which are how to ballance a reasonable amount of sexual talk with a workplace where no one gets into trouble. Tagging things that might get people in trouble when opened at work is the best compromise I can think of.
Sleepy says he(she?) never tags, but leaves it for toher people to sort out. Isn’t that what we’re doing? Sorting things out as private individuals.
If there’s more going on, but you’re not willing to explain about the harm, it’s not because I’m unwillign to *listen*. If you talk to me calmly, rationally and repsectfully and attempt to address my concerns with some sort of alternate means of dealing with things, or perhaps even a call to revolution, I *will* listen. Susie frequently makes sense, so when she’s not making sense, I cut her a fair amount of slack to try and explaon where she’s coming from and why she thinks what she’s saying shoud be important to me.
So far, I’ve got slogans, or you saying that because I’m not seeing her viewpoint (despite being willing to listen and interested in actually talking things out) I’m not worth your time.
And that’s where things stand.
Harvey’s comment made me realize that NSFW is basically comparable to the rating system. Any rating system helps people to process information, but it can also inevitably be used to help censorship. It seems to me that that the process of designating things NSFW also presents the problem of subjectivity and/or bias (cf. Kirby Dick’s film on the rating system). While I agree that perhaps people often err too much on the side of caution when tagging things NSFW, it seems like you’re opposed to helping people make informed decisions.
Just to reiterate, I agree that people shouldn’t have to be afraid of punishment for looking at sexual content in the workplace, and that the boundaries of what is permissible should be broader, both at work and in American society in general, but that’s an argument about the proper scope of NSFW, not whether it should exist.
After reading the back and forth here, I have to say that while I might agree with Bacchus’ view that content should not be labeled blithely and stigmatized as “not safe for work,” I can’t see how Josh and his friends and co-workers and the millions in their position are doing any sort of harm by using the NSFW tag with the purpose being not to vilify or degrade the content but merely to help each other stay out of trouble with The Man–whether they agree with His views or not. And honestly, the “if your workplace sucks leave it and become a self-righteous sex blogger” argument doesn’t really work; if droves of people quit their jobs because the policy restrictions were completely tolerable but chafed against their principles, like you seem to want them to do, Bacchus, the economy would be in eighty kinds of trouble. Finally, the NSFW tag isn’t inherently bad or even repressive, like other lables (oh, say n*gger or fag or any number I can think of off the top of my head) are–it merely notifies the prospective viewer that the content MIGHT not be suitable for public viewing. If you choose to ignore those little four words or don’t need to heed them, great, but for the millions of workers who browse the net during work, it’s just a helpful feature–not an instrument of societal oppression or anything (which, by the way, is a real stretch; if some sort of authority mandated the tag, then you’d have at least some basis for an argument, but “societal oppression” here? Come on…).
I work in a hospital emergency department. Patients (including children) and other staff can almost always see whichever terminal I’m at. All web use is logged, and ‘anyone who accesses pornography will be sacked’, according to our contracts.
So I find the NSFW tag extremely useful. Imagine if I clicked a link from Wired to ErosBlog without realizing.
It’s just practical.
Frankly, I prefer a NSFW tag. I don’t want my employer and coworkers to know my appetites and proclivities…its like a secret handshake to me and I like being part of that club….
NSFW is stupid. Who is it for? People whose workplace doesn’t care if they surf the web, but they’ll get fired if they look at sexually explicit content, even if they say “oops!” and immediately click the back button. If your workplace allows web surfing, but can’t handle an “oops!”, then your workplace doesn’t allow web surfing.
At my workplace, it wouldn’t be considered apropriate to have explicit stuff up on my screen, but they’re sane: I’d say “oops”, and it wouldn’t be a problem. And you know what? I’ve never once had to say “oops”; not because of NSFW tags, but because it’s just not that hard to tell. Ben: I just googled up all the links to ErosBlog from Wired, which they call (in the “Sex Drive Daily” section) “one of the best sex blogs, with great pictures…” Good thing they’ve got that NSFW tag there eh? I can see how you wouldn’t have realized.
I think most people, on both sides, are missing the point. Sure, it would be great if we didn’t have to censor what we read at work, but we do. The NSFW label makes it easier for us to do that, and as such it is a polite and useful thing for a writer to put in. Regina Lynn does it in links out from her columns and I respect that because it means I can read the columns at work, and check the links from home later, where I won’t offend anyone. Without the NSFW, I’d have to avoid all the links instead of just some of them, just in case.
The trick is, if someone is going to link without noting that there might be graphic adult material on the other side, then they should make it obvious from the link text where it’s going. If a link says ‘nearly naked teens’ then it’s pretty obvious that it isn’t something to open at work, for most. If it says ‘my new puppy’ and you’re expecting a furry canine rather than a cute guy/girl wearing a collar and a leash.. well the NSFW might have just helped.
It’s like this suggestion of removing the CAPSLOCK key from keyboards. It’s a tool – the tool isn’t good or bad, only the use of it is. NSFW isn’t a ghetto, unless you let it be one. Use the tool, or don’t use it – but I don’t think it’s right to say no one should use it because you personally don’t like it. That’s just as much censorship as using NSFW can be.
Without getting into the NSFW debate, there is a primary reason a company does not want employees visiting porn sites and that is the malware problem. I am a computer security manager and we have hundreds of people surfing the Internet all the time. Norton Security reports that 48% of the top 100 dirtiest sites (in terms of malware) are adult sites. A lot of malware that gets loaded involves key stroke loggers that capture every thing the user types.
Whatever the malware, it usually looks for other computers to infect on the local network. A lot of malware sets up spamming software that will send out millions of Nigerian prince emails at night when the offices are closed. We use filters to block the known websites that convey malware, but we cannot block everything since new servers pop up daily.
Another thing to keep in mind is the legal principle that the computer you use at work is not your computer; it belongs to the company. If the owner of the computer does not want people visiting gambling sites or porn servers, or other sites that are not related to the job, that is their decision and not the end user of the computer.
I have gotten my PC at home infected more than once from adult sites and it is a pain in the ass to get some of the worst malware off your computer. I got infected once with a rootkit that set up a mail server. I caught it before it could actually start spamming but it took me three days to kill it and get back to normal. It had so many hidden pieces that I ended up doing a low level format & reinstalling Windows and all of my software. Any website can be infected, but adult sites are among the ones with most malware. Norton, McAfee, etc. have limits to their ability to detect the newest threats.
It is best, if you can, to run your browser in a sandbox or on a virtual machine so that your host PC does not get infected if the browser downloads something bad. I use something called Sandboxie. It is free and slows you down a little, but offers an additional layer of protection.
I don’t think “without getting into the debate” means what you think it does…