The Internet REALLY IS For Porn
Like any good writer of sermons I took the trouble to consult scripture before sitting down with my pen for ErosBlog. In this case, the scripture I consulted was the University of Rochester economist/math deity Steve Landsburg. He seemed like a pretty obvious choice. After all, did he not use his Everyday Economics column in Slate to present evidence that Internet porn actually reduces sex crimes, and write a popular economics book with the becoming title of More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics?
But what was most heartening of all was some advice Professor Landsburg offered his daughter in print in an earlier book inspired by her:
“Surf the Internet. I’d much rather you getting your pornography from cyberspace than by rummaging around your parents’ bedroom.
“In fact, I’m glad the net makes it easy for you to get ahold of things other people would prefer you not to get ahold of. Family values crusader Donna Rice complains that ‘any child with a computer can access vile pornography in a matter of seconds. And once they have seen it, it can never be erased from their minds.’ You betcha, Donna. The Internet is the natural enemy of those who are out to erase other people’s minds.
“Let’s be honest. Access to pornography is not one of the costs of the Internet, it’s one of the benefits. The whole purpose of the Internet is to facilitate communication and thwart those who would hamper the free exchange of information.”
— From page 215 of Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You about Economics, Values, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Free Press, 1997).
Everyone should be so lucky as to have a dad willing to offer advice like that.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=3111
Ah yes, computer and web advice from 1997 – a time of 2.4 to 56Kb modem connections, $2,800 for a 80386sx computer with a 40MB hard disk and half a meg of ram, WordPerfect, Wildcat BBS, Windows95 was still going strong, Digital Research DOS seemeed like a distant memory, and Netscape was the dominant browser.
I remember it well.
An archive search on Google of Newsgroups reveal that there were a total of 6,940 instances of the word “blowjob” across all newsgroups during the sixteen years from 1981 through 1997. My hunch is that there are 7,000+ instances of the word “blowjob” on single blogs for the year 2008.
Also, in the excerpt, Economist and Father-of-a-then-7-to-8 year old daughter Landsburg does not share whether he installed Net Nanny (released 1994) or similiar product on the computer his daughter was using to access the interwebs. Or if he supervised her use of a computer that may have cost more than the car. Oh, and internet access was, in some cases, charged by the minute. So the act of looking at porn had a direct economic consequence.
Though, maybe not. Maybe his thinking was that it was okay for Cayley to sit down at the computer by her seven year old self, do a search for some information about “teabags” for a school paper, and turn in a dot-matrix printed report about Sir Lipton and lemon parties. Because “free exchange of information” trumps everything, including, apparently sanity.
Sorry, I don’t agree. I don’t think a society which limits exposure to pornographic information – using a fairly strict limited definition of “pornographic” – to preteenaged children is wrong. (e.g. same sex couple naked and kissing, not porn. Same sex couple naked, one or both penetrated, displayed on black latex covered in oil, porn.)
What’s left out of Dr. Landsburg excerpt is the self-nullifying part of his argument. If pron is widely available, but only accessible through a several thousand dollar computer that requires a high degree of techical expertise to run in order to find information that requires a fair degree of research skill to locate, and generates its own costs to retrieve, then it’s not generally available.
Fast forward to nowadays – it’s different. I think we’d agree the porn is different. One effect of lowering the threshold to put porn “out there” is that the amount of bad, crappy porn has increased exponentially while the amount of “good porn” has remained consistent.
There’s probably a Freakonomics article on that, too.
Passerby, I don’t think you’re going to find many takers here at ErosBlog for the idea that you, or anybody else, can reliably distinguish between “porn” and “not porn”. It’s an impossible task even if it were a desirable goal, which I doubt.
I should warn you, also, that your sarcastic tone is treading perilously close to the sort of incivility that’s not permitted in the ErosBlog comments. Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between derisive sarcasm (not welcome here) and enthusiastic argumentation (quite welcome!), so I admit the possibility of misunderstanding; but still, I’d much appreciate it if you’d have a look at the ErosBlog FAQ (see prominant sidebar link) before commenting further. Thanks!
Hi Bacchus,
I’d read the FAQ prior to posting and wasn’t trying to go for incivility so much as enthusiastic argumentation.
My point, as such,was less about what is or isn’t “porn” – to each his or her own – but the circumstances under which the advice, “Surf the net for porn!” was given.
There’s also a tendency for people to pull parts of arguments out that suit their purposes (c.f. the Bible and nearly everybody who uses Scripture to justify their personal bias).
A dad telling his actual seven year old “surf for porn” strikes me as irresponsible. The same advice given to a theoretical seven year old is understandable. But then, my experience as a parent is that theoretical children are much more easily raised.
Sorry for any agita I’ve caused about sarcasm.
–
ps. also, I realized I was off by ten years with my computer example.
I’ll go out on a limb here. I’m betting the father wasn’t thinking of his seven year old having access to hard core porn (parents that are generally rational tend to have children that are generally rational. His seven year old would have been interested in seven year old girl pursuits) as much as his child having access to any information she wanted to seek out during her lifetime as a free and unhindered rational being. Access to knowledge isn’t like access to weapons (I wouldn’t impede it in real life but as a fantasy I’m not sure anyone, adult or otherwise, really needs most of the weapons that we have available to us. Yes, I’m a make love not war guy.) A seven year old is no more likely to want information about blow jobs as how to create anthrax. Frank Zappa used to take offense to the age recommendations on toys he wanted to buy for his children. His children were creative enough that toys in their targeted age range tended to be beneath their actual intelligence and interest. Having access to a library is a good thing for humans, even though we might occasionally come across photos of two headed lizards or frog babies.
Just thinking about myself at 7, I’m damn glad I didn’t have access to projectile weapons, my brothers and I fought so much I’m sure one of us would be dead if we had that kind of thing lying around and hadn’t been trained in how to use one properly. I wouldn’t have been much interested in dirty pictures, although that certainly changed in later years.
A far greater threat to my development was the lack of a father (divorced parents), I would donate money to any organisation that is devoted to finding ways to keep two parents (of either gender, one’s usually a bit more butch anyway) in charge of each group of kids. A few playboys is no real threat to the vast majority of young kids, but the lack of a proper role models Is. Where’s the outcry against that? And having enough parenting usually leads (hopefully?) to having guidance about porn, sex and masturbation.
Passerby: I agree that he was writing in a different world. However, the skills/education thing you mention surely points to the best possible solution. Which is not to ‘restrict access’, but to increase the skills and education levels on these topics generally, and specifically to teach kids the skills they need to navigate the internet (and also more generally, the portrayals of sexuality in our culture). That to me sounds perfectly sane.
I also don’t think porn should be a big worry in giving kids internet access any more than it is with letting them into newsagents with porn on the shelf. And I should say now that I’m young enough to have been a kid with internet access. If anyone wants to hear stories from my 12 year old self I’ve got them, although they’re basically non-stories. When I got online, I searched and I found what I was looking for, which was mostly newsgroup discussions of Lord of the Rings and Terry Pratchett and other stuff I was into at the time. If something appeared on my screen that I wasn’t interested in, whether it was porn or insurance, I closed it without any thought. If it crashed netscape, I cursed and kicked the reset button. When I started to get curious about sex, I started looking around, and I found things that were more or less appropriate to what I was after, but were enough to set me on my way. I don’t remember feeling threatened or traumatised at any point. Even when I ran across a page about forced lactation in BDSM (by the kind of innocent Googling accident you describe, actually), all I got out of it was a sense of relief that any weird desires of mine would be considered normal by the world too. And I firmly believe my non-story to be the statistical norm.
There’s also a distinction to be made between ‘restricting access’ and the kind of scenario you mention of looking up words that have a double meaning. Personally, I’d be happy if most of the time people only found porn if they were looking for it (note ‘most’ not ‘only’ – some leakage/accident is inevitable, and even desirable. If people only ever encountered exactly what they were looking for it would be a dull, flat world). I want looking for and finding porn to be as effortless as it is any other kind of information or entertainment, even if the person looking is younger than our culture is usually comfortable with. I’d rather trust their judgment than some monolith that wants to make the decision for everyone, whether that’s Google or filtering software or whatever. What counts as porn and what kind of porn is appropriate when is way too knotty an issue for someone to decide for everyone else.
Having random popups of genitals shoved in your face when you’re looking at something unrelated is an entirely different matter which I am of course totally against. But thankfully that seems to be more or less a thing of the past (or maybe that’s just my Firefox + Noscript + adblock setup of joy).
My apologies for the essay, Bacchus!
“The Internet is the natural enemy of those who are out to erase other people’s minds.”
Lovely quote, that.