|
|
The Sex Blog Of Record
Monday, October 23rd, 2023 -- by Bacchus
Today I learned that software for the purpose of describing images to the blind all comes with #pornocalypse baked in. I don’t have details, only this report from Blind and Sexy on Mastodon:
Similar Sex Blogging:
Thursday, September 23rd, 2021 -- by Bacchus
Liberality, of sorts, is far from a modern invention. It even existed between the pages of large-circulation popular magazines in the staid and conservative 1950s. Nonetheless, I was rather startled to discover this editorial, cheerfully and no doubt expensively illustrated by Harry Devlin, in the May 13, 1950 issue of Colliers. Their editorial Sniffing Out The Sin In The Cinema politely eviscerates, in about a dozen paragraphs, a dumbass proposal by some deservedly-forgotten United States Senator. To save you reading most of those, I’ll tell you that the blue-nosed asshole suggested requiring federal licenses for everybody in Hollywood, under the threat of ganking said licenses whenever their personal behavior failed to live up to unspecified federal morality standards. Collier’s editors were not keen:
Ever since Puritan days there have been periodic attempts to banish sin from our land by means of blue laws. The attempts have been uniformly unsuccessful, probably because it goes against the tough grain of American character to have some pious legislator define virtue and enforce it by statute. But successive failures haven’t discouraged the sanctimonious solons. They’re still at it.
…
Hollywood is already subjected to a lot of censorship and pressure, official and otherwise, which too frequently is reflected in the movies we see. We believe the threat of further censorship by Congress would simply lower the quality of Hollywood’s end product without improving the morals of the people who make the pictures or of the people who see them.
The only sensible and democratic censorship is individual discrimination. If you disapprove of the behavior of an actor or director or producer, you can stay away from his pictures. If enough people feel as you do and follow your example, the effect of your disapproval will be felt. Hollywood is very sensitive in the region of the box office. And it never fails to look for a remedy when that sensitive region is injured.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Thursday, July 25th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
I’m afraid we will always have to endure people who can’t stand freedom of expression. The best response to them is always mockery:
Artwork is by cartoonist Shary Flenniken.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Tuesday, February 26th, 2019 -- by Bacchus
“It’s quite clearly obvious that they are utterly disgusting and must do in fact disgust any decent-minded people!” That’s how this tightly-wound retired British major opens his sputtering interview with an amused BBC reporter. He goes on to rail at length about the five or six shops that have mannequin porn “up against the glass” where “you can really not avoid them!”
I don’t know if anybody else in the seaside resort town of Eastbourne in East Sussex in 1959 was unduly aroused by shop window mannequins, but judging by the height of this major’s dudgeon, I think we can safely conclude that they were powerful fetish fuel for him. Projection much, major?
No, he’s very convinced the mannequin porn is a public menace: “I cannot believe that these displays are anything else but harmful.” And as always, the lurkers support him in email:
“I’ve had numerous letters and telephone messages from people, not only resident in Eastbourne, emphatically endorsing my action. I’m hoping that local opinion may ultimately put a stop to these unpleasant exhibitions and thereby remove a slur from the good name of this town.”
Similar Sex Blogging:
Thursday, September 21st, 2017 -- by Bacchus
It should come as no surprise that burlesque houses were always looking for dodges to placate the censors. This cartoon from an Australian men’s magazine has a little fun with that process:
The caption reads:
“No, but suppose she represents the victory of the United Nations over the forces of evil and oppression… Then we could get away with it!”
From the October 1948 issue of Man Junior, viewable in its entirety at the Internet Archive:
Similar Sex Blogging:
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015 -- by Bacchus
The 1934 Motion Picture Production Code (usually called the Hays code) took a lot of the edgy sexy fun out of the movie industry. Here’s a famous photo shot by legendary Columbia Pictures “stills man” A.L. “Whitey” Schafer to protest the new rules. You’ll like it:
And here’s a different reproduction with better visual contrast, although as it’s a photo of an old print, the price is some distressed detail due to wear-and-tear.
Oddly, none of the sources I consulted about this photo identified the model.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Wednesday, April 15th, 2015 -- by Bacchus
Does anybody remember when, back in 2013, I blogged about how Tumblr was blocking selected adult links, in particular ones to a clip-sale place called Extra Lunch Money? It was a prior restraint sort of block; you’d hit the post button and if the offending link was present, you’d get a cryptic red “there was a problem saving your post” response.
My prediction back then was that Tumblr would, when caught, claim that the prior link restraint was a glitch:
Beginning during the negotiation of the sale to Yahoo, Tumblr’s practice has been to disadvantage its adult content in silent and hard-to-notice ways, even when that content was fully-consistent with its fairly permissive community guidelines. What’s more, when forced to backtrack by public outrage after the big robots.txt debacle, Tumblr went to great lengths to pretend it was all a misunderstood and unfortunate technical error.
So my prediction here is that if the link-censoring initiative attracts enough negative attention, publishing these links will start working again and Tumblr will either say nothing, or explain that it was all just a glitch. But if this story doesn’t reach critical mass, look for the list of disfavored adult links to continue to grow.
I was right. That’s exactly what happened. The blocked links quickly started working again.
Fast forward to yesterday, when Lady Amalthea posted an alert on her Tumblr blog about a sort of prior restraint that she’d noticed in attempting to post links to various cam sites and clip-sales sites:
Notice that one of her examples of a link Tumblr won’t let her publish is our old friend from 2013, that Extra Lunch Money site. And also notice that one of the people responding to Lady Amalthea’s post says that the block on her other example (My Free Cams) is not new: “Tumblr has never let me link to MFC, btw. That’s not a new thing in case anyone thought it was.”
So I fired up my Tumblr test suite and decided to focus on those two links and (as a control) the top link on her list of links that were working as of yesterday, a link to the clip site Clipvia. So far I haven’t looked at the behavior of any other links, just these three.
What I found is that whether you want to call it a “glitch” or prior restraint, at least some of the link-blocking behavior is definitely back. However, it may indeed be somewhat glitchy; I found that the behavior was inconsistent (not reproducible) as to at least one of the test links.
The first thing I tried was to create a new “Text” style post for each of my three test links, which I created by navigating to the home page of the three sites, copying the URL displayed in my nav bar, and pasting it directly into the new Tumblr post page before hitting the “Save Draft” button. At first, the only link that generated an error message was the one from My Free Cams:
Although I was initially able to save more than one draft posts with the Extra Lunch Money and Clipvia links, subsequent attempts failed:
From there, I moved on to creating new “photo”-type posts. I would upload an image (the same in all cases), paste in the test URL, and attempt to save. In this case, I have not been able to get the Extra Lunch Money link to fail; it’s worked several times when I have tried this experiment:
However, my other two test URLs are not postable:
For my final experiment, I tried editing a post reblogged from someone else, and pasting in all three suspect links. In this, and several other experiments with reblogging, I was unable to generate the mysterious error message, and instead successfully saved my drafts:
My conclusion? If this is indeed a deliberate block of a set of blacklisted links, its implementation is glitchy, because the same link would sometimes post and sometimes fail to post for me. Its implementation is also glitchy across different post types and post actions. However, I don’t believe it’s completely random; there seem to be no reports of unpostable links outside this universe of sites used by camgirls and indy custom adult clips producers. I suspect that Tumblr does indeed have (and has had since at least 2013) a blacklist of not-to-be-published links. (This would even make sense if its use was restricted to protecting Tumblr users from malicious malware installers, to pick one obviously-legitimate use for a blacklist.) There might be an automated process (that’s gone wrong) for adding sites to the blacklist, or there might be a training-and-supervision issue that has let “rogue employees” add stinky adult sites to a list that was not intended for the restraint of adult publication. Given the way different attempts to post the same link have different results at different times, it’s even possible the blacklist is not universally distributed across all of Tumblr’s different server farms.
If enough Tumblr users report this “glitch” to Tumblr support, I expect that eventually the adult links they would like to publish will be removed from the blacklist, since the links do not violate any of Tumblr’s existing terms of service or community guidelines. That’s what Tumblr did last time, and they haven’t announced any new terms or policies (I checked).
Last time Tumblr was flirting with blocking selected adult links from publication, I wrote:
Tumblr is quietly and dishonestly hostile to adult content in general and to adult marketing and self-promotion in particular, even when that marketing complies with their community guidelines in every particular. Which is a nice intro to this morning’s sermon on The Catechism of Bacchus:
- Tumblr is, at the end of the day, a blogging service.
- As I’ve been saying since at least 2004, blogging services suck.
- This is Bacchus’s First Rule and it remains the rule: Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.
- You will be tempted to ignore The Rule because of social media network effects.
- You may even feel forced to ignore it, because you can’t get enough attention on your own platform.
- When you disregard the rule (and everybody does, even me who wrote it) you will get burned.
- Count on it. Plan for it. The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All.
Nothing has changed since I wrote that.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013 -- by Bacchus
This article at Wired details the latest bizarre chapter in Google’s censorship of its Android mobile device ecosystem. There’s a new list of bad words baked into the latest Android version, and just as with the bizarre censorship of the search suggestions Google makes when you’re typing a search into its web page, Android will refuse to autocomplete anything on this new edition of the bad words list:
There’s no “sex” at the Googleplex.
Type or swipe the word on the latest version of Android’s Google Keyboard – or for that matter “intercourse,” “coitus,” “screwing” or even “lovemaking” – and the web giant’s predictive algorithm will offer no help.
These are just a few examples from an obsessive, and often baffling list of more than 1,400 English words that Google has quietly deemed inappropriate for Android users.
…
Taken as a whole, Google’s list suggests not only a surprising discomfort with sexuality, but also reproductive health and undergarments. Words like “panty,” “braless,” “Tampax,” “lactation,” and “preggers” are censored along with sexual health vocabulary like “uterus” and “STI.”
“I try to Swype-type the word ‘condom’ and I get ‘condition’ or ‘confusion,'” said Jillian York, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “There is no context in which that makes any sense. Grow up, Android.”
It’s trivial now, but pay attention. Just how much do we want to allow our language and culture to be shaped by invisible “protective” algorithms built into our devices at a deep software level? To whom, precisely, are we granting this new power over our memetic space, and why are we granting it?
Similar Sex Blogging:
Monday, October 21st, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Apparently this statue is at the center of a controversy in Kansas, where the raving loonies are having a second try at getting it declared legally obscene:
The American Civil Liberties Union is on the case (naturally enough) and recently they made a FaceBook post about it that included a photo of the statue. Facebook deleted it. And gave the freakin’ ACLU a 24-hour posting ban for having posted it:
We at the ACLU were reassured of one thing this past weekend: Facebook’s chest-recognition detectors are fully operational. A recent post of ours, highlighting my blog post about an attempt to censor controversial public art in Kansas, was itself deemed morally unfit for Facebook. The whole episode is a reminder that corporate censorship is bad policy and bad business.
The blog is about a kerfuffle over a statue in a public park outside Kansas City: a nude woman taking a selfie of her own exposed bronze breasts. A group of citizens organized by the American Family Association believes the statue to be criminally obscene (it isn’t), and has begun a petition process to haul the sculpture to court (really, they are). Our Facebook post included a link to the blog post and a photo of the statue in question.
Our intrepid Digital Media Associate, Rekha Arulanantham, got word on Sunday that the Facebook post had been deleted, and was no longer viewable by our Facebook followers or anyone else. I duly informed my Kansas colleague Holly Weatherford that the photograph she’d taken had prompted a social media blackout. Then, astoundingly, on Tuesday morning Rekha discovered the ACLU had been blocked from posting for 24 hours, with a message from Facebook warning us these were the consequences for repeat violations of its policy.
We were flabbergasted; we hadn’t tried to republish the offending post or the associated rack. So, just to get this straight: the ACLU’s post on censorship was shut down–not once, but twice–for including a picture of, and a political discussion about, a statue standing in a Kansas park.
Of course, the ACLU can get access to real humans at FaceBook in a way that normal people probably can’t:
There was no “appeal” button, and we were unable to find a page where we could report or challenge the post’s deletion. The best option appeared to be a generic Facebook content form, designed to receive any input at all about a “Page.” We got a response: a canned email informing us that Facebook “can’t respond to individual feedback emails.” Not exactly promising.
But we have an advantage most Facebook users don’t: We’re a national non-profit with media access and a public profile. So we tracked down Facebook’s public policy manager, and emailed him about our dilemma. His team was immediately responsive, looked into it promptly, and told us that the post was “mistakenly removed” (and then “accidentally removed again”). Here’s what Facebook wrote to us:
We apologize for this error. Unfortunately, with more than a billion users and the hundreds of thousands of reports we process each week, we occasionally make a mistake. We hope that we’ve rectified the mistake to your satisfaction.
Facebook then restored the original post.
…
our ultimate success is cold comfort for anyone who has a harder time getting their emails returned than does the ACLU. It’s unlikely that our experience is representative of the average aggrieved Facebook user. For most, that generic form and the canned response are as good as it’s currently going to get.
Indeed.
To be fair, this isn’t really a #pornocalypse story despite my post title. I’ve been using the pornocalypse buzzword and hashtag for stories about big internet companies who got big by being porn-friendly (or, at least, apathetic or agnostic about adult content on their platforms) who later inevitably decide to crack down on it and remove it in an attempt to be more attractive for investors, advertisers, and mainstream public opinion. Facebook, by contrast, has never been nudity-friendly as far as I know. This is really more of a cautionary tale about the doomed and foolish idea that you can machine-filter out nudity and sexual content without disrupting important grownup conversations (political, medical, et cetera) that you presumably actually do want on your social media platform. (I say “presumably” with some skepticism, though. In a world full of squeamish advertisers, perhaps FaceBook really would prefer that the ACLU doesn’t discuss a controversial nude statue. But if so, they have to know they can’t admit that out loud while still claiming to offer a functional social-media platform.)
Similar Sex Blogging:
Saturday, June 2nd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
You may by now have noticed that I’m often very slow to jump on bandwagons and crusades and campaigns of outrage that go careening by us all at Twitter-enhanced speeds. There’s no shortage of the things, so it doesn’t really matter which side (of whatever controversy or cultural struggle) you are on; you can find a bandwagon to fit your taste without any trouble at all, and if you’re internet-plugged-in, plenty of them will find you. I’m not immune to that, but even when the militant controversies are relevant to my interests and to ErosBlog topics-of-interest, I often tend to tune them out.
Why? Well, sometimes it’s because I’m just out of the loop and don’t learn about them until they are all played out already. But often, I’m uncomfortable with the moral subtext of these things, or with the calls to action that accompany them. You can’t participate in an internet conversation of outrage and condemnation and angry social criticism without treading perilously close to the dreaded tropes of Something Must Be Done, There Ought To Be A Law, No Right-Thinking Person Would Associate Themselves With Doings Of That Sort, and Nobody Should View Or Enjoy Morally-Bankrupt Things Like That.
I can’t bear to stand in any of those camps with my voice raised. It’s one thing for me to avert my electronic gaze from an offensive thing, but quite another for me to shout with the mob of voices clamoring for somebody’s silencing. And there’s never been a good internet bandwagon from which the noise of that particular hue and cry was inaudible.
Which is why I don’t mind saying, I found considerable resonance within myself with the following:
The swooning and fainting and so forth about this stuff, the fever, is comical in its preening intensity. There is clearly some kind of competition to determine who is the most scandalized. It reminds me of church, frankly; I don’t do church, either. I have no common cause with perpetually shocked viziers of moral pageantry. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that I am their enemy.
The answer is always more art; the corollary to that is the answer is never less art. If you start to think that less art is the answer, start over. That’s not the side you want to be on. The problem isn’t that people create or enjoy offensive work. The problem is that so many people believe that culture is something other people create, the sole domain of some anonymized other, so they never put their hat in the ring. That even with a computer in your pocket connected to an instantaneous global network, no-one can hear you. When you believe that, really believe it, the devil dances in hell.
You could show me that on a sign carried by a random stranger, and I’d say “Yeah, I’m with that guy.” (And then I’d inevitably be humiliated when he tried to sell you and me some Lyndon LaRouche literature or a wearable Faraday cage or a Birther book.)
So who is “that guy”, this time? Turns out it’s Jerry Holkins, also know as “that Penny Arcade guy, Tycho, who pissed off a lot of people a few years ago over the internet dickwolves dickishness.” The big blockquote is from the blog post (as opposed to the webcomic) where he’s currently weighing in about a controversial video game trailer.
Yeah, you did read that correctly. There’s a culture-fight going on about the trailer for a videogame, yup. The trailer is said to feature battle nuns who die in ugly fashion. Google “rape culture hitman” (or just contemplate those search terms for a moment) if you want the flavor of the debate. Alternatively, if you’re feeling nostalgic, google “grand theft auto prostitutes”. Me? I stayed out of the GTA thing and I’m staying out of this one. Y’all have fun. And don’t forget to make more art.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 -- by Dr. Faustus
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., dissenting in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919).
My exploration of Roger Corman-related bonus material continued this week with the cast and crew interview features on the new release of Galaxy of Terror (1981).
Galaxy of Terror would probably be remembered today (if at all) as a minor, competently-made low-budget Alien rip-off but for one notorious scene. The set-up is something like this: A spaceship crew is dispatched to a strange, dark planet where a mysterious force generates monsters out of each crewmember’s deepest fears. Many grisly deaths result. Not a bad premise, so far. But one of these deaths turns out to be unusually kinky or unusually squicky or both. As Roger Corman himself explained in the interviews:
Of the various monsters which came out of each person’s unconscious, the one that was most famous and really became notorious at the time and helped to sell the film…was the monster coming out of Taaffe O’Connell’s unconscious.
Taaffe O’Connell played a character named Dameia, a highly competent spacefarer. And a stunner to boot. (She’s depicted to the left in her part as Dameia, and on the right in her present-day bonus-material interview.)
Dameia has just one little hang-up. As Corman puts it:
For the part of Taaffe I decided that in her unconscious mind she was afraid of sex. So for her we designed a monster maggot-like creature with certain phallic overtones.
Yes, indeed. The design for the maggot was apparently done by James Cameron, who got his start working for Corman and thus was able to join the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and a your-jaw-will-drop-when-you-see-the-list parade of others who got their start in that amazing one-man film school.
Now there’s an image to keep in mind the next time you see Titanic or Avatar.
And what does the giant icky maggot actually do to poor Dameia? Well, as Taaffe O’Connell puts it rather bluntly in her own cast interview:
…this woman succumbs to her greatest fear and her greatest pleasure.
And images from the sequence can make make matters blunter still.
In short, this sequence is a dramatization of a certain kind of pop-Freudian psychological conjecture: there are people whose conscious hate and fear of and disgust at something covers up unconscious desire for that very same thing.
Now is this conjecture a smart one? Perhaps. It does seem to me that there are certain psychological phenomena (homophobia is a clear example) for which it suggests at least a promising line of inquiry. But okay, maybe it’s a dumb idea. Maybe it’s even a pernicious idea (I hope I don’t have to spell out why that might be). But the more serious point here is that it is an idea, an interesting one, carried inside the unlikely vehicle of a B-grade horror movie. Good or bad? You might want to study the matter.
The film industry’s Moral Guardians, however, were not interested in having this matter available for you or anyone else to study. Galaxy of Terror editor R. J. Kizer explained:
Galaxy of Terror ran into several rating difficulties. First and foremost was the famous giant maggot scene. When we submitted the film we initially got an X rating. …[W]hat the rating board does is that won’t exactly tell you what is it that got you the rating. They just tell you, “well, you got an X rating.” The original concept of the maggot was the fact that the woman being attacked by the worm is in terror and then eventually comes to enjoy the experience. That was how she was directed, and that was how the thing was designed. So I had to take all of the erotic rhapsody looks out. I had to take out any suggestive movement of the maggot, there were — how else to put it? — humping movements being made by the worm and I had to take those out, so it looks like the maggot just kind of like… falls down on her and is just pressing down on her as if to crush her. So when I made all these little snips of film, and I went though and went through and resubmitted it we got an “R”. So Roger [Corman] comes into my room and says “I want to see what you took out.” And I had this box of trims, filled with little frames, a foot long to half a foot long to just a couple of frames to literally one frame of everything I had taken out all labeled where I took it out from…and I just reached randomly into the trim box and pulled this four-frame long piece of film. And I held it up. “Well, for example we started with this”…and Roger just looked at that four-frame piece of trim that I was holding in my hands and he says “Oh I don’t believe these MPAA people! I can’t! You take out four frames and we go from an X to an R. I give up. I don’t understand these people. Well, there’s no point even putting that stuff back in. Well, just ship it.” And he walked out.
So let’s reflect on what went on here. The MPAA has in effect just told us that it’s more or less okay to make a commercial movie in which a woman is stripped, raped, and killed by a giant slimy maggot and show said movie to youngsters, as long as they’re accompanied by a parent or guardian. Nice. But a slight variant the same scene, presented as the cinematic realization of an admittedly somewhat-disturbing erotic idea, will get your movie slapped with an X rating. Which means, of course, commercial death for the movie. The rating will keep the ideas in the movie out of the public realm just as effectively — if not more so — than if the gendarmes had trooped in and carried off the prints.
If someone wants to explain how behavior like the MPAA’s is consistent with the communicative norms of an open society, I am all ears.
And as for the little bits of trim in editor Kizer’s box? Lost for good, I’m sorry to say.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 -- by Dr. Faustus
When I blogged up what I thought was a fairly harmless and charming little remark from Steve Landsburg earlier this week, at least one of ErosBlog’s readers got at least a little bit perturbed. How dare I, or perhaps more accurately how dare Professor Landsburg, suggest that it’s okay for a minor to go surfing freely around the Internet, wherein she might encounter not just sexually explicit images, but {shudder} evil nasty porn?
A fair enough question, and one worthy of another one of my Sunday sermons.
Whenever someone gets up to defend the application of J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle — the view that the coercion of others can only be justified by self-defense and that we’re not allowed to force others to do or refrain from doing things for their own good — someone else will invariably hop up and ask, in plangent tones, “won’t anyone please think about the children?” (“Who will save the wee bairns?”)
What they mean by this is that if we allow adults full liberty to enjoy certain things like erotic materials, then Poor Innocent Children will also get exposed to them, and that this will be some sort of Very Bad Thing. So maybe we need to restrict the liberty of adults, at least to the extent of building high walls (real or virtual) around the Very Bad (if Poor Innocent Children will see it) Thing.
Hmm. Sounds like the putative well-being of children provides a very handy pretext for action by those who are not so much concerned to protect the well-being of children, as to extinguish the liberty of adults. And I don’t doubt that it is used exactly as such a pretext, much of the time. But let’s grant that those who would defend children — the Knights of the Wee Bairns, shall we call them? — are, in this instance, acting in good faith. Is there a harm here that merits our attention? Is Professor Landsburg’s daughter in some terrible danger from the Internet?
The Knights of the Wee Bairns, at the very least, want paywalls and adult filtering around “bad” content; some of the more maximalist among them want this content to disappear entirely, of course, and not just from the Internet.
People who fret about the danger that Internet porn supposedly represents to children most likely fear that free access to it will endanger their own ability to transmit their values and worldview to their children. This possibility is the “harm” that they fear. Perhaps their fears aren’t entirely unfounded. Maybe something children see on the Internet will affect their values or worldview in ways their parents won’t like. Too bad. In a free society, children are not robots to be programmed by their parents. You’re not entitled to demand that anyone else build a wall around anything just because of the worldview you want to transmit to your children.
I’ll sharpen this claim with an example, pointed right at myself. I am a religious nonbeliever. I am robust in my non-belief, and apologize for it to no one. It would be grounds for substantial disappointment, no, actually it would be grounds for considerable soul-searching and condign self-reproach, if either of my own daughters were to end up as some sort of evangelical Christian, because for my money that means they ended up believing something that is almost certainly false and probably pernicious as well. But I do not, not for one minute, think that this means that someone who runs a website devoted to Christian apologetics should be required to put up an age-determining wall, or require a valid credit card before visiting his site, or put some sort of objectionable content flag in his HTML code so that Atheist Net Nanny can filter out his content, with its explicit promotion of a worldview and values I’d rather my own children not end up subscribing to.
If we must censor content based on its potential to change some child’s values or worldview to something her parents won’t like, then there will be precious little liberty for anyone.
“Oh, but that’s not what we mean,” say the Knights of the Wee Bairns. “We’re only against porn, which is bad. We don’t mean to stifle vigorous debate in a free society. We don’t want to extinguish the liberty of adults. We think that children will be harmed if they see certain images or read certain stories. We insist only that there be some walls across the Internet, so the kids can’t get access to this sort of material.”
I would begin by noting that there really is no such thing a harmless wall across the Internet. The wall will never be truly voluntary. It will invariably be enforced by legal and social sanctions, which means that some content will disappear, simply because it isn’t worth the trouble or the risk of the provider to deal with the compliance burden. Other content, which should be available to all, will end up behind such a wall. To site just one prominent example, it’s been clear for years that Net Nanny and the censors keep material having to do with sexual health away from the teenagers who could really benefit from it.
So there’s a real cost to building walls across the Internet. Is there a corresponding benefit, in the form of harms avoided to minors who happen to view porn?
No.
There are many reasons why I think there is a strong prima facie case why there is no such benefit, no avoided harm to minors. Among the two strongest are the relative resilience of minors and the fact that things on the Internet don’t really change the incentives associated with real-world behavior.
Does viewing stuff — even nasty stuff — make children into nasty adults? Where is the evidence? Let’s look at some history. About two generations ago there was, you might recall, a huge conflict called the Second World War. Children living in the United States experienced this conflict largely as a series of deprivations. But tens of millions of children living the vast zones between the North Sea and the Volga, between Hokkaido and Java, experienced the war as terror — bombings and shellings and occupations and persecutions. Nothing anywhere on the Internet is as obscene as what happens in the real world when a war sweeps through. And what became of this generation of children? Some were psychically scarred for life, sadly. But most of those tens of millions grew up in the postwar world to have pretty normal lives, no more prone to criminality or dysfunction than human beings generally. Children can be, and are, pretty resilient. And keep in mind that Internet surfing, unlike having your country bombed or invaded, is voluntary. Anyone, children included, who encounters a distressing image can always just surf away.
Meanwhile, the real world continues to impose its set of costs and benefits, and these will be more powerful shapers of human behavior than what children or teenagers see on the internet. Out in meatspace, aggressive sexual conduct toward non-consenting others can lose you your job, ruin your reputation, and even land you in jail. Poorly-timed pregnancies can derail your life. HIV infection can kill you. None of these hard facts change, no matter what you’ve seen on the Internet, and people, including underage people, know this. Costs are real. People’s behavior is highly sensitive to cost. Homo economicus might be a crude approximation of actual human beings, but he’s a hell of a lot better than the “monkey see, monkey do” psychology that seemingly can be attributed to many fear mongers about porn.
“But you still might be wrong!” cry the Knights of the Wee Bairns.
Sure. Anything might be wrong. But if the mere theoretical possibility of harm is enough to forbid someone from doing something, then there really will be no liberty for anyone. That much should be too obvious even to require exposition.
All the same, I have no desire to be a dogmatist or an armchair theorist. I’ll respect anyone who civilly disagrees with me. And I’ll go one better than that. I’ll even agree to change my mind, provided that someone can honestly meet the following challenge:
Begin by defining a Bad Life Outcome as something that is uncontroversially bad to happen to someone. I mean bad in a thin sense. It has to be an outcome that pretty much everyone would agree would be bad. In defining bad you don’t get to cheat and load into the concept of “bad” something distinctive about your own worldview. I know that if you’re a die-hard Democrat you might think turning into a Republican or if you’re a Christian you might think becoming an atheist is a bad life outcome, but these don’t count: these outcomes are only bad relative to your specific worldview. Spending your life in prison, or dying of some terrible disease at 25, are Bad Life Outcomes as defined here.
Now suppose further a hypothetical experiment. Take 200,000 nine year-olds. Assign 100,000 of them at random to a Control Group and 100,000 to a Test Group. The Control Group has to spend their time on the Internet until age 18 with Net Nanny filtering out most (surely not all) of the bad old porn on the Internet (along with quite a lot of other stuff, probably). The Test Group gets uncensored access to the Internet until the age 18.
If you can tell me what the number of Bad Life Outcomes will be in the Control Group and the Test Group, and give me a convincing explanation as to why a skeptical and competent social scientist — someone like, oh, Steve Landsburg, say — should credit your numbers; oh, and furthermore, if the rate of Bad Life Outcomes in the Test Group really is materially larger than in the Control Group, then I will cheerfully change my mind.
Monday, February 9th, 2009 -- by Bacchus
From scans of an article discussing cartoon censorship in 1939, we learn that mermaid nipples and harem girl thighs-under-silk were verboten:
Thanks to Silent Porn Star for the link.
Thursday, June 9th, 2005 -- by Bacchus
This detail from the Japanese manga The Red Flower That Blooms Wetly has got to be the single most gratuitously pointless example of symbolic censorship ever seen. I guess the narrow diagonal white line “conceals” the very tip of the cartoon clitoris, but the rest of the image is so revealing it’s very hard to see what the concealment accomplishes. A bizarre artifact of the Japanese legal system, we must presume:
Image via J-List.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
|
