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THE SCOOP for September 18, 1996
Online Pornography
Webcrawling Toward Ecstasy
(C)1996 Bob Harris
If you believe Time, Newsweek, and The Weekly World News, online pornography is becoming a national crisis: children everywhere are logging onto the Internet, stumbling into pictures of nude women, and immediately degenerating into drooling little perverts.
I use the Internet constantly to research these articles and my lectures. Last week, when I needed to double-check some stuff about Kurdistan, I had everything in about ten minutes. And I didn't see any naked ladies.
But is it possible the kids are at risk? Finding out meant hours of grueling research, seeking out and examining dirty pictures. Never one to shirk my devotion to truth, your intrepid reporter spent an evening last week fearlessly immersing himself in cyberfilth. It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.
Here's what I found:
The World Wide Web is full of kid-friendly point-and-click graphics, so that's where I began. Using about a dozen search engines, I found roughly two hundred sex-oriented sites in about five minutes. Wow.
But don't get sweaty yet. Kids can't even find their own shoes, much less remember ten phrases like http://www.altavista.digital.com and then come up with keywords to describe things they've never seen.
Even if they could, most of what they'd find is about as dangerously erotic as an episode of Baywatch. A lot of "adult" websites are simply lingerie catalogs and such. Many others are just weird and harmless, like The Online Image Museum of Lycra, where some guy with a lot of time (and God knows what else) on his hands keeps an archive of speed skaters, disco singers, and TV superheroes for your viewing self-pleasure.
Nearly all of the hardcore stuff is at pay-per-view sites requiring a password and a credit card. Besides, the pictures take so long to download I can't imagine anyone, especially short-attention-span kids, preferring this to a simple magazine. Peeking at my Dad's hidden Playboy stash was a lot easier and dirtier than this.
The Usenet is a text-based area for such useful discussion groups as alt.Elvis.sighting and alt.dinosaur.Barney.die.die.die. You can't just blunder into something horny here, and even if you did, photos have to be laboriously converted back and forth into binary code. And half the postings are for get-rich-quick schemes, which makes sense, since it's all so time-consuming that regulars couldn't possibly have a job.
Typical here is alt.pictures.celebrities.nude, with naked shots of Demi Moore, Raquel Welch, and Madonna -- like you need a computer for that -- and stuff like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.disney, which is as goofy as it sounds. There are also skin shots aplenty of famous actresses making serious career mistakes. Diff'rent Strokes, indeed.
Alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.fetish made me laugh out loud: pictures of men wearing diapers and wrestling in mud; a girl with about a hundred piercings swimming underwater; and a bald woman doing something with a beer can you'll just have to imagine. (Yes. Exactly. You pervert.)
The best part was trying to figure what in hell happened to these people in junior high.
Obviously, this is nothing you want the kids to play with, but six-year-olds can rarely type, much less penetrate Unix filename structures and uuencoding. Get real.
Notably, I saw no sign of the legendary kiddie porn, although religious zealots were everywhere, usually in nutcase-friendly All Caps: SINNERS! ESCAPE THIS TAWDRY NIGHTMARE! answered by a bunch of underwater diaper-wearing beer lovers writing things like bite me bite me bite me.
Now I see why people actually consider Crossfire a form of intelligent debate.
I also sampled a few sex-oriented IRC channels and FTP sites and whatnot, with similar results. Of course, the Internet is big enough that there are certainly some bad things going on that I didn't see. Welcome to Earth.
And all sex in the '90s has its risks. Below yet another surgical miracle feigning ecstasy on a handrail, a string of random characters filled my screen: a virus, according to an adjacent post. Luckily, I have a Mac, and this virus only affects PCs running DOS, making them crash periodically for no apparent reason. Gee. How awful.
So would censorship save the Republic? Nope. The Internet's too big for anything but selective enforcement, and there are inexpensive software packages that parents can use to desex the upstairs Aptiva.
Gee, parental responsibility combined with a free market solution -- isn't that what most of the yo-yos yammering for censorship claim to want most in the world?
Nope.
The Communications Decency Act, which Bill Clinton signed into law because he doesn't have the spine God gave a tuna, makes it a crime to publish on a computer network all sorts of things that are Constitutionally-protected on paper -- not just paintings by Picasso, drawings by DaVinci, and scenes from Schindler's List; but vital political stuff like instructional manuals on how to avoid AIDS, human rights info on sexual abuse by third-world governments, and even the Yellow Pages listings of women's health clinics.
It's not hard to see the authoritarian agenda here.
The CDA was instantly ruled unconstitutional in lower federal courts, which shows you how much Clinton, Gingrich, and the rest know or care about the Constitution. The Department of Justice will ask the Supreme Court to reinstate the law. Let's hope they Just Say No.
At least Clarence Thomas will vote against it.
Still, just to be sure the kids are all right, I ran one final test. I sat my six-year-old nephew down at my PowerBook. He's a bright kid from a family of engineers, and he uses computers at school. If I pretended not to watch, would he soon get his very first jpeg?
Nah. In three minutes, he was back at the TV playing Nintendo, gleefully kicking little electronic people in the neck until they collapsed.
Now there's a real danger.
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Bob Harris is a political comedian who has lectured at over 250 colleges nationwide.
Original file name: THE SCOOP -- Webcrawling Toward
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