Secondhand Smut

Washington Post Staff Writer Monica Hesse draws our attention to the increasing problem of winding up trapped in an airplane or subway seat next to someone watching porn on his mobile electronics. Thanks to her article, I've found a new blessing for which to give thanks—it has never happened to me before. Apparently, according to the article, such incidents are on the rise and it is only a matter of time before I'm on a Southwest Airlines flight trying to avert the view of my kiddies from the iPhone in 13B.

Hesse creatively nicknames the phenomenon "Secondhand Smut."

Her article comes at a time when I'm seriously thinking about abandoning Twitter to return to an exclusive relationship with Facebook. Being a Twitter member, for me, has meant the constant fending off of attempts by porn mistresses (or are they 27-year-old male geeks living in their parents' basements? Who knows?) to get me to "follow" them.

As a historian, I long ago learned to be skeptical of the tiresome refrains of "The world has never been this evil before!" We forget so quickly—being the most evil is a stiff competition in human history. We're pretty good at evil, and have had several distinguished competitors in the Hall of Infamy.

But I'm tempted to make such a proclamation these days. Technology is making a difference for the worse. Will people ever develop the widespread willpower to overcome their addictions to porn?

"Secondhand Smut." I like the phrase. I just think it deserves wider application. The secondhand effects of smut are so much more than an uncomfortable airplane ride. It manifests itself in husbands who lose interest in their wives, in women objectified and used, in diseases spread and people dead, in "actresses" and "actors" whose lives are thrown away, and in a modern plague of human slavery and sex trafficking.

I'm praying that we reach a tipping point where people can see that pornography is so much more corrosive than tobacco, and that societal ills are just as worthy of legal disincentive as are physical ills.

Unlikely to Be Quoted This Mother's Day at Church

A recent Fox News article reveals that a woman formerly opposed to posing naked in pornographic magazine Playboy was actually talked into doing so by her own mother (see here, third story down).

Sex is being destroyed by the people who think they are celebrating it.

Microsoft: "Browse Better" = "Browse Worse; Hide Better"

Microsoft's newest advertising campaign defines a new low in the company's public relations history. Their advertisement "O.M.G.I.G.P" (the elaborated title is a violation of the third commandment, so I'll not be providing it) depicts a wife uncovering her husband's browsing history and becoming violently ill at the sight of what he has been viewing online.

What is Microsoft's solution to a depraved and perverted husband and a sickened wife? Will the folks at Redmond suggest that pornographic sites like the bleeped out URL given in the advertisement are inappropriate? Of course not. Their proposed solution is "InPrivate Browsing." Indulge the darker recesses of your heart, just learn to keep secrets better. Now THERE'S an approach that will strengthen the fabric of our society (not)!

Microsoft's slogan for Internet Explorer 8 is "Browse Better." How Orwellian that this slogan is actually an encouragement for people to browse worse!

A Creative Way to Attack Internet Porn?

First, why would we bother? After all, some might argue, the publication of lewd material goes back to the dawn of time. Why fight what seems to be unstoppable?

Well, just because pornography has been around for a very long time, that doesn't mean that its perverseness and pervasiveness have not changed down through the years. For example, if a resident of my home town, Lake City, Arkansas, had wanted to view live pornographic action a century ago, such a person would have been forced to travel to some seedy part of Memphis (a then-imposing journey of some sixty miles), locate a suitable establishment, and then hope not to be seen while entering or exiting. Today, the same man must invest money and effort into spam-abatement software and procedures in order to AVOID being solicited by purveyors of porn.

Pornography is a negative influence upon our society. It is a blight upon the face of our culture. It is a growing menace to the sexual fulfillment and happiness of the American people.

But how do you stop it? Efforts to create a special TLD (top-level domain) for pornography as well as efforts to combat wanton internet porn have collapsed when confronted with the fact that the Internet does not behave like other commerce in the world. A web site might be hosted from anywhere on the planet, so enacting tough legislation in a particular jurisdiction is entirely ineffective.

I say that an Internet problem deserves an Internet solution. Something creative and distinctively Internetish that stands a chance of prevailing in the war on porn.

What am I proposing? The inspiration for my plan is SETI@home. Participants in the SETI@home program download software onto their computers that, while they are not using their computers, works diligently in the background to download and process radio signals from outer space searching for evidence of intelligence in the universe beyond Earth (think Contact).

Why not have such sleeper programs installed on computers to chew up the bandwidth of porn providers, hitting them in the pocketbook where it hurts? A sufficient number of computers toiling at this task would degrade the user experience of porn customers and force providers to outlay cash for expensive extra bandwidth just to stay afloat. Such programs would continuously browse the free portions of known pornographic sites to place high demand upon their computer resources. It might not be a knockout blow, but at least it would score as a punch.

Of course, one would have to probe the legal niceties delineating SETI@home on the one hand from something like a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the other hand. At some point tending toward the latter, I think such activities could become illegal. And we wouldn't want that.

Also, I suppose that those who have good enough web filtration to keep people from browsing porn for real would also find that their filtration software would block the porn-hacker program, as well.

It may not be workable, but it seems to me that this is a problem crying out for a good solution. It scares me to think of a generation of children (including my own) coming-of-age with the Internet as it now exists.. I'm willing to take responsibility for helping to keep them from pursuing porn, but we ought to find some way to limit the ability of porn to pursue them. For people who take such responsibilities seriously, the viability of the Internet itself may be the thing at stake.