Well, here's a big "oops"--I typed this up back in December of last year, and for some inane reason, left it on draft status instead of publishing it. Here it is, totally unedited from the way I left it seven months ago (unfortunately, the link to the Yahoo News article has now expired, but I'll leave it in there anyway):
Popular computer columnist John Dvorak of PC Magazine (and formerly of one of those Mac magazines I used to read),
seems to have a problem with the fact that ICANN recently nixed plans to create a .xxx top-level domain.Frankly, I would have thought he had more sense than that, but the issue with him seems to be some sort of porn-phobia and perhaps a hyperactive knee reflex. As his column progresses, his anti-porn ranting becomes more heated, to the point where I almost expected him to start raving about "our precious bodily fluids."
He begins by painting himself as a standard freethinking type:
The group making the most noise about the .xxx domain is a classic checklist-following evangelical group called Concerned Women for America. Its members follow the exact cookie-cutter Jerry Falwell theology promoted by many of these groups. Everything on the group's Web site is in red, white, and blue. Typical articles found at the site might be about the dangers of birth control, how gay marriage is bad, how evolution is just an unproven theory, how stem cell research is bad, and why we should have prayer in school...
I actually have to take my hat off to Dvorak for this paragraph, which is one of the most succinct, effective, and backhanded slams of a wingnut group that I've had the pleasure to read.
Unfortunately, trashing wingnuts is not what he's after. His real beef is quickly exposed in the next paragraph:
Exactly how these folks became enamored of resisting the .xxx domain is somewhat mysterious, and I suspect the pornographers themselves are behind it. These women have been tricked. Who benefits from the death of .xxx? The pornographers, that's who."
The idea behind the .xxx domain is to make it brain-dead easy to keep porn out of the American family home. That's the reason it was proposed. So why do these people oppose it? The argument against the .xxx proposal seems to indicate either an incredible naïveté regarding the workings of networks and computers or an extreme distrust of computer users themselves. Perhaps it's a combination of both. Concerned Women for America claims that the .xxx domain will increase porn by giving the pornographers a "new platform." What? Can someone tell me exactly how this creates a new platform? Don't these people understand how a ghetto works? Do they know what a platform is? Do they understand that this is like the warning stickers they themselves insist should be put on records and games? How do they not get that?
It's a warning label, not a platform! It's isolation. It's zoning. Would you allow locating adult bookstores next to churches? It seems that Concerned Women for America would demand doing so.
The idea behind .xxx is to put these porn folks into their own space where they can be somewhat controlled. The idea is not to make getting to porn easier. Getting to porn is easy enough now—even by accident. That's why the current structure is a threat to family values.
While Dvorak is obviously more savvy about the workings of browsers and the internet than the people at Concerned Women for America, it seems that when it comes to the subject of pornography, he may as well sign up for a membership.
The basic concepts are not all that hard to understand. Whenever you make something more scarce, there is the danger of creating an attraction for it that previously didn't exist. This can be especially powerful when the thing being limited is related to a powerful biological drive like sex: put porn behind a big, scary looking door, and it's a lot more interesting than it would be if it were out in the open and nobody was making a big deal about it. It's debateable whether this effect, this added attraction, would outweigh the effect of limiting porn to one domain. I am undecided on the issue--the ability of browsers to block one particular domain would unquestionably put a damper on the ability of people to access certain sites. But, on the other hand, you don't need a web browser to get all the pornography you can possibly handle, and, in fact, a web browser is a very inefficient method of obtaining it. However, whether .xxx would serve to limit porn in any meaningful way is not the main question.
The main question is (and Dvorak should damn well know this), "What
is pornography, and who gets to decide?" It's one thing to define
Scatbabes.com as porn. But does
Kari Sweets qualify, given that there is no nudity whatsoever on her site, yet the photos and videos there are clearly designed to be erotic? What about
True Teen Babes, which is pretty close to the same as Kari Sweets, except it uses a variety of models
who also happen to be underage? That latter site, in fact, has already faced up with this issue, and the fact that it still exists and the author is not in jail says pretty clearly that the contents of the site, while possibly erotic, are not "porn" in a legal sense. Yet I have no doubt what at least some the subscribers to that site are doing with the pictures there: they are whacking off to them. Which, strictly speaking, indicates that those pictures constitute porn
to them. Same deal with Kari Sweets--some people are going to look at her and say, "Aw, isn't she cute?" while others are going to frantically drop trou and ejaculate all over their keyboards. Is the problem not obvious? One person's porn is another person's innocence. Or, one person's porn is another person's fart joke: Some people would find video footage of women farting to be totally unappealing and rather disgusting. Others would find it hilariously funny. And others would find it immensely arousing. So is it porn, or not? And who gets to answer this question? Should True Teen Babes be limted to the .xxx domain based on erotic content, even though that would mean the models on that site would be unable to look at their own pictures? Should GirlsFarting.com be limted to the .xxx domain because a small number of people get turned on by feminine gas?
This question has been addressed before, of course, given the fact that certain materials are considered legal to sell to minors and certain materials are not. In fact, it used to be even more complicated than that--the practice when I was in college was that Playboy magazine was not generally found in porn shops, but rather in newstands. This would tend to indicate a non-pornographic content. Yet it was still verboten to sell it to minors, which would tend to indicate the opposite. These days, the standard has tighted up so that most newstands don't carry it anymore, and porn shops have stepped in to meet the demand. (Truthfully, I could be wrong about this, since the availability of Playboy magazine is not a subject I am normally interested in.) Yet I am sure there are parts of the country where things are still closer to the old way, just as I am sure there are parts of the country where things are even more restrictive (if that's possible). This is not even getting into the subject of how things are handled in other countries--I've been to both Canada and Australia in recent years, and both of those nations seem to have a much more relaxed attitude towards the whole subject than we do here in the States. Nobody could accuse these nations of being in the midst of some sort of decadent cultural meltdown, either--in fact, I'd rate them both as more desireable places to live than the U.S., and not for any reason having to do with access to adult materials (although, admittedly, that
would be a plus).
In the end, what this comes down to is the question of not just where the line is drawn, but
who is going to draw it. I am sure this was the primary factor in ICANN's decision to not create a .xxx domain. They knew they'd be stepping into a minefield as soon as they gave themselves the authority to decide what's porn and what's not. Not only would shouldering such a burden be fairly odious for them, it would squelch the right that every citizen has to decide for him or herself what material is acceptable and what is not. This would not be the sort of simplification that cultural conservatives are hoping for--it would simply be a disaster.
