One of the blogger’s essential ‘housework’ chores is to regularly clear away the comments posted by commercial operators trying to provide my readership with direct links to sites I have no wish to link to. You know the stuff – insurance, viagra, loans, poker and, of course, porn.
(Note to sexual abuse survivors: the rest of this entry contains references to violent sex and is NOT recommended reading for those with active ‘triggers’.)
Sometimes, when I open the notifying message in my email inbox and go to hit the de-spam link, my eye is caught by a few words in one of the advertised site URLs or their tags. It might be weird, like ‘cup poodle tea’, or I might just decide it’s worth a look on its apparent merits, like, say, ‘free anal hardcore porn’. Oh yeh? I thought, what’s your hardcore? The link took me through an ‘access forbidden’ page back to the homepage of a site called (at least they don’t mince words) Rape. WELCOME TO OUR COLLECTION OF THE BEST RAPE SITES! etc, etc, trumpeted a box in the banner. On the front page nine ‘paysites’ advertised under titles like ‘Scream and Cream’, ‘Ravished Bride’ and ‘Bi Domination’. (No, children, I’m not going to give you the link.)
Predictably, the design was luridly hellish — black and scarlet, with obscurely suggestive pics and a graff-style logo with a tombstone font subheading, and although I decided (for the sake of my soul) not to venture past the front page (and so can’t even guess whether the advertised scenarios were truly bad news or just bad acting), it did look efficiently organised. And while full of shock-language like “Feel the despair and misery of these forced witnesses who see their wives and girlfriends screwed and humiliated!” it also seems occasionally almost self-aware. Consider this promo-bite for the Bi Domination site:
“It’s hard to forget some things. Violence and pain get stamped in your brains forever. But you don’t have to try to forget! Now you have a unique chance to follow all bisexual domination movies for as long as you want! Feel the pain these bisexual victims experience…”
There is some complex shit in human sexuality, and it’s all out there at your kiddies’ fingertips, unfiltered and unexplained. I distrust products like NetNanny because they let parents feel they’ve done their job — ignorance isn’t protection, and certainly not if it’s parental ignorance. NetNanny knows nuth’n, but yours ain’t the only computer in town: what’s needed is explanation.
If I were a high school teacher I’d be starting a Netsurfing and discussion class to initiate guided group debate about how sexuality operates in power relations, in character and identity formation, in trauma-processing. I’d get them actually looking at porn in class and debating its morality, considering its authorship, evaluating its styles, cross-pollinating it with academic writings on the subject — and eventually analysing their own vulnerabilities and finding their own proactively reasoned sexual ethics.
I’d be hoping those kids could help me figure how desire connects in to all our other deep drives — not just to joy and love but also to fear, pain, shame, hatred and rage. And why we persist in believing we can formulate an ethics of co-operative tolerance not only despite it, but through it.
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