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Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com.

Celebrating Pornography Awareness Week
by Diana Hsieh / 7 November 2000

GeekPress has just learned that this past week (Oct 29th to Nov 5th) was Pornography Awareness Week. We are distressed to have missed this important event; nevertheless, we are firmly committed to doing our part. We want to bring internet pornography to the attention of the millions of Americans who are not making use of this important national and international resource.

This week-long celebration of the role of pornography in our culture was long overdue. A recent NY Times article on pornography indicated that only 25% of web surfers regularly visit pornography web sites. That's pitiful! Sexually explicit materials are a vital part of our morality, culture, and economy. If we wish America to remain a world leader, we must transform pornography from a hobby to a habit!

According to Top 9 and Alexa, Americans are more interested in news, auctions, mp3s, and shopping on the internet than they are in pornography. It's a sad statistic, I know, but perhaps one that can be remedied.

Of course, Americans themselves are not entirely to blame. The lack of promotion on the part of pornography sites has left many Americans in the dark about even their existence. Adult web site owners, as we all know, are notoriously shy about promoting their web sites. They put up entry pages warning people away. They link heavily to other sites, driving traffic away from their own site. And they often scam search engines to give false results for pornography searches in order to confuse people into browsing sites with no pornography at all!

Additionally, the aggressive, ethically questionable promotional tactics of other sites (particularly educational sites like Hooked on Phonics) have confused buyers into purchasing phonics sets when they were really looking for the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee video! Linux/Unix/BSD sites are not much more honest, as they have obviously used shady tactics to get to the top of searches for f*ck and finger.

These problems have definitely created clouds of confusion among web surfers. One construction worker I spoke to was amazed that pornography could even be found on the internet. "And here I thought the internet was a haven for all those scamming educational web sites selling phonics games!" That's a lesson we all need to learn.

So my message to pornography site owners this week is just this: Stop hiding! Get out there and promote your adult web site! There's no need to be so shy!

Another impediment to finding pornography on the internet are so-called "smut filters," which use keyword and image analysis to separate porn from non-porn. These filters sound like they would be a great help in finding pornography. But think again: Porn filters are actually supposed to block pornography! What a bizarre inversion that is! Why would anyone not want to see fat, naked chicks, news of babes, pregnant sluts, erotic stories, muscular, naked men, or The Dildo Song? What parent would not wish to expose their children to these important, educational displays of human sexuality? It is, I must admit, a complete puzzle to me!

Thankully, these "porn filters" aren't doing their jobs very well. For example, a test of Pornsweeper showed that it blocked out images of Bill Gates, George W. and Laura Bush, and three bluegrass players in a park, along with other subversive images inappropriate for children. (Those close ups of blow jobs and other sexual acts were just fine for the kiddies though.) And the much-hailed BAIR Filter is letting through pornographic gems like this threesome.

I think it's time that someone developed a real porn filter, one that only lets through sex, sex, and more sex. Now that would be useful bit of software!

Some pro-pornography advocates more radical than myself have called upon the federal government to encourage pornography use through public service announcements and subsidies for pornographers. In my opinion, such measures are premature. After all, President Clinton has already set up a very popular pornographic web site at whitehouse.com. And some members of the White House staff have been diligently collecting thousands of hardcore teen, gay, and bestiality pornography. We should study the effects of this work before spending more tax dollars that could otherwise be used by American citizens to purchase pornography. (However, I do support tax deductions for pornography purchases.)

Personally, I would prefer to see a grassroots approach, in which neighbors, businesspeople, ministers, teachers, and students publicly speak out about their favorite pornography sites. I want to see an uprising of the people for pornography!

In essence, we at GeekPress are all in favor of the American Family Association's continuing "focus on the fastest growing and most prolific form of pornography our nation has ever known... internet porn." As the AFA press release says, "Never has so much been available to so many, so easily."

Right on, brothers! So let's go get it!

About the Author

Diana Hsieh is the owner and co-editor of GeekPress, an irreverent filter for the most unique and interesting technical news of the day. (She swears that she's not a porn freak, despite whatever this satire and her recent Scamming Google article might indicate.) Diana also sporadically writes and lectures on philosophy, Objectivism in particular. She can be reached via e-mail to diana(at)geekpress.com.

© 2000 Diana Hsieh. Permission to reprint will be granted upon request.