Wednesday, April 08, 2015 

Upon this tidal wave of internet sleaze.

If there's been any real underlying theme of the "short" campaign so far, beyond the obvious dividing lines established by Labour and the Tories, it's in how the smaller parties are still trying to deny they might be involved in anything as puerile as politics.  "I told you they were all the same," insisted the most boring man alive last Thursday (other than myself, natch), in spite of how he makes even hip to be square David Cameron seem positively alternative just by standing alongside him.  The Greens have just released their party political broadcast, depicting the big four as One Dimension and most likely blowing their entire campaign budget in one go, while last night Nicola Sturgeon was insistent she would help Ed Miliband into Downing Street, at the same time as ensuring the break up of the Westminster old boys' network.  Purists might suggest the best way to get Miliband as PM is to vote Labour, but that could be a little too obvious for these times.

You do of course understand.  Politics, like crevice, is a dirty word.  Westminster is even filthier, conjuring up images of snouts in the trough, flipped duck houses, not so old men in grey suits not being in touch with hard-working Brits who revel in their own ignorance, feculence and I'm already losing the will to live just by relaying the nonsense that has become the default setting for so much of our discourse.  What baffles is why, instead of fighting against this attitude, which isn't cynicism because authentic cynicism requires thought and so much of the "they're all the same" bullshit is just sheer laziness, politicians instead do their very best to fuel it.  The first campaign missive from my Labour candidate has arrived, and in the posting she insists she has no intention of becoming a "Westminster politician".  Forgive me if I'm being deliberately obtuse, but if she's elected she doesn't have any choice in the matter, unless she intends to not take up her seat ala Sinn Fein.  Yes, I know what she means; she isn't going to become that sort of politician, as though it's ignoble to want to be more than just a constituency MP, as though you can't be both.

I'd much rather if we're going to snort and shake our heads at the very mention of Westminster we do it for something approaching a decent reason.  Take for instance the mindbogglingly stupid pledge made by the Conservatives at the weekend that hasn't really had the attention it properly deserves.  "TIDE OF INTERNET SLEAZE TO BE HALTED" shrieked the Mail, the headline currently alongside an image of Kate Upton in her underwear.  Yes, after successfully dealing with the entire problem of kids being able to explore the wonders of fisting if they so wish by requiring ISPs to have online filtering turned on by default, the Conservatives now say that kiddiwinks are still having their lives ruined by catching a glimpse of a Japanese bukkake party.  Why, according to a totally legit survey conducted by the NSPCC and ChildLine, a tenth of 12-year-olds are "addicted" to online porn.  They're campaigning against it with, and I'm not making this up, Fight Against Porn Zombies viral videos.  Fapz.  Fapz.  Someone thought that was funny, clever and unlikely to be understood by the people who commissioned it.

All porn sites will then be required to have some sort of age verification system, beyond the you can only enter if you're over 18 yadda yadda warning most paid sites currently have, although the porn tube sites for the most part forgo even that.  This will apply whether or not they're based in the UK, the implication being that if they refuse to take part, as they will, as porn is not the guaranteed revenue generator it once was, those refusing to take part will be blocked.  Again, it's not clear how this will work, the suggestion being that ISPs will be required to block access to the sites in the same way they currently do the torrent and sports live stream sites that have a court order against them.

Why though stop there?  Why just require sites that define themselves as being pornographic to verify the age of their users?  Why shouldn't Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr have the same system in place when the first two serve as the main referrers to such material, while Tumblr is a veritable cornucopia of every fetish known to man, and plenty of others not yet identified by science?  Surely Xbox Live, Steam and Amazon should have a proper system in place to verify that 18-rated games and movies aren't being bought by children using their parents' details, or indeed to prevent the parents from irresponsibly giving in to the demands of little Johnny.  How many of our kids are watching videos on YouTube that are completely unsuitable for them, and shouldn't something be done about that?  Isn't it time the smut masquerading as news served up by the Mail, Sun and Star was put behind a not suitable for human consumption warning in all newsagents?

And so on.  As Gilad Rosner writes, such a system is technically feasible, except it would still be so full of holes as to be completely useless.  Unless the porn tube owners cooperated, and there's not the slightest indication they would, we'd just see the same thing that's happened with the "blocked" torrent sites: the springing up of mirrors that are not blocked.  This in itself wouldn't stop said torrent sites from being another major source of the sleaze polluting the minds of children, nor would it online lockers, let alone how we're also informed most 9-year-olds are playing I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours on Snapchat in any case.  Even if ISPs were required to be more proactive than they have been in blocking the proxies giving access to torrent sites, it still wouldn't stop anyone downloading Tor and getting around the whole shebang that way.  For the umpteenth time in history, what seems to be Conservative policy is denying adults the right to make their own decisions about what they watch on the completely spurious basis of protecting children.  It would be slightly more acceptable if the policy was workable; it isn't.

How lovely it would be then if prospective MPs, rather than feeling the need to make excuses for themselves from the very beginning, instead outlined how they be different from their predecessors.  Instead of sucking up to tabloid newspapers with a commercial interest in going after the full-on sleaze provided by their rivals, they could promise to vote on the basis of what is known to work.  They could make clear it is the responsibility of the parents to monitor what their beloved sprogs are watching online, their responsibility to ensure filters are in place, and most importantly, they are there to talk about something they've seen that may have upset them.  They could also set out the argument that it's the maiden aunts at the Mail and in the Conservative party that are preventing the desperately needed changes to sex education in schools, which is stuck back in the 20th century while the 21st roars by.  Or they could just stick to the party line and keep their heads down.  Which is what most of those currently pledging to not be "Westminster politicians" will almost certainly do once there.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

4/08/2015 11:59:00 pm | |

Wednesday, January 29, 2014 

This is a post about sex and porn.

It's always a danger to write about things you know next to nothing about.  Not that that's stopped me in the past obviously, or indeed stops pretty much anyone from giving their keyboard a damn good slamming about pretty much everything.  One great example was this post from last year, which was cross-posted over on Lib Con, and where it quickly became clear that I was perhaps a bit old-fashioned in my views on the amount of flesh on display in music videos and also knew absolutely nothing about Justin Bieber or One Direction.  Ahem.

That post was partially in response to a comment piece by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, and here we are again.  I know next to nothing about how people my age and younger are conducting themselves sexually, except to say I'm not getting enough of it.  Whatever it is.  Cosslett however says she does know, and that many women are increasingly submitting to the requests of their partners which they are certain are influenced by pornography as they don't know how to say no or aren't confident enough to.  It's a topic we have broached before, and it would be to ignore the wide availability of hardcore porn and the potential for it to have made some young people believe the things depicted in it are normal and average to completely dismiss the anecdotal evidence we have.

At the same time, it's also difficult not to think that Cosslett is either exaggerating for effect, or is taking a few examples and stretching them to absolute breaking point.  I am more than happy to accept that, as Cosslett says, some men seem to think sex ends once they've ejaculated onto their partner's breasts or face.  The latter is after all overwhelmingly how most porn scenes now end.  Although this is somewhat to do with how the "money shot" in hardcore porn has always signalled the end of that particular sex scene, it doesn't explain why the "facial" has become so dominant over the more prosaic pulling out and coming which once sufficed.  In part it is about male power, without doubt, and in some scenes it's more than clear that the supposed star has no choice over how the scene ends, even if she clearly hates what's about to happen.  This is exacerbated further when "cum dodging" as it's referred to is mocked and belittled, as it sometimes is in behind the scenes sections of gonzo films, as though a woman not wanting to have semen sprayed into her mouth, all over her face or into her eyes or hair is pathetic and/or hilarious.

When Cosslett focuses twice on women having their hair ejaculated on though and fingers porn as being responsible you do have to wonder.  I honestly cannot recall a single instance in any porn scene I've watched where the male actor has specifically came on his co-star's hair, and her hair only.  It seems more likely that the woman she's spoken to has been unfortunate enough to have had a relationship with someone with this particular unusual fetish than it being indicative of something else.

Then we have "seagulling", which I most certainly hadn't heard of before.  Apparently once confined to boarding schools, it's supposedly spread to some universities, and involves the friends of someone bursting in on their pal once he's finished having sex with his girlfriend, and them ejaculating all over her.  There are some obvious problems with this having happened rather than being an exaggeration of an exaggeration: despite what porn might suggest, men generally cannot ejaculate all at the same time or one after the other.  Second, where are they hiding so that the unaware victim doesn't know of their presence?  Are they all in the room next door pulling themselves off without going off early or missing the moment?  Third, while I don't doubt that the alumni of boarding schools have and do get up to some otherwise unusual antics with each other, teenagers don't usually masturbate together.  That would most certainly be "gay".  It all sounds extremely familiar to the also apocryphal biscuit game, at least when it comes to all those involved taking part voluntarily, or a more recent supposed "thing" in America, rainbow parties, a gathering where a group of girls would all wear a different shade of lipstick and take it in turns to fellate their male school friends.

It's also difficult not to be sceptical about just how many women have been asked on a first date for anal sex.  Again, anal sex in porn is all but ubiquitous, although arguably it has in fact been in decline in porn over the last few years due to the internet free-for-all having had such an impact on the niche producers.  Are we though talking about first dates as in actual first dates, or first dates in the Tinder sense?  Searching for examples of women being asked for it on a first date turned up this piece, which as anecdote does suggest it might be happening, but only in the no-strings, one and done, dating sense (and in Australia).  Which it must be said, isn't wholly surprising.

None of this is to deny that porn certainly can be a problem amongst the impressionable, and that Cosslett is absolutely right in arguing that sex education desperately needs reform to address something that just 15 years ago wasn't anywhere near as big of an issue.  As Flying Rodent says though, sex education is not going to be a panacea.  Some of it ought to be pure common sense: if kids really do think the back bottom is as pliable as some porn makes it look and accessing it is also as painless, they've clearly never tried to stick a finger up their own passage or indeed took a dump, and I honestly don't believe anything other than a tiny minority do believe such, err, crap.  They might get the impression that heterosexual anal sex is normal, or that women universally enjoy it when they most certainly do not, but even that latter assertion seems dubious when plenty of porn does not suggest that at all.  The more honest makers will often include interviews with the stars where some have made clear they either don't like it or only do it because of the money.  Some of it is also about how to empower women to say no (and for some men to know that no means no): why do some whom as Cosslett puts it mock and deride their partners for asking for such things when with their friends feel unable to do so in the bedroom?

As Cosslett also says, what we really need is some proper research into sexual attitudes among the young, and also some facts on just how many really do watch porn and to what extent.  This is difficult precisely because of the age of those involved and due to the potential for lying and boasting which goes hand in hand with the discussion of sex, but clearly we need to go beyond anecdotes and a discussion based around them when no one really knows the reality.  One suspects it isn't as bad as Cosslett suggests, but there will be a minority who have been affected.  We won't know that however until we can talk about it, and that also seems as difficult as ever without descending into hyperbole.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Share |

1/29/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Thursday, January 16, 2014 

The real nanny state.

You might have missed it if you've been too busy reading all the juicy, sorry I mean disgusting allegations being made against both Bill Roache and Dave Lee Travis, gleefully, I mean dutifully reported by the country's finest, but just before Christmas Cameron's great firewall of Britain was finally finished.  The other big ISPs that had yet to put in place their "default on" internet filters duly turned them on, and to no surprise whatsoever many non-adult sites were blocked.  The filters it seemed had a special dislike for anything LGBT-related, exactly the kind of sites that confused or bullied children should never be able to see, while they also forbade access to blogs dealing with file sharing, rather than just actual file sharing sites.  Big no signs also appeared instead of sex education sites, in another development absolutely everyone saw coming.  These problems were naturally called "teething troubles", and no doubt some of the more egregious ones were quickly ironed out.

Something we haven't had previously was one of those in favour of "default on" filtering coming out and properly responding to an article critiquing the entire approach.  The Graun today gave space to John Carr, secretary of the Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety, to reply to Laurie Penny's piece for the paper at the start of the year.  Apart from Penny's opening paragraph, which imagined someone being phoned by their ISP and asked whether they wanted to still be able to see dripping quims, ravaged buttholes and terrorists beheading infidels (I paraphrase slightly), which isn't how the filtering is being implemented but is an accurate picture of how some, finding their access has been restricted, will be contacting their ISP's help desk, it was a decent summation of how we got where we were and how closely related it was to outright censorship.

Carr is of course having none of it.  All the new approach is doing is helping parents, "making it a great deal easier ... to use filters if they want them".  The decision is entirely theirs, not the state's.  Except, by putting such pressure on ISPs to change their policies and implement "default on" filtering it, it seems remarkably close to it in my eyes.  If the decision was entirely theirs, as adults, then surely the default should be off?  Only those of age can take out a new account giving them internet access, so where's the harm in making such filters easily available but have them off by default?  Indeed, isn't the very fact they are on unless you choose to switch them off a wonderful example of providing a false sense of security?  Making parents believe the net will be safe for their children due to the new filters, meaning they don't have to do anything to protect them, seems even more irresponsible than the situation we had before to this layman.

Still, Carr says ISPs are just catching up with the mobile firms that have had their filters turned on since 2005.  What he doesn't mention is that only those with a credit card (not a debit card) can turn the filtering off, which excludes a decent chunk of the population.  Those without one who wish to have it turned off need to find their provider's local store and bring ID to prove they can look at mucky pictures if they so wish on their smartphone.  It's a great example of infantilisation, but one we're apparently prepared to live with.  Carr also dismisses Penny's claim that all we've heard about to do with filtering is pornography, or indeed child pornography, which the likes of Claire Perry willfully conflated in a successful campaign for something to be done.  How would a 9-year-old sleep after viewing a double chainsaw murder, he asks?  Considering that such extreme violence is even more difficult to stumble upon than pornography without specifically searching for it, this seems a rather moot argument.  A better question is how many 9-year-olds would be seeking out gore videos, the likely answer being hardly any.  Carr next mentions "women-hating violence", such as three men simultaneously beating and raping a woman.  Unless I've missed something, one of the few things yet to be recorded and posted online is the actual rape of a woman, so one presumes Carr is talking about a scene cut out of a film.  Again, how likely is a child to find something of that nature, especially one as young as 9 without looking for it?

This distracts in any case from the main arguments against, which are the filters should not be on by default and that if we must have filters, they should be a good deal smarter than the ones we seem to have been stuck with.  They should also be as transparent as possible: as mocked as O2's short-lived filter checker was (this blog was blacklisted on the under-12 filter, along with much of the rest of the internet), it was the only example of an ISP being clear with those supposedly responsible on what was actually being blocked.  Just as adults are able to see what ratings films and games have been given and make their own decision as to what to allow their children to see/play, why should there not be something similar to O2's checker where you can put in a URL and see its classification?  Perhaps it's because, as Cory Doctorow wrote, that such lists are considered to be trade secrets.  Carr says the filters will get better and errors can be easily rectified, but will they be?  Mobile operators are still incredibly reticent about their blocking practices, not inspiring confidence ISPs will be any different.

Carr finishes by saying that parents shouldn't "feel obliged to provide unrestricted access to all its horrors", but this obfuscates the issue.  Filters and censorware have long been available, only it was up to parents to make the decision for themselves as to whether to use them.  Making filters available as they have been, just not demanding they be default on, would fulfil Carr's argument.  We've reached a position where not just pornography but "extremist" material, file-sharing sites and everything in between is blacklisted by default, something you don't have to be a conspiracy nut to think is beneficial to both government and big business.  This has all been achieved through the age-old method of asking "won't someone think of the children?", the default fall back argument of the censorious everywhere.  Combined with the child porn angle pursued by the Mail, it's not a surprise the ISPs and Google gave in, or at least gave the impression they had.  What ought to be surprising is that a party which has constantly derided the "nanny state" and urges personal responsibility at every turn has been the one to do so.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

1/16/2014 11:22:00 pm | |

Monday, November 18, 2013 

An invented victory over an invented threat.

"Stunning victory for Mail campaign", screams the eponymous newspaper's front page.  "GOOGLE BLOCK ON CHILD PORN", it goes on, while David Cameron says that Google and Yahoo have "come a long way" following his speech earlier in the year calling for action.  You could easily be fooled into thinking that with one stroke, the major search engines have dealt a critical blow against the depraved and evil people sharing child abuse images and videos online.  Cameron says there's more to be done, and there's the little matter of p2p sharing and the "dark net", but Claire Perry's pleased and the Mail is similarly delighted, so clearly the pressure has worked, right?

Well, sort of.  Read the reports a little closer, and it instead becomes fairly apparent that Google has reacted to the demands of the ignorant by making it look as though they've done more than they actually have.  In his piece for the Mail, the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt talks of how the results for 100,000 queries "that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids" have been cleaned up, while the BBC reports how the new algorithms "will prevent searches for child abuse imagery delivering results that could lead to such material".  In other words, there is absolutely nothing to say that any one of those 100,000 search terms did lead to such material in the first place, or that all of those queries had been used by someone looking for abusive images.  It's worth remembering that despite all the ravings of the Mail and friends in June and July, not a single journo claimed to have been able to access child pornography (and no, calling it child pornography does not legitimise it, unless you're too stupid to understand the nuances of the English language) through using just Google or any other search engine, although we did have Amanda Platell tell us that a professionally shot adult scene featuring an 19-year-old was in fact child abuse.  Charles Arthur wonders why it took Google so long to do this; the reason, apparently enough, is that it didn't really need to.

Nor has Cameron's other key demand from his speech, that there are some search terms so "abhorrent and where there can be no doubt whatsoever about the sick and malevolent intent" that no results should be returned at all become a reality.  Instead, Google has put warnings from both themselves and charities at the top of the pages for around 13,000 results.  The implication is that none of these search terms returned material either, but again, it looks as if they've given in to pressure to do something, however futile.  Where the furore does seem to have resulted in some real action is it looks as though Google has developed a video equivalent of Microsoft's PhotoDNA, where pictures can be traced even if they're resized or the colours altered.  This again however isn't going to make much difference when neither photos or videos of child abuse are much shared on YouTube or the main social networking sites.

The real question to ask might be just how counter-productive this debate by megaphone has been.  Cameron reckons a Google deterrence campaign "led to a 20% drop off in people trying to find illegal content", yet apparently puts this down as a success rather than wondering whether it in fact means they went elsewhere.  This entire episode has been defined by ignorance, and it's not necessarily a good thing that a lot more people now know about Tor or the other "dark nets" than they did previously.  Cameron says he's going to sic GCHQ onto them, and while it's somewhat reassuring that previously the NSA and GCHQ failed to crack Tor, it's clearly possible they could break it, endangering those who do use it to evade the surveillance of authoritarian states. 

All that's likely to have been achieved by Google etc humouring the government and the Mail is a few of the more boneheaded perverts being told by their computers they need help, while doing nothing to help those in the clutches of the abusers.  Politicians and newspapers trying to make complicated and intractable problems look easily solvable while making them the responsibility of others? Who woulda thunk it?

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

11/18/2013 07:50:00 pm | |

Monday, July 22, 2013 

Moral panic: on by default.

We live, so it seems, in a distinctly weird world.  Never before have we had such easy access to a full array of sexual imagery, and yet despite being able to summon up almost any fetish at the click of a mouse, we don't seem to want to discuss why something turns us on, or what it says about us personally.  Fundamentally, that's down to how we don't want to be judged; despite porn being consumed as never before, we still regard it as being embarrassing or difficult to talk about, understandably so.  We also don't really want to know whether our friends or loved ones might have say, a scat fetish, or even something more prosaic like being partial to BDSM.  What goes on in someone else's bedroom is their business, so long as no one gets hurt.  The same applies to watching other people doing what we would like to, or fantasise about doing; no one else needs to know.

Except, when we don't talk about and rationalise it, what we end up getting is the semi-moral panic we're currently going through, stoked almost solely by the government and certain newspapers.  They have provided absolutely no evidence whatsoever for any of their claims, most specifically that images of child abuse are proliferating, or that normal "online pornography is corroding childhood".  That they haven't is nonetheless irrelevant; without parliament so much as being involved, from the end of the year the big four ISPs, having been pressured into doing so, will block the majority of pornographic sites by default.  These default filters will almost certainly wrongly block plenty of material that is not pornographic (as this blog was by some mobile internet providers), but who cares when it's all about protecting children?  It's surely a small price to pay for something approaching peace of mind.

Here's how the campaign by the likes of Claire Perry and the Daily Mail has worked.  Having failed to build momentum behind their demands despite the Bailey review into the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood, they struck upon conflating child pornography (as we're not allowed to call it, as apparently simply describing it as such is to somehow legitimise it) with legal pornography.  Helped along by the Tia Sharp and April Jones cases, the haranguing of ISPs and search engines for not blocking child porn (despite the fact there is relatively little they can do when they're not the ones hosting it) morphed into haranguing them for allowing a so-called free for all.  Responsibility it seems is not with the parents or adults to ensure that their children can't access material not suitable for them, it begins instead with the ISP.  As I've pointed out before, for a supposedly conservative government to be passing the buck from those truly responsible to those who provide a service to adults, considering they're the ones paying the bill, is quite a break with their usual thinking.

David Cameron's speech today was an absolute classic of the meaning the opposite of what was said genre.  He starts off by saying how difficult it is for politicians to talk about the subject, and it is indeed difficult for them to talk about when parliament has gone into recess for the summer and they don't seem to have been offered the chance to discuss it anyway.  He relates that he doesn't want to "moralise and scare-monger", the paragraph after he's stated without qualification that "online pornography is corroding childhood" and how the internet is impacting on the "innocence of children".  He says that the issues of images of child abuse and underage access to porn are "very distinct and different" challenges, but that they have something in common.  Namely, that it's been decided it's good politics to conflate the two as it reduces opposition.  After all, everyone hates nonces, don't they?

It quickly becomes clear just why the ISPs and search engines have become so agitated at what they see as the ignorance displayed by politicians.  Cameron in his section on illegal images talks as though the way in which search engines work is manual, rather than automatic and constant, saying the comparison with the Post Office isn't accurate as the likes of Google facilitate access to the illegal material knowingly.  This is nonsense.  It also doesn't seem to matter that as we've discussed, it's exceptionally difficult to find such material by accident, or indeed, even deliberately through search engines, what matters is that something is being seen to be done.  What's more, the internet giants should be putting their top people on solving this very problem that doesn't exist, to stop images and videos being posted in the first place!

Finally, and to really make clear how serious everyone is, there are some searches that are so "abhorrent and where there can be no doubt whatsoever about the sick and malevolent intent" that no results should be returned at all.  You know, like how in China on a firewalled connection if you search for "Tiananmen Square" you'll get plenty of information on the square itself but be hard pressed to find any on the massacre.  Not even during New Labour's hyper authoritarian period did they suggest censoring the internet lest anyone commit a truly "sick and malevolent" thought crime and expect to get something back if they did.  The message seems to be that the person committing the offence should be glad that GCHQ don't immediately send the police round.

When it comes to the "default on" blocking on new connections, the mindset behind it is equally transparent. Claire Perry addresses legal pornography in the same way as campaigners against drugs have in the past described cannabis as being a "gateway" to the harder stuff, saying she believes the killers of April Jones and Tia Sharp "had stumbled upon" illegal images having first browsed perfectly legal material.  This rather ignores the fact that neither Mark Bridger or Stuart Hazell were young men, still uncertain of their sexuality.  By that point, you are either sexually attracted to some children, or you aren't.  This isn't to say someone can't develop a fascination with one particular child, as Stuart Hazell may have done with Tia, and then attempt to persuade themselves that the feelings they're having are perfectly normal through accessing images of abuse, but it's relatively rare.  That both Bridger and Hazell, as adults, would have been able to turn a "default on" filter off also doesn't seem to make her think twice about her argument.

Which pretty much sums it all up.  If Perry and friends really want to protect children, then the emphasis on filters over everything else spectacularly misses the point.  Cameron mentions education in his speech, but only as an effective afterword.  No filter can block everything; sure, it'll almost certainly take out the porn equivalents of YouTube, but it won't prevent access to the few remaining public torrent sites and their XXX sections, the uploaded.net's where everything under the sun is hosted including porn, or indeed the numerous porn blogs on Tumblr.  Proxy servers are incredibly easy to use, and the kid that does have access is soon going to be helping out their friends who've found themselves blocked.  What it will do is treat adults as children, as they so often have been in the past for the supposed good of the latter.  Those who hate porn and don't want to engage with how it's become part of modern culture, for both good and bad, love the idea of those wanting to access it having to embarrass themselves by ringing up their ISP, as will happen, knowing many won't. As for the others who just don't want to talk about desire and turn-ons as it's icky and difficult, well, this helps them as well.  Acceptable porn, such as Fifty Shades, will still be available to all and sundry; that other stuff, the disreputable, industrialised output that could be improved if only we felt able to properly address it, will remain the standard behind the "default on", helping precisely no one.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

7/22/2013 04:54:00 pm | |

Tuesday, June 18, 2013 

Ignorance, immaturity and idiocy: all part of the debate on the internet and porn.

I'm struggling to think of a recent issue so appallingly approached and debated as the recent blow up over the availability of pornography on the internet has been.  The only really comparable issue that comes to mind was the short lived moral panic over "meow meow", or Mephedrone, where the Sun was in the vanguard, claiming at one point that teachers would have to give the drug back to any students it was confiscated from as it wasn't illegal.  Interestingly, the "legal high" market continues to grow, leaving even more questions for potential users over safety, yet the tabloids seem to have decided the story's done.

Even that outbreak of silliness can't compete though with the idiocy that's descended thanks to the collision of technology and naked human flesh.  While the lead has been taken by the Daily Mail, the Sun having always had a problem commenting on porn thanks to its continuing attachment to publishing a topless woman on its third page almost every day, we've also had stunningly stupid interventions from the former broadsheets.  The Graun comprehensively cocked up by publishing an editorial which seemed to call for the banning of all porn, later corrected to "just" violent porn, while the Sunday Times has been caught out using some exceptionally dodgy statistics to claim we're living in "generation porn", using an image of a topless woman to illustrate its point, natch.

Obviously, there are two separate issues at the heart of the sound and fury which require entirely different responses, although the conflation of the two hasn't helped matters.  First is that any action which makes images of child abuse more difficult to find on the net is a good thing.  We don't know how Stuart Hazell or Mark Bridger got hold of the images they viewed before they went on to kill Tia Sharp and April Jones respectively, or just how much of an influence they had on their crimes, but it can't be denied they played some role. What doesn't help is the scaremongering and apparent lack of knowledge displayed by those pushing at an open door. One Daily Mail headline gave the impression that Google was the internet, and so could deal with child porn at a stroke if it wished, while it also claimed 1.5 million people had "stumbled" on such images. To top all that, it enlisted Amanda Platell to try and find some illegal material, only for the queen of the Glendas to claim a  scene from 2001 featuring a then 19-year-old was proof of the easy availability of filmed child abuse.

The reality is that unless you actively seek it out, it is exceptionally rare to encounter images or video of child abuse by chance. In 15 years or so of using the internet, and having spent a significant period of that time not always on the most salubrious of sites, only twice have I come across images that almost certainly were of abuse. The first was many years ago when exploring a back door posted on a forum into one of the early sites that offered space to host images. By refreshing a specific link, a new image was randomly fetched from seemingly all those that had been uploaded, and one, and just one from the dozens or more looked to be of abuse. The second, far more prosaically, was when I happened to be browsing /b/ on 4chan at the time as someone decided to flood it with images of children, something it's long been notorious for.

The worry is not just journalists that don't know what they're writing about, but politicians also being ignorant of how things work.  When Maria Miller talks of preventing images from even becoming available in the first place, it's difficult not to sigh.  This lack of knowledge does indeed seem to have irked ISPs, with one source complaining to the Graun about today's meeting with the government that "generally speaking the politicians there fundamentally (or wilfully) misunderstand the technical and legal aspects to the subject".  When increasingly those who are doing something dodgy move towards the so-called "darknet", or use TOR to access the deep web, there's relatively little that the ISPs themselves can do.  Giving the Internet Watch Foundation more funding to actively seek out illegal material might help, but considering in the past they've made some extraordinarily stupid decisions about what to block, handing an unaccountable organisation even more leeway isn't necessarily a unmitigated good thing.

When it comes to the easy online availability of perfectly legal pornography, it continues to amaze me how a Conservative government that preaches personal responsibility in every other area seems to think in this instance it's not the duty of parents to ensure they have measures in place to stop their children from viewing it.  There really ought to be no excuse for not doing so; the generation having children now (which, rather scarily, is my own) were brought up with computers and so can't claim to be completely illiterate.  It certainly is true that it's difficult to block access to every video sharing site, and it's all but impossible to stop children from sending each other videos they've acquired from somewhere over their phones, but if they've reached the age at which they're doing that then they're old enough to be sat down and talked with about what it is they've watched.  Yes, there needs to be a change in sex education so that pornography is discussed and addressed, but it's also down to parents to explain that porn is fantasy and has very little connection with real life.  For the vast majority, porn is not going to damage them, or make them lose their innocence.  If anything, parents tend to be shocked by how much their offspring already know by the time they get round to it.

This isn't to regard porn as a whole as being harmless, although I'd say most of it is and its spread may even have had some positive effects, but it's ridiculous to regard it as being a unique danger to children and their development.  I watch porn even though there's many things about much of it that I loathe, whether it be the despicable misogyny that disfigures the "reality" genre that now dominates, or the way that so much of it follows the same tired format of suck, fuck, "facial", the latter which is troubling in itself.  The only way we can deal with its increasing influence is to discuss it maturely: if we don't, then those who've grown up with it accessible at the click of a mouse will.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

6/18/2013 11:37:00 pm | |

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 

We need to talk about porn.

This government, by its own admission, has a problem with women. Despite being able to keep the majority of this country's men convinced that a policy of economic suicide is a fantastic idea, the women for some reason don't appear to be taking to the plan of retreating to the bunker and hoping desperately that something will turn up, probably because they're the ones losing their jobs while the retirement age is being pushed up. Austerity, inflation busting fuel bills and the prospect of working even longer for those lucky enough to still be in employment are the bleedingly obvious reasons for why support for the coalition has been slipping.

What then do the geniuses in Number 10 suggest to arrest this alarming fall in contentment? As the coalition refuses to go beyond Plan A+ on the economy, the obvious answer is to simply make a number of gestures: no one besides the incredibly easily outraged cared that David Cameron had been slightly rude to Angela Eagle and Nadine Dorries in the Commons, at least amongst those that even noticed, but nonetheless shiny head came out and apologised. Next came some slight changes to child care, which are still a couple of years away and where it's not clear where the money's coming from. Now we have the similarly slight implementation of some of the proposals made by the blessed Reg Bailey, chief executive of the Mothers' Union, in his report on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood.

If you've spotted a theme here, it might be that even though it's women the government is attempting to get back on side (itself potentially patronising), it doesn't appear as though the boys in charge could find a single one to either consult or advise them on what might just do the trick. Instead it seems as though they've just guessed, and flailed around looking for policies and legislation they'd either delayed or cast aside that at least gives the impression of doing something. Hence the latest wheeze, the adoption of an opt-in system where those who take out new contracts with any of the four big internet service providers will have to make clear that they want full access to "adult" content. Otherwise, much of the web will be off limits, behind a firewall designed to protect children from seeing explicit material.

In this the government has picked up at least one curious ally. The Guardian, the same organisation which last year brought us the Wikileaks files, deciding quite rightly that publishing American cables on Iraq, Afghanistan and general diplomacy online was in the public interest, has decided that's quite enough internet freedom as far as they're concerned. "The internet's many benefits were never intended to include the bombarding of people's homes and children by pornography", it intones. Indeed, David Cameron's modest proposal simply doesn't go far enough, especially as "the destructive effects of pornography on relationships and values, harming not just children but also adults, far exceed any liberating effect which some claim to discern".

Putting aside the fact that almost as soon as dial-up bulletin boards came into being they were used by the teenagers of their era to swap unbelievably low quality semi-pornographic images, and how you could make an arguable case that without the easy access to porn that came with it the growth of the internet may not have been as exponential as it was in the 90s, it's incredibly dubious that the overall effects are as destructive as has been claimed. As we still have an understandable if debilitating aversion to openly discussing the use of pornography, pretty much all we're left with is the two opposing sides in the debate making equally unconvincing arguments. Whether it's the "feminist" porn director Anna Arrowsmith declaring that porn is unequivocally good, or Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle du Jour, saying much the same, or the Graun's surprisingly unenlightened view, no one seems prepared to delve into the middle and do research into whether the porn free for all is having an adverse effect, either on children or adults.

For there's very little even anecdotal evidence to suggest that it's as a result of this new supposed hardcore culture that other aspects of life have becoming increasingly sexualised. It has to be remembered that hardcore wasn't legalised in this country until 2000, when internet video sharing was still in its relative infancy. Rather, the pushing of sex has come overwhelmingly from the tabloid media and its hangers-on, the very same organisations which are now so vociferous in calling for the protection of children. It takes a lot of chutzpah to complain about Rihanna and friends when tits are on every other page of certain papers, and when they follow the every movement of such upstanding role models as Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Katie Price, all of whom have featured in their own homemade escapades.

This isn't to suggest that the internet and the cornucopia of perversions available at the click of a mouse isn't potentially problematic: while "rough" material has been around since the very beginning, there's little doubt that American produced "gonzo" porn (and it is overwhelmingly American made porn which is the most widely distributed on the internet, even if European porn is equally guilty and may well have even started the trend) has had an effect on the genre as a whole. Where once it was rare for a film to feature anal sex, it's now probably rarer for a full-length movie to not have at least one or even two scenes containing it. Likewise, the "facial" has now become so ubiquitous that it's difficult not to look for a deeper reasoning behind why almost every scene must end with the man ejaculating onto his co-star's face. Is it all about male power, and more to the point, is it having an effect on the impressionable? There's little doubt that at the very least this, along with the grooming issues which have also been picked up upon, is having an impact on the young and their expectations of sex, something which desperately needs to be properly quantified.

None of this however justifies a blanket prohibition on internet porn at the source unless you "opt-in". Not only is it doomed to failure when the technology moves faster than that which aims to block it, as such filtering will not block the sites where copyrighted material is freely exchanged, such as Rapidshare, with individuals now using social networking sites to swap links, it also makes a mockery of this government's responsibility agenda. The parents are the ones who should decide what their children can and cannot see, with filtering software being so easily available and installable; the government should not be intervening and making that decision for them, let alone in effect decreeing that adults are to be treated like children unless they expressly ask not to be. We already have the Internet Watch Foundation, which along with its praiseworthy work of filtering child pornography also blocks material which is "criminally obscene" and "incites racial hatred". Giving ISPs the power to block effectively whatever they feel like with government approval almost invites censorship.

Equally, blocking porn, even if popular with women, is hardly going to win back their support. 79% of women might want an opt-in system (PDF), but 53% thought it would be easy to get round, as it would be. The last government was authoritarian but ineffective; this one seems determined to carry on repeating the error.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

10/12/2011 11:33:00 pm | |

Monday, June 06, 2011 

Everyone else's problem.

If you thought New Labour were bad when it came to the seemingly endless policy reviews they ordered, many of them helmed by people of the moment, almost all briefly made famous by lifestyle television programmes, then the coalition has gone one better. Previous reviews on the state of childhood by Dr Tanya Byron and Dr Linda Papadopoulos have now given way to the Big One. For such an important and definitive report on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood, a truly big beast was sought. As none could be found, Sarah Teather chose Reg Bailey, head of the Mothers' Union charity instead.

Yes, if you too are scratching your head at the apparent cognitive dissonance involved in a man being the chief executive of a charity calling itself Mothers' Union, then much soon becomes clear. For Mothers' Union is nothing if not forthcoming in its actual aims, as made clear on their website:

In 81 countries, our members share one heartfelt vision - to bring about a world where God's love is shown through loving, respectful and flourishing relationships. This is not a vague hope, but a goal we actively pursue through prayer, programmes, policy work and community relationships. By supporting marriage and family life, especially through times of adversity, we tackle the most urgent needs challenging relationships and communities.

Yes, they're a Christian charity. For those who think that perhaps God has very little to do with either loving relationships or indeed, childhood sexualisation, all such complaints should be taken up with Teather and friends, although one suspects that this might be a case where Iain Duncan Smith had some influence.

Bailey at least admits that he has no special qualifications for helming such a review, other than being a parent and grandparent himself, as well as the head of a charity (he notably doesn't state its religious ethos, and the word Christian doesn't appear once in the entire document) that supports families in 83 countries. In fairness to Bailey, his introduction to the review (PDF) which follows covers its bases well: he has harsh words for the "prurient approach that has sometimes characterised the wide media coverage of these issues" and he more than once emphasises the fundamental responsibility of parents themselves to control the environment in which their children grow up in. This is a review ordered by a Conservative-dominated government, after all.

The problem that the review barely touches, if puts its finger on at all, is that for all the calls that have been made for children to be children, adults need to try to come to terms with how they project their own worries about the world they're living in onto their offspring. The report informs us that 9 out of 10 parents surveyed agreed that children were under pressure to grow up too quickly, yet it doesn't seem that the finding prompted the researchers to do the obvious thing and ask children themselves whether they felt they were under pressure to do so. The answer might well have been illuminating. For while adults fret, mainly due to how quite a considerable number yearn after their own carefree years as a child, and wish they could return to it, children on the other hand either don't think in such terms, or instead wish that they were older and so have more freedoms. I cannot at any point during my childhood recall feeling that I was not being allowed to act my age, at least within reason, or that outside influences or pressures were bearing down on me; it's only now that I look back and contemplate how quickly time passes that I regret not making more of it while I had it. I suspect this is the emotion that especially drives parents, who after all are in effect seeing little facsimilies of themselves growing up before their very eyes, into wanting them to remain in that state for as long as is possible.

As the report then can't put it as brutally as advising parents to try as hard as they can not to fuck up their children with their own neuroses in the finest Philip Larkin fashion, while still advocating proper boundaries and limits on material from whatever sources they consume, it instead either beats around the bush or puts the onus on the retailers, broadcasters and media. To be sure, they have more than their fair share of responsibility, and it is difficult to argue with the conclusion that we are living in "an increasingly sexual and sexualised culture", yet it's hardly the case that there isn't any getting away from it. Rather than it being the children pressurising the adults into giving them what they want, it seems more to be about adults demanding things that either already exist or which they can't seemingly be bothered to put in place themselves. Take the very opening of the report, where Bailey sets out the "simple" views of a child:

“I don’t know why grown-ups find it so difficult, it’s really very simple. There should be another button on the remote control like the red button so that if you see something that isn’t right on television then you can press it to tell them you don’t like it. And if more than a thousand people press it then the programme is automatically cut off”.

So said the enthusiastic 10-year-old at a research presentation from a group of children to the Review team. “It’s really very simple.”

It is indeed very simple, or at least it seems so to this simpleton. There doesn't need to be an additional button which takes the equivalent role of Caesar at the Coliseum, you already have either the "off" button or the change the channel button, neither of which it seems see much usage. Television executives, believe it or not, make decisions based on the ratings the programmes they commissioned receive. If you don't like what you're watching, switch it off or turn it over.

This it seems is simply no longer good enough. Instead, and mainly prompted by the X Factor final where two of the least sexy performances in living memory took place in front of millions, images which the Daily Mail made its hypocritical best out of, broadcasters must "involve parents on an ongoing basis in testing the standards by which family viewing on television is assessed", as if they weren't already enough compliance procedures in place. It's still difficult to understand why there was such synthetic outrage generated by the X Factor final, especially when old Top of the Pops routines by the likes of Pans People and friends could be almost as risqué nearly 40 years ago, but then all broadcasters had to face was Mary Whitehouse and her clique. Now we have Mumsnet, which doesn't just want to interfere with factual and entertainment programming, it also wants to decide what is and isn't permissible in a soap opera, for goodness sake.

Other recommendations just seem to be the kind of gestures which these reports have long settled for making in lieu of, in this case, doing something far more counter-productive and potentially inhibiting on adults making a free choice. Hence "modesty boards" are recommended for lads' mags in newsagents, which have been in freefall circulation wise for some time, despite the effect they may still have on teenage girls' perception of what boys expect, while the proposed introduction of age ratings for music videos seems to miss the point entirely. They can conceivably be too explicit for younger children, yet the older teens will have long since moved on from their wares. Bailey recommends that the "internet industry must act decisively to develop and introduce effective parental controls", but there's only so much that NetNanny type software can block; most kids will exchange material now over social-networking sites. Parental monitoring is always going to remain key, and putting the onus on others will continue to be a cop-out.

The contradictions then are manifold. Nine out of ten parents worry about children growing up too fast when asked, yet they don't really think about it, or consider concerns about sexualisation and commercialisation too much when they aren't confronted with it, as it should be. Bailey wonders why "so many parents seem to lack confidence in their ability to help their children navigate this commercial and sexualised world", but why should he be so surprised by that when not a single one of the recommendations he makes urges parents to take action themselves? Instead of empowering them to take control or even to help them overcome what are certainly in some cases irrational fears, it remains everyone else's problem.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

6/06/2011 11:11:00 pm | |

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Last posts

Archives

Email me
Syndicate this site (XML)
Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates