The Poison Pill of Un-Reality Part V

For thirty years I served her Majesty at home and abroad without acknowledgment or reward. 

Then  I publish a pornographic book, and at once earn £10,000 and fame. I begin at last to 

understand the public  and what it wants. - Sir Richard Burton

I've met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence, just like me. And, without 

exception,every one of them was deeply involved in pornography. - Ted Bundy

Pornography, literally charges the blood. It is a bio-chemical “opiate”. After all, these are the chemicals that flow through our bodies that create liaisons, affairs, unions and marriages. The latter rituals are naturally very often doomed to failure precisely because of this false chemical romance. Frequent exposure for the child  may cause an emotional de-sensitization both in terms of sexual desire i.e. a greater threshold of stimulation is required and thus the seeking out of such material of a harder or more extreme quality and secondly the atrophying of more finer qualities of emotional communication.  More and more stimulation can lead to addiction whether child or adult. The former however, is more vulnerable to the power of such images due to the level of emotional immaturity and hormonal influences.

Children will mimic and experiment with what they see at an early age and though this is certainly a natural stage in child development that is often colloquially labelled “doctors and nurses” the easy availability of sex and violence together on T.V. as “jolting” images disconnected from context appear to have its effects on the psyche of the child. We are seeing patterns of cases reflecting the premature absorption of programming that “forces” children to partially act out certain scenarios for sexual experimentation that will be way beyond the emotional maturity needed for such adult explorations. In many cases progressive and habitual exposure to pornography has played a key role in influencing this experimentation. 1 Though it may not be a primary factor in every case, both in minor offences and criminal felonies, pornography is invariably present as an indirect or direct influence, particularly with rapists and child molesters. 2

In Britain, the official porn capital of Europe and with a £31.1 billion slice of the $57.0 billion global market, 3 pornography is becoming so acceptable that teenage girls are beginning to see it as a valid career choice. In “porn-speak” this acceptability starts from “glamour” as it is now named and it is this glamour industry ideal that is attractive to over 63 percent of 1,000 girls questioned in a British survey while 25 percent preferred the idea of lap dancing. 4 The mobile phone has also been taken over by instant messaging porn. Now you can get aroused during a coffee break or in rush-hour traffic.

Even back in 1999, Internet tracking company Forrester Research, estimated that $1bn of the $7.8bn spent online last year went on pornography. Private Media Group, On Command Corp. and Metro Global Media and Vivid Entertainment are just some of the porn corporations listed on NASDAQ. Wall Street knows that selling sex is immensely profitable which is why AT&T, MCI, Time-Warner, Comcast, Echo Star Communications, GM’s DirecTV, Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton, Radisson, VISA, MasterCard and American Express, as a brief sample, are all involved in receiving enormous revenues from the porn industry. They are understandably coy about revealing this side of their financial interests. The first cable company to offer hard-core adult movies to subscribers was Adelphia Communications Corp. who had also donated large sums of money to some of the most right wing members of Congress.  5

Some of the hotel chains such as Marriott and Hilton earn about $190 million per year from in-room pay-per-view porn videos  6   while AT&T and MCI WorldCom are leading the 1-900 phone-sex market, generating almost $1 billion per year. 7 While Adult toys chain Castle Superstores Corp operates outlets in 11 Wal-Mart stores in the Mid West of the US, Europe too is getting in on the act upholding a financial tradition that supports exploitation including pornography. In the late nineties German bank Commerzbank acted as financial advisor for Beate Uhse, a German sex merchandise firm that floated on the Neuer Market. It was not the first flotation to tempt the family bank. In fact, it has taken part in many of Europe’s biggest porn-related, corporate deals. 8   Nothing like hypocrisy and double standards to fulfil their market-led responsibilities.

Although there is still resistance from Wall Street to the full embrace of porn, it will arrive. Profits always win out, especially when the possibilities of marketed sex is shaping the quality and direction of technology.

Due to the accessibility of internet porn there is undoubtedly a rise in children and teenagers becoming addicted to images which distort not only their sexuality from developing healthily but further increases the view that women are objectified. Sex and love are terminally confused in the world of the adult, let alone the emerging adolescent. In one researcher’s words, boys are: “consuming porn literally every day since they were 14. Our sexual cues and desires are learnt during adolescence, and . . . these young men were regularly viewing bestiality and group sex”. 9   Many researchers agree that the average age of exposure to pornography begins at around eleven years old, though 90 percent of children are exposed to some form of pornography from the ages of eight - sixteen, often while doing their homework.

Assuming we are even online at all, how familiar are we with what is out there on the wonderful world of the internet? Carry out a search using the keyword “porn” and you will find over 130 million hits alone with well over 260 million pornography related internet pages. 10

Some of the easily accessible websites include links to a variety of other sites which include hardcore porn categories which make up by far, the biggest market. This may be categorized variously as “interracial sex” “S&M” “Fetish” “Anal” “Hairy” “Rape”  “Rough Sex” “MLF” “Mature” “Transsexual” “Fetish” “Bi” “Lesbian” “Gay” “Bestiality”  “Amateur” “Teen,” “Black,” “Latino,” “Blonde” etc. in an almost endless stream of categories to cater for soft porn to extreme deviancy.

All the above categories have sub-titles with endless networked sites that create revenue from DVD sales, sex toys and one off monthly, quarterly and yearly subscriptions. Although some sites have an adult password age verification warnings, the former can easily be obtained, while the latter is ignored by any hormonally compromised school boy. All or most of these websites will include free samples of movies and clips of both soft and hard core sex acts from playboy models to Japanese-schoolgirl-sado-masochistic bondage; foot-loving fetish to farm-yard animal exploits. All is accessible on your friendly family search engine if parental controls are not observed even then these controls are hardly any match for the cyber-savvy teen.

Do-it-yourself-porn is also online with a vengeance. Webcams are hosted by either company backed porn starlets or individual “amateur teens” branching out into their own blog with “pay-to-view” live-cam experiences. We can be sure that the internet is providing an expansion of both the amateur and professional porn entrepreneurialism. The internet is merely reflecting the next phase of “market need” that is appearing within the living rooms of our “American beauty” suburbia. 11

Digital videos and the do-it-yourself amateur porn business are booming with “self help” books teaching you “how to get rich quick.” A cursory peruse around internet book stores and titles such as Adult Website Money: How to Build, Start, and Market an Adult Website Business for Little to No Cost in 30 Days! Or, How To Use Your Computer Internet Skills To Get a Date or Have Sex with a Video Porn Star, Stripper, Escort or Model. Then there is the feverish title of Adult Video Business: How You Can Find Attractive Women to Star in Your Own Adult Films, Make Money, and Quit Work in 7 Weeks. They are beginning to appear more frequently each year. 

As the author of one popular paperback claims: “She lives happily on the beach in Malibu with her Jack Russell terrier, Arpy.” 12  With such a glowing endorsement of well-adjusted porn stars with their contented pooches it seems there is no need to worry - the porn business is comfortably settling itself into the mainstream.

That being the case, one piece of research urges caution over what they consider to be a “porn myth” as regards online saturation of pornography websites. In a study conducted by Dr. Steve Lawrence and Dr. C. Lee Giles for the NEC Research Institute they found that only 1.5 percent of Web sites contain pornographic content. This is more understandable when “the Web contains about 800 million pages encompassing about 15 terabytes of data and about 180 million images.” And further: ‘The sex sites were much less than you would have thought,’ Lawrence said.” Their findings also confirm that it is not so much pornography that has taken over the web but corporations and their commercial websites that make up 83 percent of internet with only 6 percent containing scientific or educational content. 13

Nevertheless, there is much more the search engines cannot access or index which logically amounts to millions of sites. Yet half of the porn sites (though not the most popular with US surfers) are hosted outside the US, so American-based legislation will continue to be ignored. This is both good in terms of censorship and bad in terms of those underage. Possibilities for blocking are available, assuming that parents are sufficiently able to monitor their offspring, which is unlikely.

Whether there are only 10 million, 20 million or 260 million, if a child punches into a search engine an overtly sexual term – which they will - it does not matter the precise number if websites that will instantly appear offering hardcore images to view. The pages are there. And pornography of even 15 years ago has transformed into the cyber porn of the 21st century which bares no resemblance at all to its former top shelf days (though magazines are still doing a roaring trade). Playboy and Penthouse are like the soft whispers of a tabloid angel compared to the material any school boy or girl can access.

Notes

1  ‘Hamilton School Children Imitating TV and Internet Porn in Sexual "Experiments"’ April 5, 2004 LifeSiteNews.com
2  W. L. Marshall, ‘The Use of Sexually Explicit Stimuli by Rapists, Child Molesters, and Nonoffenders,’ The Journal of Sex Research 25, no.2 (May 1988): 267-88. This study reported that 53 percent of child molesters deliberately used the stimuli of pornography as they prepared to offend.
3  N2h2.com survey from www.securecomputing.com
4  ‘Mummy, I want to be a porn star’ by Kira Cochrane, The Sunday Times September 18, 2005
5  The Republicans in Congress appear to have a covert tradition of paedophilia and sexual deviancy so this hypocrisy is hardly a revelation. (See also Chapter XVI).
6  ‘Wall Street Meets Pornography’ by Timothy Egan, New York Times, October 23, 2000.
7  Ibid
8  ‘Selling sex: A Beate Uhse store’ by Edward Helmore, The Observer,  September 12, 1999.

9 Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families by Pamela Paul. p.58.
10  N2h2.com survey from securecomputing.com (data from 2003).
11 ‘Officers discover sex-slave cult’ BBC News, 19 May 2006 “Durham Police discovered the bizarre sect after raiding a home in the area, after receiving complaints that a woman was being held against her will. But a spokesman said the Canadian was a willing participant and the other people involved were consenting adults. The group, called Kaotians, follow the Chronicles of Gor novels which depict a society where women are dominated. The 29-year-old woman is said to have voluntarily attended the sect after finding out about it over the internet.”
12  1-2-3 Be a Porn Star! A Step-By-Step Guide to the Adult Sex Industry by Ana Lori

13  ‘Why is the Web like an iceberg?’ By Joel Deane, ZDNet News, July 6, 1999.