honestlyreal

I read this curious article this morning.

It’s got a strong whiff of “being seen to do something”, while shying away from some of the more serious realities.

I am not an expert on this topic, but neither am I that coy about it.

So here are a few comments that might be informative, as none of the principal players involved seem that keen on actually getting to grips with the reality of the subject matter.

Back in the 1970s, when many of our policymakers and politicians were growing up, porn was generally found in skips and hedgerows. Ripped-up, soggy copies of Playboy and Penthouse formed our mental models of the genre. The women (there were no men) were beautiful, semi-naked, and generally decorous. There was stuff about fast cars. There were made-up letters about unlikely liaisons on aeroplanes.

{Health warning for the sensitive: if you don’t want to read some frank words about what things are really like, don’t continue. Perhaps try and get some people to vote for you to make laws and stuff instead. Get some misinformed articles published in the mainstream press. Pretend you have no idea about any of this, and hum la-la-la when anyone raises the subject. That sort of thing.}

The more gynaecological poses were the province of darker stuff, imported from Scandinavia or Holland and sold in plastic bags in dark little shops in city back streets.

But we didn’t like to admit we knew phrases like “Color Climax” so we stuck with the safer, top-shelf, tee-hee-hee Playboy as our model. (I actually saw a tweet yesterday where the word “penthouse” in an unrelated context was used as a cue for a joke about smut. It’s become part of our vocabulary).

So roll forwards to 2011 and we’re having a bit of a fret about this thing called online porn, and how it might be corrupting the young and how it might be dealt with.

And the example that’s being dragged out from the (unavailable) Ofcom report is playboy.tv.

PLAYBOY TV?

So that’s what we’ve got to watch out for? Have you looked at it? Look at it. It’s pretty harmless. Almost slightly silly.

Online, it’s much like the magazine, glossy, playing out fantasies of gorgeous hostesses, fast-car lifestyles, Malibu and other such bollocks. Lots of splashing around in bikinis, but not as far as I could see, a hint of a vulva in front of the paywall. Soft porn. For anything else, you need to pay. I didn’t. And why would I?

Because the world of the shiny member sites (sorry) and their sort-of-soft-and-not-that-corrupting-really “pornography” isn’t the world of online porn.

Google the word “porn”. Seriously. Be brave. Your mum won’t find out. I promise. (Unless you use her computer. In which case, don’t.) You won’t see playboy.tv, or anything like it, on the first few pages of results. I got bored scrolling through the screens and didn’t find it.

You will find YouPorn, PornHub, RedTube and numerous clones. All free to view, no registration required, all hardcore, and with content of quite mixed provenance.

Some of it looks like straight lifting of content from other sites–I’m generalising here, and not referring specifically to the sites named above–and not alleging any criminality (so please don’t sue my ass).

Some appears to be user-generated content, submitted by “amateurs” with a bottle of lube, a webcam, a glazed expression and a cheap rug.

And the rest is the last screech of the old blue movie industry, giving away its back catalogue in a desperate attempt to drive a bit of traffic to its members’ site, where it hopes to lure a tiny percentage of truly stupid visitors into signing up to a never-ending subscription, using all the tricks in the book.

Fancy regulating that sort of environment? Interchangeable, come-and-go (or indeed go-and-come) sites, all peddling identical material? Asking them politely if they’ll implement a PIN number coding system on their front doors? Good luck with that.

These sites, generically, are known as tubes. Want to find something particularly “specialist”? Google your desired search term along with the word “tubes”. You’ll find it. Remember Rule 34 of the Internet.

The Internet is full of free, unrestricted, unregulatable hardcore porn. There. I’ve let the cat out of the bag. And told you how to find it. And playboy.tv has nothing to do with it. Who knew?

So the interesting story then becomes: why not be more honest about this in articles like that Guardian piece? Why pretend that targetting (or trying to target) a few well-known names will reshape society into a better place?

Is it because we can’t break our habit of associating the word Playboy with porn? Can we not move on from what we found on the school gym roof in 1981?

Have we just got such a taboo about the subject that anyone with any standing who writes with any kind of informed knowledge about the subject risks a chorus of “nyah nyah nyah and how would you know, eh, eh?” that will effectively tarnish their public profile for ever. (Deep breath in seeing how this blog post goes down then…)

Is it because we’re trying to hide these terrible truths from susceptible young people who might otherwise never think of putting the word “porn” into Google?

Or is it because we’re trying to look like we’re doing something, rather than actually doing something? And going after well-known names is the most acceptable and easiest way to do that?

And when we can’t really control how they behave, or close them down (which we can’t, as they’re most likely not within our jurisdiction) then it’s just that bit easier to start the push for stronger filters of sites which aren’t approved by our establishment, and finally bring this bloody Internet thing under some control. Because we’ve shown we tried all the other approaches, first, haven’t we?

I genuinely don’t know. But I’m a bit tired of a pretence that the world is one way, when very many people know it isn’t but can’t easily speak about it.

This is going to be a long old social and political battle; keep your eyes open for the next skirmish. It’s going to get very interesting.

Grant Shapps had just finished talking at the Big Society launch when an earnest chap rushed up to him. Mr Shapps had been lyrical on the subject of the role that mobile technologies could play in citizen engagement and empowerment. “You can use FixMyStreet on the iPhone”, he proclaimed (carefully keeping his non-iPhone below the radar).

The Earnest Young Man was forthright: “you can’t talk about mobile phones as solutions so easily”, he said. “You know they’re looked upon by many as a symbol of luxurious indulgence, don’t you?” And we know who he was talking about. Newspaper columnists who still remember when a three grand briefcase phone was the ultimate status marker. When making calls in public, or in your car, was as good as admitting you bathed in champagne every night.

If you have a mobile, you can’t be poor. (Or you’ve stolen it.) Simple as that. It’s a sign of privilege and wealth. GIVE mobiles to the excluded to help them access services and stabilise their lives? GIVE? We might as well reupholster their sofas, hand out free cigarettes and scratch cards and install cold beer fridges as they fritter away their day watching TV… Never heard such rubbish. (Though we’ll still pack our pages full of adverts for ringtone downloads and so on. Just in case. Y’know.)

And it occurred to me that there may be shadows of this hanging over the: “Internet – human right, essential or luxury?” debate.

<parody>

If you insist on living up a fell, you can’t expect me to run a slip-road of the M6 to your front door. You get a rough track instead, buy a Landrover, and put up with it. Enjoy the views, and button it. You made your choice, and you’ll pay for your Landrover, not me. (I made my choice, choosing an over-priced four-bedroom house in Highgate, a substance abuse problem, and a miserable job on a national newspaper.) [update: <---this is still parody voice, not Paul confession, m'kay? I've never worked on a national newspaper.]

And if we’re going to put some of the essential public services online (as it seems we might have to) we can make your version a digital equivalent of the rough track too. Won’t look so nice, but it’ll work. The basic exchange of information required to submit a form can be done over a telephone line. We were all doing it on our modems ten years ago, weren’t we? You don’t need those big graphics and PDFs. Indeed, weren’t all you long-haired hackers telling us all along that the PDF lay on the road to perdition?

So, stuff your fibre-to-the-cowshed chatter. Learn to love your thin copper wire. Proper bandwidth is absolutely a luxury – to be enjoyed by the young, urban and wealthy (preferably all three at the same time).

Because you’re not fooling me. What you’re really after is porn and games. Hard to get a dodgy DVD up your mountain, so of course you want it all piped in. Who wouldn’t? And games! You’ll be on World of Warcraft until the cows come home, literally. Why should the rest of the country subsidise your filthy habits and patch up your solitary existence?

</parody>

Far-fetched? Perhaps. I stress this is a perspective which has been exaggerated for effect. But I wonder if – as with mobile phones – there’s a certain, influential generation that see the technology as being more than just a technology. And instead, a marker for a whole way of life they just haven’t accepted yet.