Porn on Demand - Internet makes it easy to view pornography without shame - Brief Article

National Review, May 31, 1999 by Rob Long

The rise of shame-free smut.

When Bob Crane, the star of TV's Hogan's Heroes, was found murdered in an Arizona motel in the late 1970s, among his personal effects were several hundred pounds of video equipment. Crane had state-of-the-art stuff for the time: a huge video camera, a heavy playback tape machine (roughly the size of four microwave ovens stacked together), and enough lights to form a small production company.

Crane was a porn freak. And back then, being a porn freak wasn't for the casual hobbyist. The airline overweight-luggage charges alone were suitable barriers to entry, and the enormous cost of what was essentially professional television equipment managed to keep the riffraff out. Or in, depending.

All of that changed, of course, with the introduction of the VCR and a camcorder the size of a plump quail. Add to those two items a slim notebook computer for whip-fast editing, and you have a compact kit so small and light that it would barely show up in crime-scene photographs. Twenty years ago, poor Bob Crane had to schlep back- breaking crates all over the country to satisfy his creepy hobby; now it all fits conveniently into the overhead compartment or under the seat in front of you. Golfers have more luggage.

This wasn't a coincidence. New technology relies on "early adopters" to pay more for groundbreaking equipment. Audiophiles subsidized the introduction of the compact disc with their single-minded pursuit of perfect sound reproduction. Computer geeks brought us the Palm Pilot. And Bob Crane gave us the VCR. He lugged all that stuff just so that we could slip in A Bug's Life and keep the kids quiet for a couple of hours.

To keep ourselves honest, it's a good idea to remember the smutty origins of our current obsession with the Internet. The first companies to successfully charge for content, the first multi-page websites, the busiest chat rooms-all are directly involved in the pornography industry. Bear in mind, too, that the excessive stock-market valuations of e-commerce companies such as amazon.com and eToys are the direct result of the e-commerce pioneers, the pornographers. As with the explorer's path that became a wagon trail that became a rural road that became a superhighway (information or otherwise), the first people to make the journey did so to look at dirty pictures. And as of now, the Internet pornographers are unique among e-commerce companies in that they turn a profit.

In the late 1970s, around the time Bob Crane got iced in a cheap motel room, I was a Boy Scout. Our troop raised money by collecting paper to recycle, and every so often we would go to the various dumpsters around town to sort and shuffle. It was a dirty, sticky, exhausting job, but there were always plenty of volunteers, because among the piles of newspaper, cardboard, and occasional garbage, invariably some-to us- insane person would have thrown out a Playboy, or if we were very lucky, a Penthouse.

Work would stop for several hours as we gathered 'round the magazine, campfire-style. It was a scene out of soft-core Normal Rockwell, and these days, I'm not sure the sight of a few teenage boys huddled around a computer screen carries the same benignly rakish vibe. Every kid has a computer.

And every computer has access to pornography. It is a world the distracted boys of Troop 202 could only dream about. The Internet is only a medium, of course-no better or worse than a magazine, say, or television. Like those, it has its pockets of quality. But we fool ourselves when we confer on it any community value, as Al Gore does when he proudly claims credit for "hooking our schools up to the Internet." Imagine making the same claim for television, or magazines.

Does anyone seriously think the problem with our schools today is that students have insufficient access to television? Or magazines? Or stores? Is it any wonder that Americans, never more than a mile from the nearest french fry, have become a nation of fatties? And if the effortless french fry feeds our snacky appetite, what about our prurient one? The pornography industry's relentless quest to eliminate the physical barriers to distribution-first, the inconvenience of the movie theater; then, the embarrassment of renting tapes; now, the herky-jerky video quality of the Internet-will eventually pay off. Every American house will have, if it wishes, hot-and-cold-running porn. And on every American desk in every American office, an Internet- connected employee will be able to view, with a finger tap and a mouse click, a kinky girl-girl act right there in a small screen next to last year's expense accounts for the sales staff.

We can't turn back the clock. And even if we could, who would want to give back the wonderful cocooning technology that the pornography industry has subsidized? I like my VCR, and I buy books from amazon.com. But without a sleazy movie theater you have to slip into, or a leering video-store clerk, or, to get really old-fashioned, the old lady who lived next to one of the newspaper dumpsters, who peered at us from her kitchen window in silent reproach, won't pornography become just another form of entertainment, available for the asking? And won't that lead-and I know I'm pushing it, but I'm only pushing it a little-to the same shrugging attitude towards violence, which in computer games and certain movies has a certain creepy porno-lust quality to it?