arious updates and comments about aspects of porn and porn in the news.  Date above each item is when it was first posted.

More recent additions are listed on top.

February 14, 2004

In other Valentine's Day news, here's an article about Christian Porn Addicts.  I live for this sort of thing.

Almost 18 percent of people who called themselves born-again Christians admitted visiting Internet porn sites, according to a 2000 survey of 1,031 adults by the evangelical group Focus on the Family. In a 2002 Pastors.com survey, more than 50 percent of responding pastors reported viewing pornography in the previous year.

"It's definitely the church's dirty little secret," said Mike Foster, co-founder of the anti-porn site XXXChurch.com, which hosts online support groups for Christians trying to kick the habit.

Imagine that, hypocrisy among the self-professed devoutly religious? 

Bernie Anderson, a pastor at Seventh-Day Adventist churches in the Dallas area, said an addiction to sexually explicit images threatened his marriage and his ministry.

"It was like a double life," said Anderson, 33.

For 20 years, he found himself drawn to pornographic Web sites, movies and magazines, he said. He would get up at night, telling his wife he needed to study, and would surf the Internet for porn. Later, he would spend hours accessing porn sites from the computer in his church office.

"You go take a shower, clean up and say you'll never do it again. Yet the next day, you fall right back into it," he said.

Not to kick these idiots while they're down, but is there any thought that perhaps being hard core Christians, with all of the guilt and self-hatred for normal human sexual impulses that implies, is what's cause these guys their real problems?  Normal people (okay, men) look at porn from time to time, perhaps whack off, and then get on with their day.  There's no obsession or loss of control about it; it's just naked pictures or dirty stories.  I mean really, how long can you stay horny, and how much interest does anyone have in watching the dreadful shit that passes for porn once you've gotten off?

The problem for these guys is that they wrap sex up in so much baggage and weirdness that they can't just get their rocks off and move on.  It haunts them and they can't stop, since they feel so guilty about it.

If I had the money and wanted to fuck with these people enough, I'd fund a study to get a bunch of porn addicted born agains counseling and treatment to get over their sexual hang ups and guilt, so that they could have healthy sex lives and so that porn would no longer be so important and forbidden in their minds.

Sort of hard to manage the control group in that sort of study though.  And people with a need to belong to such a cult-like religious affiliation have numerous other psychological issues that would probably throw monkey wrenches into any sort of psychological healing.

But hey, it would be fun anyway, just for the publicity and media coverage.

Anyway, here's a picture of the billboards they're putting up around Dallas this year.

December 6, 2003

This one amuses me.  Porn stores are busily infiltrating small towns, since the zoning laws there aren't so restrictive against adult businesses as they are in cities.  So these little hickvilles get a giant porno store set up on the side of the freeway, and while there aren't enough people in the towns to support the stores, they get a lot of drive by traffic. It's good old-fashioned American entrepreneurial spirit and opportunism at its finest.  Or it would be, if not for the fact that some people dislike pornography.

Abilene, a town of 6,500 where the largest employer is the Russell Stover candy factory, is prepared to pay almost any price to rid itself of the store. A town meeting is tonight at the county fairgrounds to discuss options to force the store to close.

"We're all steaming mad," says Phil Cosby, a resident who is organizing opposition. "This county is not unwilling, nor afraid to oppose this dangerous, addictive and increasingly violent industry. ... This store slipped into this county under cover of secrecy and darkness and we are going to turn the light on and expose them."

The town is using every means it has to fight the store.

Cosby has organized 80 men into Project Daniel, an effort to picket the store around the clock for 100 days. They are taking down license plate numbers of truckers and notifying their employers.

Busybody Christians aside, it's hard to imagine why the trucker's bosses would give a damn. You've got guys working a shit job like long distance trucking, and you're going to bust their balls over buying some porn to ease the pain?  Get out of here.  Are they bosses or nannies?

It's also hard for me to imagine men who have more need for porn than cross country truckers, out driving for days and days with nothing to relieve the boredom.  Better they jack off and relax at night than they go cruising for whores or hit a bar and get pounded.  And then start off the next day driving their huge truck down public highways while battling a raging hangover, or a hopping case of the crabs.

July 2, 2003

A couple of days ago, my ongoing pre-moving apartment cleaning brought me up against a moral dilemma.

I had disposed of or sorted all of my books, when upon reaching the top shelf of my tall bedroom bookcase I found many magazines. It's not like I didn't know they were there; they were clearly-visible from the entire bedroom, but I had pretty well managed to blot them from my memory over time.  And none had been touched in years, which made the whole "throw them out or not" dilemma an easy one to resolve.  At least it was easy for most of them.

I had 3 years of Games Magazine, which I used to enjoy but got tired of once I was out of school and didn't have hours to kill sitting around at desks anymore. I had a year of Thrasher skateboard magazine from like 1990, for some reason.  I found another 3 or 4 years worth in a box at my dad's house yesterday, and they all went into the recycle dumpster.  I had a couple of years of Poets and Writers, a journal type magazine that I don't think I ever once opened, despite my mom getting me Xmas subscriptions two years running in the late 90's. There was also a year of Astronomy, half of which were still in the plastic bags they wore to survive the postal service.  Those I saved since I have loved astronomy since I took two classes in it in college, and keep meaning to get back into it.  And I had 3 years worth of Maximum PC, which I enjoyed until it started to suck, and independent of that development, I just lost all interest in keeping up with the latest PC products I couldn't afford to purchase.

What to do with all of those was easy; they were all thrown into the recycle dumpster, aside from the Astronomy, which I saved. I should note that I read (well, skim) Entertainment Weekly and read Newsweek every week, since my dad subscribes to them, but I throw them out or take them back over to his house (he donates them to the library after a week or two) once I'm done with them.

So what was the dilemma?

Porn-related, of course.

Well, not exactly "porn," since I've never paid for a porn mag (I define "porn" as "moving parts" personally, so how anything but a video or DVD could be "porn" I'm not quite sure), but I had a year of Penthouse from 1996, when I subscribed for the hell of it.

I'd bought single copies once or twice a year for a while, usually whenever I'd fly somewhere and need to kill some time in the airport. I don't have any reason why I only bought them in airport magazine shops, rather than subscribing, or buying them at a local store, or just going to browse at Barnes and Noble.  There was no reason really, it was just a habit I got into.  And I didn't even open them in the airport, I'd save them until I got home, or got wherever I was going (usually to visit my grandparents for a couple/few weeks in the summer).

And I generally found them pretty useful, both for the obvious horny young man reasons, but also for the news-like articles and interviews and such.  Not exactly quality reporting, but sort of anti-society tabloid crap that was hard to find in the pre-Internet days.

Anyway, with that pedigree I subscribed for a year after getting some really cheap introductory offer.  And I enjoyed them, for about 4 months.  By 6 months I was bored of them, since every issue was basically the same thing, and by 8 I would have cancelled the subscription if I hadn't pre-paid it all, and weren't getting them for like $1 a copy anyway.  The forum letters were pathetic, the dirty comics were juvenile, the airbrushed simulated soft-core photo crap began to bore me as badly as the airbrushed asexual crap in Playboy, the articles were the same anti-moralist bullshit every month, and all of the news and gossip was 8 weeks out of date.  In retrospect I'm not sure why it took me so long to get sick of it.

I hadn't read any of them in years, or even looked through them; I mean if you want to see nekkid photos, that's what the Internet is for, right?  But despite my total disinterest in them at this point, I paused a moment to think of the children.  I had one copy of Oui magazine when I was young myself, (I found it under the bed in a hotel suite in Vegas when I stayed there in Vegas in with my dad when I was about 16) and treasured it always (actual visible pussy, years before I had access to porn and the Internet), and always got very interested in any copies of Penthouse a friend might happen to have. Playboy was always around when I was a kid, since I was like 12 and my dad used to get it, but I had no use for it past about 14, once I matured enough to get sick of the airbrushing and became interested in actual female nudity, not just plastic boobies and occasional pubic hair peeks.

I mean sure, if I were 15 and really hard up, a look through a Playboy was enough to wake up little Flux, but it always took so much imagination, and was much less fun than thinking about various cute girls from school.  But aside from that, Playboy never really interested me.  The whole faux-literary magazine vibe was just so lifeless, and as I used to say even back then, "Life is too short for softcore."

Anyway, as I gazed at the 15 issues of Penthouse, my moral dilemma kicked in.  Should I just chuck them, when while they were of no use to me, I knew that any 12-17 y/o boy would give a testicle for them?  It wasn't like I was going to sell them off or something, but I could leave copies lying around, by the dumpsters, or out by the curb where the neighbor kids skateboard. It seemed a shame to just toss them out like trash, when teen boys would get so much value from them.

But I wasn't sure how to go about that, and there were a few vague thoughts of some outraged parent trying to get me arrested for corrupting youth or something. I also didn't really want to be bothered, with so much more junk to throw out and non-junk to sort and save here or take with me.

At last I thought of the main reason I didn't even want to save the photos from the mags, and that made my decision easy.  The whole reason Penthouse (and Playboy, and others) are dying now is the Internet.  No one wants to pay for photos of softcore when there are essentially infinite naked women online for free.  Every try to get through even 10% of the free sample pages on The Hun in a single day? Good luck.

And with this realization it became very easy to just throw out the mags. I figure every boy over the age of about 13 has figured ways to find an infinite number of free porn sites, softcore sites, bestiality sites, and so on. Every kid is online now, or at least has friends who are and who don't have their parents standing over them, and everyone knows the various Cybernanny programs are easily defeated or disabled.  Why should I worry about saving old Penthouses for the children when they can see such better stuff online anytime they want?

True, there's something soothing about curling up under the covers with a flashlight, and you can't do that with a computer, unless you've got a good color printer or a laptop in your bedroom, but hey, boys will manage to find good wanking material now, just as they always have.  Fantasies about their hot sisters/schoolgirls/teachers, if all else fails.

I did save a few issues of Penthouse, and an old Playboy I found on an airplane years ago, and the Vegas copy of Oui, and a Hustler that's so greasy you almost need to wear gloves to read it. The only reason I saved them (no, really) was because Malaya requested it.  She wanted to page through them with me and snark on the crappy content and cheesy models, and who am I to refuse her such a simple request?

I do hope we can throw them out after that though, or I can at least throw them over the fence behind the recycling dumpster at her condo, where I saw some kids playing one day.  Now that's real recycling.

April 26, 2003

Since I've had a digital camera for about 10 months, I've noticed a steady downward-sliding trend in my behavior. This I blame on the digicam, coupled with my having a website to post pictures on.  The relatively recent addition of an online-girlfriend who thinks I'm hot, and several gay male readers who agree, hasn't helped.

Thanks to opportunity, weak morals, and encouragement from various borderline stalkers, I have realized that there are eight steps on the downward spiral towards gay porn.

1. Taking various pictures with clothing on, feeling weird to even post them on your site.
2. Taking various topless or other semi-nude photos that you would never consider posting.
3. Posting non-nude shots of yourself without giving it a thought; taking a few nude pics while giggling and then quickly deleting them.
4. Posting topless and other non-genital photos of yourself; taking nude shots with less giggling.
5. Posting censored nude shots of yourself, sending nude shots to your online girlfriend/boyfriend.
6. Taking sexual photos of yourself for the online gf/bf and cropping and processing them in Photoshop without the least bit of guilt.
7. Having so many dirty photos of yourself lying around that you begin to seriously consider letting the gay guys you know see them, since what the hell, it's not as if they haven't seen a penis before.
8. Selling your spare nude shots on an amateur gay porn site, since what the hell, you took the pics already, and they're just going to waste.

I have reached step 7. No, I'm not proud of it.  It has been somewhat of a boost to my self-esteem, anyway.  Lucky for me that I look decent.

March 11, 2003

Hustler Superstore finding it impossible to buy billboards or advertising in Cincinnati. 

It's the latest round in the long-running battle between Jimmy Flynt, owner of the adult store, and Sharonville-based Citizens for Community Values (CCV), whose supporters recently complained to zoning officials about the giant banner and continue to successfully lobby area billboard companies to deny the store any outdoor advertising in the Tristate.

The store's leasing contracts for two I-75 billboards owned by the Baton Rouge, La.-based Lamar Outdoor Advertising were not renewed last fall, after company officials said they were persuaded by CCV that such advertising ran counter to Greater Cincinnati community standards.

"It's the same old story with the CCV. They forced Lamar, and other billboard companies, to stop doing business with me even though I do business with Lamar and other companies everywhere else in the country but I can't here in Cincinnati," said Flynt.

I don't know what it is with Cincinnati.  I don't think of that area as being all that conservative or religious or whatever, but it seems like half the time there is some sort of moral crusade, it's coming from there.  Cincinnati was the city that sued Mapplethorp for indecency over an art exhibition.  And it went to trial and a jury found him not guilty of offending community standards.  Much to the chagrin of the religious crusaders.

As you can see, there's nothing offensive about the sign, or even risqué.  You wouldn't know it was for anything dirty at all, if you weren't familiar with the brand name.  This current sign is breaking several zoning laws, as it's not properly displayed, not for a business on the property, covers windows, etc.  Obviously the Hustler store people are pissed and losing business by their inability to post ads out on the freeway, and doing what they can to get around it.

Whether you regard this as a ridiculously conservative crusade by people who should go back to the 50's where they belong, or an amusing victory over evil smut-peddlers will have nothing to do with the story of my discussion of it, and everything to do with what you think of the morality of selling pornography.

March 5, 2003

This sort of thing is, I think, why people my age and younger, who are on the Internet a lot, are so bemused by adults who are uptight about porn.

Pornography is so easily available in the high-tech age that it has become an accepted part of everyday life among young people, a Herald survey shows.

It has become almost impossible to avoid explicit images in website advertisements or junk email messages, according to a Herald focus group made up of high school students aged between 15 and 18.

"I reckon you'd be hard-pressed to find a 17-year-old that hasn't seen it," said Paul*, 17. "You just get over it."

Older adults, and people who just aren't online much still have this taboo about porn.  Whereas people who live online, especially those growing up with the stuff hardly even bat an eye anymore.  It will be interesting to see how this goes in about 10 or 20 years, when the current teens and young adults are moving into positions of power.  Will they get the "hardening of the arteries" type of conservatism that comes with age and a desire to protect children from all the stuff that you so enjoyed and craved when you were a child?

America is, as usual, a contradiction. About the only major Western Nation that still has a major religious influence on life, for some mysterious reason I can never fathom.  Enforcers of morality aren't just kooks and old fogies in the US, as they are in pretty much all of Europe and Oz and Asia. Yet at the same time, the US is by far the largest market for porn.  Good old fashioned Christian guilt, I guess. I don't have any clever analysis or answers.

My point is that the US has the most anti-porn types, and the most porn-viewers.  And yes, I'm sure this is the same person in a lot of cases.  So the US will probably continue to be the biggest producer of porn, and the biggest denouncer of it, while the rest of the world neither loves or hates it half as much and leaves us to get all tied up in knots over something only we think is still a big issue.

January 31, 2003

There are more Germans looking at porn than any other European nation.  But Italians look most often per capita.  I assume if they had the US on here it would be on top with a red line going about 3 meters to the right, and all the others would be like 1 pixel wide.

The chart is crappy, since it doesn't factor in total number of people online in each country.  And the article matches, since it sort of jumps from topic to topic, and has no context, and doesn't explain the measuring methodology adequately.

[The survey] found that 3,879 of the 9,411 websites visited in the month were pornographic, with Britons spending around 45 minutes a month looking at adult material.

The worst offenders were students who account for nearly a quarter of all visits to pornographic sites.

Note the editorializing there, with the "worst offenders" comment. This figure is totally unclear also. Do they mean that 9411/3879, or 41.2% of all websites visited by UK surfers were porn sites?  How could an entire nation only visit 9400 websites in a month?  And if over 40% of all websites visited are porn sites, how could the average person only spent 45 minutes a month viewing porn?  That would only give them about 100 minutes online all month.  Three minutes a day?

And if they only get 45 minutes of porn a month, that's some power browsing.  If you looked at porn 2x a week, that would be 8x a month, so you only get 7.5 minutes a pop.  Literally, perhaps.

I'm sure that neither of my assumptions are correct, but the article is so poorly written that there's really no telling.

Also, what are they defining as porn?  Is a site with pictures of girls in bikinis porn?  How about the page three type stuff that's big in the UK.  Is topless bikini shots porn?

At the end there's some pointless anti-porn hysteria thrown in, again with no reference or fact to back it up.

Some experts are concerned that more and more people were becoming addicted to sex on the internet. Last year, psychologists warned that online sex addiction was creating a dangerous new compulsion affecting everyone from housewives to gay men and corporate executives.

Of the sample of 5,000 people questioned by NetValue, students were the most likely to click on to porn, making up 23.2%. They were followed by manual workers, 15%, with professionals close behind at 12.8%.

What does it mean, "addicted to porn"?  Are there studies about that?  How many hours a day must you spend to be addicted?  Are people who spend 3 hours a day reading sports sites and playing rotisserie baseball dangerously addicted to sports?  I spend an hour or so most days reading blogs and news sites.  Am I addicted to news and editorializing? 

December 16, 2002

You want an article about a nut?  Here he is.

For 25 years, he says, his waking hours were dominated by the need to view pornography. It destroyed his ability to be a loving husband, cost him financially and kept him emotionally estranged from people who should have been close.

"It consumed my life. It was my hidden secret," he says.

The twice-divorced Cincinnati native sees himself as a blessed survivor, whose acceptance of God and admission of his "addiction" to pornography allowed him to reverse a life he is convinced was spiraling into a personal abyss.

So now he's crusading against porn, since after all, because he's a freakish pervert who couldn't handle just looking at pictures of naked people on occasion, that means everyone else must have the same problem.  And it's important that he tells society what they can and can not view in their free time.

Nearby, in a front pew, sat his wife, Vickie.

They met at an anti-pornography conference and married four years ago. Mrs. Burress works with her husband as the coordinator of CCV's victims assistance programs while also holding supervisory positions in various associated pro-family groups.

Mrs. Burress says she understands pornography's destructive power and why her husband must abstain from any exposure to such materials. For that reason, she will watch the adult videos and read the adult magazines, then write summaries for her husband so he can speak to groups, lobby legislators or persuade prosecutors.

So they get tons of porn, but only his wife can watch it, and she then describes what was in it so her husband can rail about how awful it is.  Will anyone be surprised if in about three years we hear some sob story about how his wife became addicted to it and sought out anonymous anal sex from a crack dealer? 

Oh wait, I mean "be less than overjoyed" not "be surprised".

November 17, 2002

Story about a woman whose picture from her online dating was snagged by porn sites and used repeatedly.  The article is worth a look for the overheated hyperbole and how it just goes on and on. Porn guys saw a hot photo and grabbed it to reuse.  Blah.  Big frickin' deal. I mean if it's your photo, I'm sure it would be annoying, but it's the internet.  Images are misused pretty much constantly.

The article also seems to think it's amazing and shocking that porn sites are setting up fake female dating pictures and pretending to be women just as a ruse to lure guys into signing up for their porn site.  I had assumed all pretty women internet dating photos were fake and for that purpose, actually.  But then I've been known to be cynical.

April 18, 2002

People are pretty much over porn by now, right?  I mean it's just another form of entertainment; perhaps not one you'd want children watching, but hardly anyone gets worked up over the existence of photos or movies of the reproductive act, at this point.  (Personally I'd rather a kid saw people having sex than the sort of horribly brutal murders so many R-rated films have, and that kids find much easier to watch than porn.)

Well, obviously everyone isn't sanguine about pornography.  There are still various wild-eyed types who think it's a horrible sin.  They're right of course, but it's a fun one.  A semi-hysterical article about the evils of porn can be found here.  A quote:

Porn addicts start on the “harmless” stuff, then seek more exotic ways to feed their jaded habit. Some turn into child killers and rapists who act out the fantasies that decorate the secret rooms of their minds.

I like that, "Some turn into child killers..." part.  Like a perfectly-normal guy sits down a Jenna Jameson bone-fest, and after the 3rd money shot he's just compelled to get a butcher knife and go Boy Scout hunting?

The tone of the article is so archaic in its attitudes that I wondered if it might be a spoof, or meant tongue in cheek.  Sort of an homage to the old Reefer Madness theories of "one puff = ritual murderer".  But no, that columnist has a bunch of other articles, and while none are as silly as the this one, he's clearly coming from a very conservative PoV.  I didn't see any others about sex, to see if he's hung up over that sort of thing, or just porn, though.

Anyway, I find it a stupid article. He equates all porn, and anyone who views it, with the most vile of kiddy porn, which you'll note is quite illegal in the US and most every other country on earth.  The vast majority of adults, men certainly, view porn on a regular basis, and the vast majority of those porn-viewers would be as appalled as him at kiddy porn.  And of course don't turn into murderers or rapists through some sort of magical transmogrification brought on by watching bad actors pretend to have sex.  Does he draw a line?  I mean like an artistic NC-17 film, would that turn people into child injurers?

And given who is most often caught molesting children, I guess they must pipe the Spice channel right into most seminaries?

Speaking of porn.  Which is a pretty common occurrence around here.

The US Supreme Court struck down an anti-child porn law that was far too broadly-worded.  It would have covered virtually anything ever with anyone under 18 even thinking about being naked, apparently.  Even if the actor/actress was over 18, but playing a younger character.  Since after all, no one under 18 has ever had sex or ever will. Ashcroft was said to be disappointed, but he flew back to his plantation and burned a few witches and handled some serpents, and that cheered him right up.

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