This may come as a bit of a shock, of course, but it seems porn Internet and otherwise continues to undermine decent society. Says who? Says a former San Fernando Valley area probation officer and social worker, who believes the HIV crisis that hit the adult industry earlier this year shows adult entertainment is still prolific enough – and thus a continuing menace to "decent" society.
"[W]hen pornography is criticized, the claim is often made that, in itself, pornography is not harmful," Sonya Jason wrote in the May 22 Los Angeles Daily News. "Such lame defenses ignore the crimes committed to operate the 'sex industry,' which undermines the right of every American to live in a decent society."
Such crimes, porn critics quickly cite, include the case of porn mousetrapper John Zuccarini, who pleaded guilty last December to tricking minors into seeing porn by way of misspelled or alternatively spelled domain names derived from popular children and youth sites like cartoon characters and popular music stars.
Zuccarini's technique violated a portion of the federal Amber Alert law known as the Truth in Domain Names Act. He was sentenced to thirty months in prison in February, ending a saga which involved Zuccarini eluding federal authorities for several years, until he was finally arrested in southern Florida last year.
Jason, however, wrote that the undermining of which she spoke includes the "sad example" of "our own San Fernando Valley, once considered an ideal place to raise children, which now bears the dubious distinction of 'pornography capital of the world.' How much longer will supposedly intelligent Americans continue to condone – in the name of 'free speech' and 'mutual consent' – any form of debauchery that permits damaging our youth and society in the process?"
Nonsense, insists adult Internet veteran Cynthia Fanshaw, now the editor and Webmaster of IndustryElite.com. Fanshaw said protecting children from inappropriate content remains the job of the parents. She also said driving porn underground was most likely to make porn worse instead of better from that point of view.
"Pornography in any and all forms is not going to 'go away'," Fanshaw said, "and if it is forced underground the result could be more unregulated, possibly 'obscene' content infiltrating into the U.S. market from foreign producers and publishers. There is a difference between a healthy expression of mutual sexual content between adults, however teaching kids that 'porn is bad, mmkay,' will just make them more curious. It's an age-old argument with no one right answer. But is porn more degrading to society than war? I believe (President Bush) has the answer to that one."
But people like Dr. Kimberly S. Young, executive director of the Center for On-Line and Internet Addiction, who has written a new book, Tangled In The Web: Understanding Cybersex from Fantasy to Addiction, say survey results like those of the Kaiser Family Foundation – which recently determined that 70 percent of teenagers surveyed happened upon Internet porn, many of whom bumped into it by way of Websites to which they were lured by people operating Zuccarini-style mousetraps – show how difficult it is for those who don't want it to avoid seeing it.
"Pornography is becoming so prevalent on the Internet that it is now difficult to avoid unwanted exposure, and this makes cybersex addiction more likely, which can lead to a multitude of legal issues for organizations," Young said. "There is a definite need for tools like filtering software to offer protection for those who want, or are required, to avoid this type of illicit material."
The Center for On-Line and Internet Addiction believes over six percent of Netizens "may suffer from an addiction to the Internet," provoking marital and work-related problems, which prompted the group to create an Internet addiction support group "as a safe place on the Web for those who feel addicted to the Internet to share their thoughts, feelings, and concerns with one another."
Last fall, Internet filtering company N2H2's latest report on the subject said porn pages in cyberspace hit 260 million in July 2003 compared to about 14 million pages in 1998, an 1,800 percent jump. The company said that what they derived from one Google search on the word "porn" by itself brought back about 80 million pages while "xxx" returned 76 million, though it did not say how many of those pages turned out to be the same pages brought in with overlapping or duplicated search results.
