Ms Naughty Porn for Women Blog

So, since I’m being nostalgic, allow me to introduce you to this amazing timeline: the history of internet memes. It traces the rise and fall of the various web fads that have kept us amused over the years.

Remember Mr T Ate My Balls? Or Bert Is Evil? How about the Dancing Baby or the Hamster Dance or Numa Numa? Badger Badger Badger Badger! Bananaphone! Wharbargl!

And of course, anything is possible at Zombo.com (damn, that site still makes me giggle).

If I needed anything to prove that I’m getting on a bit, this site is probably it. There’s part of me thinking: how can you feel nostalgic about the internet? It’s this bright, shiny new thing where you can… oh… yeah. That’s right.

It’s now ten years since I bought my first domain name.

This means I’ve been creating erotica online for a whole decade – 2000 to 2010. When I started out I never imagined I’d be doing it for this long, nor that it would take me as far as it has.

In the last ten years I’ve seen the online adult industry evolve from single images on slow dial-up to a million free streaming movies. It’s gone from an initial startup phase, through a goldrush and into a major bust. It’s has moved from “tease” to full-on hardcore and seriously nasty stuff at every turn. It’s also seen numerous attempts to legislate it out of existence.

It all started for me in 1999 when I decided to write an article about online women’s porn. Conducting research, I went into the local library and started looking up porn sites on their internet terminal. You could get away with it back then. I found a whole bunch of gay sites and not much else – except for Purve.com, the first porn for women site.

I ended up chatting to the Australian woman who ran Purve and, after the article appeared in November 1999, she encouraged me to get into the business of adult webmastering. I set about learning the whole deal – what jpegs and gifs were, how to become an affiliate, how to make rudimentary websites. I went and bought Microsoft Front Page, despite howls of derision from my friends who all hand-coded. I didn’t care. It did the job.

The main aim was advertising. Put up a site with a few free photos, preferably small, under 20kb each and advertise paysites. Hopefully your average surfer would like what they saw and sign up for the good stuff. Back then, you could only get good quality pics and movies (occasionally) if you joined a paysite.

One of my first sites was Grandma Scrotum’s Sex Tips, originally hosted for free by a now defunct company (free hosting was the way to go in those days – bandwidth was really expensive. Unfortunately it made life difficult when the host went under and you had to keep moving your site all the time)

I also had a go at promoting mainstream porn for men but I wasn’t that interested. For me, porn for women was the main game. It presented a whole new “niche” that was being completely ignored by the “big guns” (still is).

I can still remember the day I got my first signup… and then my first cheque. The amount wasn’t huge but the thrill was substantial. I saw the potential to make some pocket money on the side while continuing to be a freelance journalist.

And then the signups kept rolling in, more each week. Suddenly it seemed I could make a living out of advertising porn. Which was cool. I tried selling books as well through Amazon but the commission of 5% could never match the 50-60% I could earn with smut. Especially since making sales was so easy.

I didn’t really tell many people what was going on. It was good for a laugh sometimes, seeing the surprised looks on their faces. Nobody expects me to be doing what I do, even today. They assume I’m some sort of serious, bookish type. Which I am, of course, with a mischievous, evil pornographer interior.

From 2000 to mid 2003 I continued to make sites advertising the five or six subscription sites that existed for straight women. (Playgirl wasn’t part of the equation; they were unable to use the Playgirl domain until 2006 thanks to a court ruling. Shady operators had used the domain for fraud. On top of that, the company seemed to dismiss the idea of the internet as a waste of time.)

I wasn’t alone in wanting to make porn for women. I was part of a small group of other female webmasters who wanted to market to females. Every day we’d chat about the subject on the Women’s Erotica Network message board, discussing what it was that women wanted to see and how best to appeal to chicks like us.

The rest of the adult webmastering sphere weren’t interested. We often had large online arguments where the guys happily pronounced: “women don’t buy porn, they’re not visual, selling to women is a waste of time.” Eventually we stopped arguing. Their loss.

The technology progressed, as did marketing techniques. In the beginning were webrings and picture posts. You could create a seriously ugly page and fill it with ads and make sales. Then came linklists, consisting of large collections of adult links, supported by advertising. Ms Naughty is one of those. The linklist rules about the structure of free sites became rather rigid, requiring a minimum number of photos and a restricted number of ads. Then we saw the emergence of Thumbnail Gallery Posts (TGPs), comprising of single pages of thumbnails rather than full sites.

More and more webmaster message boards sprang up. These became the primary place to network with others and advertise. The first online industry conventions occurred.

The main aim at that point was to get listed in Alta Vista. Number 1 on that search engine was a licence to print money. You’d also submit to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and about 100 others. The results varied wildly from search engine to search engine. You’d also hope to get listed in the DMOZ Open Directory Project. I think it might have been 2002 when we started to prefer this “Google” thing that seemed to always give better results. I liked it straight away because my sites did better in Google than Alta Vista or Yahoo.

Then, in 2003, our little group of porn for women marketers began to go our own way. I had a disagreement with the owner of Purve, as did fellow webmistress Jane. In the aftermath we decided to set up our own adult site for women, modelling it on Australian Women’s Forum. In June 2003, For The Girls was launched.

Almost immediately we hit a snag: our credit card processor collapsed in the first month and made off with our initial profit. Thankfully we were better off than some who lost thousands. In 2003 American Express had decided to pull out of CC processing and Visa had introduced strict rules and a “danger fee” for adult sites. Not long after that Paypal announced it would not process for adult either and subsequently froze the accounts of many people, confiscating their “sinful” cash. We saved FTG by getting an account with CCBill and carrying on. Thankfully, CCBill is one of the few surviving third-party processors; at least 3 others went under in that year.

2004 saw blogs become popular in the mainstream. I launched the Ms Naughty blog that year in a very simple format; Wordpress wasn’t really an option at that time. I upgraded it to WP in 2006.

In 2004 the Bush administration, with the help of Attorney General John Ashcroft, introduced major changes to the 18 U.S.C. § 2257A law which ostensibly exists to prevent minors from appearing in porn (models must prove they are over 18). The new ruling changed the definition of “secondary producer” of adult content, making adult webmasters liable for any adult image that appeared on their site, even if they had nothing to do with originally creating that image.

The law imposed incredbily onerous compliance rules and allowed the government to essentially raid your house without notice or a warrant to “check your records.” I saw plenty of successful smaller webmasters driven out of the business by this new law, fearful of its implications. In 2005 it all went to court… and stayed there, it seems. A 2007 ruling said it was unconstitutional while another upheld it.

The 2257 thing was yet another attempt to restrict the spread of online porn. The 1998 Child Online Protection Act tried it and was struck down. The Communications Decency Act also had a go at it. There’s also been numerous prosecutions for obscenity, the most notable being John Stagliano in 2008. Nothing ever seems to stick.

Meanwhile, I just kept writing erotic fiction and searching out female-friendly pics and movies for For The Girls and my other sites. We held an annual fiction competition from 2005 to 2008 with much success.

Video On Demand sites had begun to be popular by about 2005, although AEBN had been offering their service since 2000. They began to challenge the old subscription-based paysite model in the second half of the decade.

In 2006 I remember going on to one of the adult webmaster boards and asking my peers: “What do you think of this Youtube thing? Should I embed this code on my page or will it break my site?” At the time I didn’t see that Youtube would become the future of porn. I don’t think many of us did. Yet it felt like only days before flash video was everywhere and porn tube sites sprung up like mushrooms, many offering full-length movies for free. Of course, it hasn’t ended well.

2007 and 2008 saw the Russians and the cheaters move into traditional webmastering in a big way, much to the frustration of the rest of us. A huge influx of new webmasters began catering to a dwindling number of surfers. Free porn was everywhere. The gold rush was over.

In the last two years I’ve seen an awful lot of old-timers sell up and leave the business, frustrated at constantly having to fight cheaters, liars, content thieves and scammers, seeing major companies beginning to rely on dodgy billing practices to keep themselves in profit. In the meantime the audience has come to expect that porn should always be free.

At the same time, I’ve seen the rise and rise of alternative, sex positive and feminist porn. In 2006 Good For Her started the Feminist Porn Awards and they’re due to have their fourth event in April. Early dyke porn pioneers CyberDyke have been joined by Shine Louise Houston and her Crash Pad films and site. Courtney Trouble’s No Fauxxx continues to cut across genre boundaries by offering all kinds of different erotica, gay, lesbian, straight and genderqueer. The original alt porn site Suicide Girls has had its share of trouble but other alt sites have stepped in to fill the gap. Meanwhile, the lovely Tasty Trixie has built her own adult empire, being in this business longer than me.

I’ve seen at least six porn for women paysites go out of business… which is always a pain in the arse because I have to take down ads. In 2010 there aren’t many subscription sites actively targeting straight women as their main audience; I’m proud to say that For The Girls is still going strong after nearly 7 years in the game.

Way back at the start of 2000 , when the new Milennium and the Sydney Olympics made everyone feel shiny and peaceful, I had no idea that I’d be sitting here in 2010, getting wrinkly and hunched and thick around the middle, still making a living from online porn. The internet has been very good to me; it’s provided an opportunity to become my own boss and to create a virtual magazine that publishes the quality work of many excellent writers. It has let me carve out a space where I can promote a healthy and positive version of erotica and given me a small voice for women amid a rising tide of sometimes horrible male-oriented porn.

And it’s let me do all this while wearing pyjama bottoms and daggy old t-shirts.

Will I still be doing this ten years from now? I don’t know. I can’t even think ten weeks ahead at this stage. But I don’t feel the urge to give up any time soon. I’ve still got about 20 domains waiting for me to develop them. And a feature film to make. And an internet filter to fight.

And who knows what kind of technology we’ll have in 2020? Perhaps all those promises of “virtual reality sex” will actually come true. Either that or the internet will have become so controlled and censored by world governments that online porn has become a distant memory.

I do know that we’re going to have to start re-negotiating the concept of paying for porn. The expectation that everything will be free is creating problems. As I wrote in this post, the audience can’t expect producers to keep making porn if it results in a loss. Especially if those producers are trying to break the mould and offer something positive and different. It will all grind to a halt eventually, and I don’t want to see that. I want to see change; it’s what I wanted from the moment I started in 2000. We need better, more positive porn and the way to make it happen is for the audience to get behind those people who are trying to create change.

It’s gonna be an interesting decade, I suspect.

You may notice that I’ve changed the colour of my header image. My usual cheerful purple has been replaced by black and grey. This is because I’m taking part in the Great Australian Internet Blackout this week (24th-29th).

The blackout is part of the ongoing protests against the plan to impose a mandatory internet filter on all Australians. It’s mainly to raise awareness about the issue. I also spent a substantial part of my Saturday writing long letters to politicans in protest against the filter.

If you’re an Australian reader, please read the EFA’s list of ways to protest against net censorship (and sign their official petition).

If you’re not Australian… well, thanks for your patience. And please be aware… your government is probably paying close attention to what’s happening here. They may well be planning their own form of online censorship. Remember that the internet poses a giant threat to those who would keep power and manipulate their populations. It’s the best tool we have for political organisation and communication. Plenty of politicians would like to take away our growing power.

And when they do it, they’ll use the excuse of “protecting the kids”. And before you know it, they’ll be “protecting” you too.

Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. We must fight to keep that right.

The mandatory internet filter has been on the cards for nearly two years now but I must admit I honestly didn’t think it would get off the ground. The whole idea is manifestly flawed and technically unfeasable and I foolishly thought that Senator Conroy would have to bow to common sense in the end.

Alas, no. Religious zealotry tends to flush away all common sense and thus it is that today Stephen Conroy has given the green light to the filter.

It’s hard to articulate the churn of negative emotions I’m feeling now but suffice to say that I’m angry, frustrated, outraged and perplexed by the decision. The plan still involves a blacklist and it’s still going to be secret; it’s essentially a green light for the government to censor pretty much anything under the guise of “protecting the children.”

And what’s being sold as a fight against child porn is actually a war on legal, adult pornography. The report says that RC (”refused classification”) material will be blocked – this is material that it is actually legal to own in Australia. The Australian Sex Party says 99% of all adult websites would be considered RC if the government had the resources and time to classify the millions of them out there.

Even female ejaculation is considered a “fetish” and thus beyond the pale. Once again, censorship imposes itself on female sexuality and tells us what is and isn’t “normal”. This is a regime that bans the healthy sexuality of Matinee but thinks images of clitoridectomy a la Antichrist is OK.

The only positive thing I can take from this is the overwhelming response to the announcement on Twitter and in comments on news sites. About 99% of all comments and tweets I’m reading are opposed to the filter and a lot of people are saying it’s a vote-changer. There’s real anger out there and I think it’s going to be forcefully expressed in the coming days and weeks.

Fact is Australia has outgrown it’s ridiculous censorship laws and there’s a wave of Gen X and Y internet users that are about to start getting seriously vocal about their right to freedom of speech. It really is time we stood up to these conservative bastards and told them what the majority of Australians really think.

And if protests and letters and emails and strong public antipathy don’t work, I will be leaving Australia. Probably in a year’s time when the filter is due to come into force. No doubt For The Girls and some of my other sites will be blocked and I don’t want to give my tax dollars to a country that thinks my brand of positive sexual expression is obscene.

Fuck them.

Update (and I think I’m going to keep updating this post this evening as things progress): The Australian Christian Lobby which pushed for the filter is ALREADY demanding that it be extended:

Managing director Jim Wallace issued a statement claiming the Enex report had “proven the technological principle [of filtering] can be extended to deal with other harmful X and R-rated material on the internet.

“This is now clearly feasible and we need a review in three years that might test this in practice, particularly using third party providers of URLs,” Wallace said.

Hello slippery slope.

In the last year I’ve become a heavy user of Twitter, as you can see from the sidebar with my regular Tweets. While it’s been great fun it’s also been a serious drain on my time and resources. I can lose half a day following links and Twittering and reading what other people have said. I put off doing real work because I’m frittering away my time, amusing myself, finding new things that I plan to blog about and never do.

Now there’s some official research to explain why I’m doing this. An article in Slate discusses research into the way dopamine causes us to continually seek things.

Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting “enter” to get our next fix.

Yep, that’s me. It’s actually been troubling me for some time that my attention span has become so short. I typically have about 16 tabs open in Firefox plus numerous programs on my desktop. I can be “officially” doing three or four things at once but in reality I’m not getting anything done. Instead I’m flitting around from one thing to the next.

I feel like this behaviour began way back when on I was on dialup; research used to take so long to come up that I’d need to do a few things at once to be efficient. It can happen now when I’m rendering movies. But that’s not a good enough excuse anymore. Now I really have to work hard to pay attention to do one thing for a long period of time. I keep wanting to check what’s new on Facebook, on Twitter, to quickly look up a fact on Google, to have a look at traffic stats, to watch a quick video on Youtube…

There’s a state of consciousness called “flow” when we become so engrossed in something that we forget all sense of time or where we are. When you are working in a state of flow, life is beautiful. You can get that story written, that movie edited, that design done, that website finished. But my brain doesn’t seem as willing to get into that state anymore. It’s always seeking, seeking, seeking. The dopamine is messing with me.

Religious nuts and Luddite panic merchants love to talk about the idea of “porn addiction” or “internet addiction” without having any research to back it up. Well, finally here’s something that scientifically discusses the idea of “addiction” in a rational manner. And, by the looks of it the subject matter isn’t the problem. It’s the simple human need to find new information and enjoy different experiences. Thus, there is as much danger from “recipe addiction” as there is from “porn addiction.” If you let the dopamine spur you on, things can get out of balance.

My grandmother had a saying: “Everything in moderation.” It’s something I try to live my life by. And now I need to apply it to Twitter and Facebook and all those other distractions.

Pic is from the Slate article, sums things up rather nicely.

Psychology Today has a great article which nicely debunks the whole hysterical idea that children are in danger from sexual predators while online. It refers to the 278 page report by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force which looked at vast amounts of data about whether children were regularly solicited for sex online (as the hysteria would have us believe).

The task force, led by Harvard researchers, looked at reams of scientific data dealing with online sexual predation and found that children and teens were rarely propositioned for sex by adults who made contact via the Internet. In the handful of cases that have been documented-and highly publicized-the researchers found that the victims, almost always older teenagers, were usually willing participants already at risk for exploitation because of family problems, substance abuse, or mental health issues.

The report concluded that MySpace and Facebook “do not appear to have increased minors’ overall risk of sexual solicitation.” The report said the biggest risk to kids using social networks was bullying by other kids.

Imagine that. Real evidence to counter the tabloid panic. Not that it will make much difference to religious groups or politicians. Fear sells better than facts.

Halfway through writing this post I found myself wondering if I hadn’t already blogged about this. Turns out I have, after a fashion. In February I wrote about the same report and how it found that kids aren’t necessarily interested in porn – and the majority of “teenagers” who were tended to be 17 year old boys.

To quote Psychology Today:

The Internet is still new, and kids use it more than adults, which makes many adults nervous that something nefarious must be going on. But according to the attorneys general report, next to nothing is.

Following on from yesterday’s blacklist post…

Wikileaks went down yesterday but it’s back up again today. I’ve just spent a bit of time going through the list again and making a note of all the adult websites that I’ve heard of before, ones that feature consenting adults or are run by adult companies that I know.

The list contains 40 domains. The majority of them are hardcore sites, a lot in the reality style that I personally find offensive. That doesn’t make them illegal, however. The majority of paysites on the list contain warning pages or make use of ICRA/RTA codes.

Several of the URLs on the blacklist are simple adult linklists. There are 2 adult affiliate program domains, 3 swinger’s meeting sites and 2 BDSM sites (including Hogtied.com) which, according to our classification system, are considered to be “abhorrent.” Also listed is the Alt Sex Stories Text Repository. There were plenty of other domains that looked fine but I wasn’t game to double check them.

There’s also at least 18 gambling/poker domains on the list.

Interestingly, the oldest links – the ones at the bottom of the list – contain very few legitimate URLs (that is, the vast majority of domains listed under the June 1 2007 date ARE illegal CP or rape sites). As time goes on, however, mistakes and bad judgements creep in. It’s indicative of the ad-hoc, complaints based system, combined with an increasingly lazy or moralistic ACMA.

I was going to post my list, but then it occurred to me that it would make the government’s cover-up job a little easier if they knew what shouldn’t be on there. Conroy and the ACMA are claiming the list isn’t theirs, even if the official one resembles it an awful lot. It’s entirely possible that the 40 legitimate adult domains have been put there by an ISP. If that’s the case I’d like to see the government come out and explicitly say that those 40 adult domains are fine.

I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

This is the thing, there’s outrage aplenty over the dentist and the dog kennel, but we need to be outraged about the censorship regular porn sites too. Explicit sexual content featuring consenting adults should be considered protected speech in Australia, end of story.

If you want the list, email me – msnaughty AT msnaughty dot com

Two days ago I was complaining that the internet filter plan is sucking up my time. Damn, if that hasn’t been true today. At 11am the SMH revealed that the ACMA blacklist of “illegal” sites had been leaked on Wikileaks. Naturally I went straight there to check out what the government authority considers to be “prohibited content.”

As is to be expected, the list is a fairly abhorrent catalogue of child porn and rape sites – which is what Senator Stephen Conroy has been trumpeting about in his quest to censor the net.

Unfortunately the list also has more than its fair share of legitimate adult sites featuring consenting participants: Abby Winters, I Shot Myself, I Feel Myself, Girls Out West, The Hun, XTube and Redtube are all listed, along with Australian linklists like Danger Dave and even Whale Tails – a site that focuses on women wearing their g-strings above the waistline of their jeans. Shocking, no?

The list also contains the site of a dentist, a dog kennel facility, a school tuckshop and a website design company. Beyond that there are gambling and poker sites, euthanasia sites, gay dating sites and LibChrist.com – an online community for Christians who are into swinging and polyamorous lifestyles. Plus, of course, the anti-abortion site which was added after a single complaint by an anti-filter protester to see what would happen.

I checked carefully. None of my sites have been banned.

Yet.

Last week the ACMA was threatening $11,000 a day fines for publishing any URL that was on the blacklist. Even though nobody officially knew what was on the blacklist. Go figure.

Now they’re threatening the fine and 10 years jail to any Australian who publishes the Wikileaks link. Even though Conroy is saying that the list is a fake. If it’s a fake, why the threats?

I found myself feeling suddenly worried. I’ve been linking to Abby Winters and plenty of other blacklisted sites for years! How was I to know I was breaking the law? Thankfully, the fines only apply if your site is hosted in Australia. Thanks to the draconian laws of 2000, all of my hosting money is paid to US providers.

Indeed, it tends to prove how silly the whole idea of internet regulation is. Blogger, Facebook and millions of other sites do not come under the jurisdiction of our puny bunch of pollies. The internet is the world. It can’t (and it shouldn’t) be ruled by any one nation.

There is no constitutional guarantee to freedom of speech in Australia. Thus, it’s possible for the government to compile a secret list of sites deemed unacceptable based on single complaints from individuals. No review process, no appeal. And, until today, no idea what was banned.

Right now this list is used by ISPs for optional filters and by workplaces. Senator Conroy’s plan is to use it as the base for the mandatory nationwide filter. If it goes ahead, no Australian will be able to access Abby Winters, or the Whale Tale site, or even find out about Christian swingers (which, you’ve got to admit, is a pretty amusing site that NEEDS to be seen). It’s patently obvious how much of an imposition this will be on freedom of speech. The list already contains legal sites. What’s to stop the government from secretly adding anything else that irks them?

And there’s more than a touch of Room 101 in the blustering threats of prison and fines for linking to the list. Where is the harm in looking at a list of URLs? Certainly, the majority of them lead to highly offensive or illegal CP sites, but I’m a grown, thinking woman. I calmly and sensibly went through that list to see what was included. I did not click any of the illegal links – I know better than that. I’m sure most people do.

So why is some beaurocrat more morally able to look at this list of links than me? Who decides?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen?

I’ve been following this issue all day. It’s been a fascinating example of why the internet is so powerful, and why governments want to clamp down on its use. Within hours, thousands of people in Australia and around the world knew that our government is not being honest with us. We Tweeted about it, blogged it, talked about it, considered options. When the story appeared in our major online newspapers, about 99% of comments were anti-filter. A huge groundswell of opposition to the filter made itself known – and the government has been scrambling and lying to protect its position.

This is our revolution. We’ve got to protect it, or the bastards will snatch it away forever.

By the way, if you want to look up the blacklist for yourself, type “Wikileaks” or “ACMA blacklist txt” into Google.

There. I didn’t link to it.

Edit: Just have to add this pic, thanks to Overclockers.

Another edit: If you can get to Canberra this weekend, attend the March In March anti censorship protest.

You may have noticed that the blog has been scarce with posts recently. That’s because I took another week off, relaxing and trying to recover from a bad RSI attack. The house I stayed in only had dialup, which decreased my computer use substantially – and a lovely thing it was too.

Now I’m home again and over the last couple of days have been sucked into the usual round of news-reading, Twitter feeds and trying not to procrastinate. And, fuck, if it isn’t depressing.

I came back feeling motivated and creative, but in the last few days I’ve felt overwhelmed and pessimistic. A lot of this is thanks to the ongoing bullshit that is the Australian plans for a mandatory internet filter. In the last few days it’s emerged that the “watchdog” is happy to blackban political sites on the say-so of a single person. The people who want the filter are still telling the same lies and it seems that everyday punters continue to believe the nonsense.

And then I find that Britain, Germany and a bunch of other countries are all planning their own filters citing Australia as some kind of magical filter paradise.

Friends, the seige of the free internet has begun. The politicians have realised that the internet has given us POWER. We’re able to make decisions, to muster support and to make our voices heard without the mainstream media getting in our way. We’re mobilising. We’re active. And we’re fucking powerful. They’re going to do their best to try and stop us, and they’re going to use porn and “the children” as their excuse.

That’s the other depressing thing. I keep seeing so many news items about porn lately and it’s always reported in a negative fashion. Porn is the great, amorphous enemy, despoiling lives hither and yon. Never mind that religion does far more damage in the world, it’s our clits and cocks that are the problem!

These are big issues and I want to wave the flag and encourage the fight… but, damn, if it isn’t draining and very, very difficult to be involved. And it makes it hard to do my everyday work, because I’m always spending brainpower thinking about how to argue against the filter and its supporters. At the same time, I feel the future looming like a black thundercloud. We’ve had a wonderful twenty years but now the fight for online freedom is about to begin in earnest.

I do hope the other free countries of the world are watching what goes down here in Oz with regards to the filter, because if it goes ahead it will be like a big green light to other repressive governments.

Behold: Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies, the Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking of State Attorneys General of the United States.

That’s a whole lotta capital letters, but if you skimmed over that last bit it didn’t matter much. The main thing is that a bunch of online companies and government bodies got together and tried to determine the *actual* risks to children, as opposed to all those hysterical, made up ones that usually get the headlines.

The summary has a number of interesting points. The one that stood out for me was this:

The Internet increases the availability of harmful, problematic and illegal content, but does not always increase minors’ exposure. Unwanted exposure to pornography does occur online, but those most likely to be exposed are those seeking it out, such as older male minors.

Bing! There you have it. Teen boys like to look at porn. Knock me down with a feather. This is exactly the same result that Clive Hamilton is waving around with his “shocking” survey that revealed 84% of 16 and 17 year old boys have looked at porn online (and the other 16% were presumably lying). This is the report that inspired the mandatory filter plan that’s giving us all so much grief at present.

Of course teenagers look at porn. It’s what they do. The big question is whether they’re looking at porn for mere entertainment or if they’re seeing it as sex and gender education. If it’s the former, where’s the harm, really? If it’s the latter, well, we need to beef up our sex education programs to make sure kids know that porn is often quite, you know, dumb.

The report presented these other salient pieces of information:

Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors
face, both online and offline.

Much of the research based on law-enforcement cases involving Internet-related child exploitation predated the rise of social networks. This research found that cases typically involved post-pubescent youth who were aware (my italics) that they were meeting an adult male for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity.

Again, there it is. Those damned kids, those poor innocents that everyone is trying to protect, keep being stubbornly self-aware and sexual. How dare they!

I think we’d get a lot further with these discussions if people would stop being so shocked at the very idea of teenagers exploring porn or sexual situations and instead looked at ways to ensure that exploration has positive outcomes.

When it came to solutions, this is what the report said:

Careful consideration should be given to what the data show about the actual risks to minors’ safety online and how best to address them, to constitutional rights, and to privacy and security concerns.

Parents and caregivers should: educate themselves about the Internet and the ways in which their children use it, as well as about technology in general; explore and evaluate the effectiveness of available technological tools for their particular child and their family context, and adopt those tools as may be appropriate; be engaged and involved in their children’s Internet use; be conscious of the common risks youth face to help their children understand and navigate the technologies; be attentive to at-risk minors in their community and in their children’s peer group; and recognize when they need to seek help from others.

How ridiculously sensible. Who’d have thought it?

Of course, this is a US report. Here in Australia hysteria, misinformation, and religious agendas seem to be setting the tone of the debate about child safety and online censorship.

So a survey has revealed that 46% of women would rather give up sex than their internet connection.

The U.S. survey, which queried 2,119 adults last month, found that the gap grew even wider for both men and woman who were 18 to 34 years old. For woman, the percentage of those willing to skip the sheets in favor of the Web rose to 49 percent, while it climbed to 39 percent for men.

And for women 35 to 44 years old, the figure jumped to 52 percent.

Count me in. Although I’m not sure if I should be part of this analysis, considering the internet IS sex for me. And it’s work too.

But really. Unless I’m on holiday and deliberately disconnected, I miss the internet terribly when I don’t have it handy. And I use it all the time, to work, to write, to look up recipes, the weather, what’s on TV… Whereas sex… it’s only an occasional thing. And there’s no way to Twitter.




Today I’m feeling optimistic about the future of the internet in Australia. Grassroots group GetUp has finally launched a campaign against the clean feed. They’ve already collected 32,000 signatures in a little over 24 hours and the comments are running hot on their site. Apparently they’ve had more emails requesting a campaign on this issue than anything else.

There are now protests planned on December 14 in a number of capital cities.

The SMH has thankfully publicised the latest bit of opposition with this article published today. It’s nice to see reporting that doesn’t follow the standard pro-censorship line, and they’re actually putting the boot into the government quite a bit, possibly because Senator Conroy and his lackeys won’t speak to the media or anyone about this issue.

The Opposition and the Greens have said they will oppose the plan in the Senate. I suspect, though, that Nick Xenophon, the rogue independent, is a conservative who will vote with the government. A government, by the way, that’s not supposed to be this conservative, dammit.

I think the governments of the Western world will be watching what happens here quite closely. I don’t doubt that most of them are salivating at the thought of getting their mitts on the internet and stopping the free flow of ideas. “Protecting the children” gives them the perfect excuse. If we Aussies can successfully stop this through people power, it will send an important message.

We are the People’s Republic of the Internet and you mess with us at your peril!

I left a long comment on one of the blogs at GetUp and I want to repost it here.

I’m going to come in and make the point that people are afraid to make: why should the government have the right to stop us from viewing adult material?

Yes folks, I’m talking porn. NO, not child porn – that’s just the straw man thrown up to distract people from the fact of censorship. I’m talking about the legal adult material that is enjoyed by up to 70% of Australian adults.

The internet has allowed adults to enjoy sexually explicit material without the board of classification poking its nose in or giving its stamp of approval. The world hasn’t come to an end because people have been able to watch porn in the privacy of their own homes. Australians have been able to make their own decisions about what they want to watch without outside forces imposing their morals. This is a GOOD thing.

And the internet has provided the opportunity to create and access adult material that is sex positive, queer and female-friendly, inclusive, realistic and non-exploitative.

So yes, aside from all the perfectly good reasons for opposing the mandatory filter, we should be standing up for our right as adults to choose what content we wish to see – and that includes websites/movies etc dealing with sex in an explicit way.

Australians are, on the whole, pretty open minded about sex but we won’t speak up for ourselves on this topic. This has allowed the prudes and religious groups to lobby loudly and impose their morals on everyone else.

And we should be asking ourselves: why do we get so upset about sex but not bat an eyelid when it comes to violence? Why is sex so rigidly controlled by governments and the church?

Obviously children should not be exposed to inappropriate material. That’s what Net Nanny is for. That’s what “parenting” is supposed to be about. But the internet shouldn’t have to be reduced to to the level of a five year old in the interests of protecting children.

So I’ve mentioned the elephant in the room but it needs to be said. If you take porn off Australians, they’re gonna be very, very cross. And we should stand up and say that.

The Australian government seems determined to go ahead with plans to filter the internet at ISP level, making people “opt in” if they want to see adult sites.

While the story itself is distinctly biased, the 51 comments listed after it cheered me up immensely. About 95% of them are against ISP filtering, and all make the point that parents shouldn’t expect the government to do their job for them.

It includes this amusing exchange:

DavidLastName: Im sick and tired of wading through a simple limewire download and gettin porn. Get rid of this garbage.

BlzBob: LIMEWIRE? If you allow your children to enter the the local strip joint to get a glass of water, don’t expect the strippers to put some clothes on while they are there.

Classic.