Another Reason I Hate Porn
Because if you’re online AT ALL, you can’t avoid it. It’s one thing if there’s a product out there, and sure I don’t mind if they spend some money on advertising because even if I don’t want their product, someone else might, or I might change my mind later, and it’s good to know what’s out there. But when you come on to MY turf and bombard me with your product again and again, it’s ANNOYING. Here I am, changing my blog real estate, paying for my own nice digs, and now that I’m just settling in, ready to do some decorating, feeling good, what do I get? Up to 5 long-a** spam porn comments a day. It’s annoying. It’s more than annoying, it’s disturbing. And to be quite honest, it’s reminiscent of how the tobacco industry behaved for a very long time. Peddling their product while sending us the message that everyone was doing it, that all the cool cats were smoking, and no harm was being done. They never mentioned the addiction. They never mentioned the disease. The tobacco industry single-handedly changed our culture, and if anyone objected, cautioned, or even tried to tell the truth, they were considered to be uptight. The top players in the tobacco industry knew long before we did that what they were selling was harmful, but that didn’t matter to the bottom line. They infiltrated our psyche in magazines, newspapers, television and movies. It wasn’t just the advertisements either. They knew full well if they got actors to smoke, they would not only hook the actors, they would hook the masses.
The porn industry already has more money than God. Why do they need to try to break into my comments on MY blog? Why bother with my humble little blip in the universe? They’ve already secured magazines, books, television, and Hollywood in general. They already own more internet real estate than most industries combined. They’ve got people talking and acting like porn is just a normal everyday part of life. They’ve managed to drive labiaplasty to be the largest growing form of plastic surgery. What more? Sexual stimulation rewards the dopamine pathway. The addiction highway. The internet delivered by computer is as close to a Skinner Box environment as you could create outside a lab. Directly reward the dopamine pathway with a click, increase the stimulus with each click, and you’ve got yourself some pretty slick conditioning right there. So when they send out millions of spam comments, emails, popups, whatever, they know that for every X number of people that ignore or delete, Y number won’t be able to resist having just one look. “Just one look” at porn is like trying to eat one french fry. Practically impossible. The porn industry knows it, and just like the tobacco industry got the majority of an entire culture to get hooked on its product, so too will the porn industry continue to spam my blog and everyone else until they’ve hooked as many people as they can.
Someday the studies will come out and the porn industry will be saying, “whoops, my bad”.
/ Digg this / Stumble this11 Comments so far
Leave a reply
It’s not the porn industry that loads your inbox with email; it’s the spam industry. At work, i get close to a hundred spams a day, half in Cyrillic and therefore unreadable by me, about products that can make my “love stick” longer with magic potions, more satisfying with more magic potions, or last longer with viagra for a low, low price, my debts all magically repaid, my datebook constantly filled with women just dying to meet me in very interesting ways from around the world, or from right next door, etc. That is not porn, that is simply stupidity masquerading as an email, made worth it to spammers, perhaps, by the logic of P.T. Barnum’s dictum of a sucker born every minute.
Those emails are just trying to get something (your money or your account number or access to your computer for nefarious purposes like robo-sending out more spam) for nothing (they don’t have any product in hand to sell–none, nada, zipski–not even porn anyone would bother paying for.) I believe that Microsoft stated that 95% of all emails are spam. It helps to be behind a firewall, or have a good filtering system.
As always, Monty Python has the last word on this subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE
Sravaka, I was speaking of the comment spam I get, and the majority of it is porn. 95% in fact. And a good majority of email spam is porn or interwoven with the drive for sex. Much of what you listed that you get as spam is a good example.
Currently, I don’t know how to put my blog behind a firewall. There is a spam filter on, so the comments usually don’t make it to the public view, but I still see them.
I agree with your argument that all spam is related to someone trying to make money, or get information from you so that they can make money. I just find the pornography industry is particularly invasive about it.
I also meant to say that I love the Monty Python skit. All I’m asking, in a screaming British accent, is “Why can’t I have my eggs, bacon, and sausage without the porn? I don’t like porn.”
Let me put it another way, by using William S. Burrough’s reasoning about heroin dealers which he brings up in “Naked Lunch,” wherein he says that the dealers aren’t selling the heroin to you, they are selling you to the heroin. This means that you are the product, and the heroin is merely the vehicle of conveyance wherein you get license to be an addict. It is the same with spam (actually most of advertising, now that I think of it) wherein spam is the conveyance for oneself to have license to be victimized thereby. That’s why it isn’t porn, because you are the victim, not the customer. It’s an odd culture we have, not at all obvious, I think, which is why pomo deconstructionism suits it so well, wherein form or ritual has attained ascendancy over value or meaning. This has wide ramifications in our culture. Perhaps now I should return to the logical coherence of Monty Python.
In some round about way, that’s my point. But it would be more from the spiritual perspective. In general, we are a culture of “victims”. I pick on pornography particularly for several reasons. 1) It is a good representation of all that’s confused about our culture; 2) It is the latest and greatest “drug” of which we are “victim”; 3) pornography intersected with my life painfully and without invitation recently; 4) I am raising two teenagers and there is strong evidence that our pornified culture and media is negatively influencing the young generations relationships and sexuality; and 5) people in general are turning a blind eye to it, defending it, and ignoring evidence.
Finally, the most irrelevant reason is that I signed on to moderate comments and there were 5 porn spam comments with long lists of links that each took up a page. I was annoyed and tired.
Nothing is harmful to us directly if we don’t let it be. However, if I know a person who will hit me over the head with a stick if I let him into my house even though he’s promising good times, I would be wise not to let him in. In this case, it feels like the person with the stick keeps tapping on my window, has recruited others, and sometimes walks right in my door. Even when head-beating-stick-person doesn’t get in my house, he’s getting in the houses of my neighbors, my friends, my lovers, my children, and so on. So I feel compelled to send a shout out, “hey, there’s people with sticks, and they’re gonna try and get in your house, and they’re going to tell you it’s all alright, and they’re just going to bring you great pleasure, but then they’re going hit you in the head with a stick, they’re going to steal money from your wallet, they’re going to steal your time, change your mind, create chasms in your relationships, steal the innocence of your children, all in the name of fun, and you won’t even notice it happening because it’s happening”.
So in that way, I am making that point. I’m saying, “don’t be the victim”, to this, or anything else.
While it is true that heroine is just a vehicle the addict uses to indulge in being an addict, there is little doubt that heroine is a highly addictive substance. Same with tobacco. So when one takes the first hit, they indulge the victim within. After they take the first hit, it is less an indulgence and more a becoming.
Sravaka, I also want to point out, because I don’t always spend much time on these posts and as a result don’t always communicate as well as I could, that I distinguish porn from other spam because other spam, like for refinancing your mortgage, is not representative of industries that are making sweeping changes in the landscape of our culture.
Just because I get a little saucey (sp?) once in a while I really don’t think my comments are pornographic. On the other hand, it could be that you’re psychic and distance reading my mind, in which case, I’m guilty, I apologize, and I will try to think only pure thoughts while I comment on your blog.
haha Lceel. It’s probably good that I can’t read your mind or I would’ve had to block you long ago I’m sure. Thanks for keeping it light. Though I do want to mention, as I have before, that my objections to the monster-giant porn industry has little to do with purity.
The Porn industry is the Spam industry; they are intertwined, and are usually owned by the same companies. Everyone has an addiction, but usually not as harmful as drugs, alcohol, and now Internet porn. As humans we succumb to the addiction because we are trying to escape something, and the porn industry feeds right into this.
Vanderbilt University did a great study showing a direct correlation between the addiction that drives cocaine use and sexual addiction. But we know the problem exist, what can be done about it.
Pandora’s Box was open a long time ago, and as each year passes, what was once considered unacceptable behavior is now commonplace. How can we balance individual freedom, the First Amendment, and what society considers acceptable?
Hi Jeffrey, thank you for the thoughtful responses on my blog lately. You will notice, I hope, that none of my posts ever ask for government regulation. It is my firm belief that speaking out, educating, and taking consumer action is the quickest and most lasting way to effect change.
Take, as an example, the environmental movement. The environmentalists took a long time to affect any policies, but once consumers decided (based on a lot of word of mouth and education) that they wanted to reduce the chemicals in their home and in their bodies, organic foods and green products started hitting the shelves even in large chain stores.
No law had to be passed to make that change.
Aw hell no, VV. The porn industry doesn’t know who they’re up against.