Cyber Porn

Few people are unaware that the Internet, once manfully dubbed by a forgotten US presidential candidate with the even more forgotten moniker, "Information Superhighway" has so far become less a highway than a vast collection of flashing backstreets where sex and phoney bonhomie are the primary trade. "Sex" is the most frequent search term on the Internet, and searchers can be gratified by an estimated 15 million pages of hot sex graciously provided by an industry that rakes in an estimated $1.1 billion dollars a year. It's thought that 8-15% of all Internet users regularly use their connections for sex.

What strikes me, since that number certainly includes people you and I know very well, and probably includes you and me, is the inadequacy of what is said about it. Are all these millions of people weak-willed loners with collapsed morality? Are they all, to cite the frequently used language of pathology, "addicts", perhaps lured into dependence by the wiles of unprincipled hi-tech pimps? Or are they simply taking advantage of the pragmatics of Internet porn - complete privacy (they hope!) and massive choice?

Such accounts of the phenomenon always seem to fall short of its magnitude. They merely picture Internet voyeurs as "empty" subjects just waiting to be filled with lasciviousness. These millions of otherwise dutiful and productive citizens are, when it comes to explanations of their relationship to pornography, completely without definition - except that of the total absence of the moral strength that would be a barrier to the entreaties of marketers and their all-too-easily available goods. When we would not seek to understand the success of Titanic or the Harry Potter books purely in terms of the inability of subjects to resist them, why do we do so with Internet pornography?

I think the answer lies in the fact that such explanations have become caught up in pornography's own self-presentation ("Hot cyber babes want YOU!"): that it is equivalent to sex itself, a surrogate that usefully side-steps all the painful inefficiencies of sex in the real world. In this naturalized view, human beings seem to have evolved with a craving for digital visions of sex (just as they crave sex itself) - and suddenly (at long last) the marketplace has fulfilled this desire (Just another miracle from Capitalism Inc)! Just as with other natural cravings, individuals must be expected to regulate this one with the higher structures of culture and morality. (A different model is applied to other cultural productions - we are not assumed to have a natural craving for films about historical disasters or books about magical little boys - and here appetite is discussed in terms of "taste" rather than "need".)

But this is to greatly reduce the complexity - and the interest - of the situation. It is to exclude the erotics of the Internet itself, and to turn the technology simply into a delivery system. How can one imagine - to take a historical perspective - that the appeal of the hand-cranked Nickelodeons that ran rife in New York from 1904 and that showed to individual viewers films with titles like "Peeping Jimmy", "French High Kickers" or "The Soubrettes' Picnic" (aside from their more family-orientated fare) had nothing to do with the thrill of technology? In the middle of a city whose modern grandeur was discerned by outsiders in the complexity of its layers of illusion, that was still the capital of the nascent movie industry - how could being in New York City itself have played no role in the titillation of Jimmy and his peeping? From today's standpoint, the "content" of Nickelodeon's peephole fantasies seems silly and bland, but the libidinal draw of technology and metropolis is still easy to understand. I would suggest that such contextual elements must be inserted back into our understanding of Internet pornography if the relationship between 21st century Jimmys’ and their digital high kickers is going to have any meaning. Rather than assuming that people are just passively "invaded" by Internet porn, let us ask what they might actively be seeking in it.