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Mass awakening needed
to curb Net porn
New-York based research firm, Datamonitor, says porn Website owners, in a bid to lure more customers, inundate the Internet with porn spam, which is often laced with graphic sexual photographs, as a teaser to visit paid sex Websites. Spam is sent randomly to millions of e-mail addresses in one go. Porn Website owners got a shot in the arm last week when a federal appeals court in Philadelphia struck down a law aimed at shielding children from Internet porn. The court affirmed earlier decisions that said even though porn offends many persons; porn on the Web is free speech, protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Emboldened by this, pornographers began flooding unsolicited porn advertisements to many Internet mailboxes, including some easily accessed by children. A California-based columnist for PC computer magazine, John Dvorak, estimates that he gets 500 e-mails a day, with as many as 100 that he never asked for, touting porn sites. He says moderately effective filters are available to block porn spam from one’s electronic mailbox. Some of the filters recognise that the return e-mail address is fictitious or impossible to trace and prevent the pornographic message from reaching onemail inbox. But then defining what constitutes porn is tricky. Porn site owners have eased the term "adult material" into the lexicon, making even hard-core sexual content seem like harmless entertainment for grown-ups, media reports here said. Gail Dines, who is the director of American studies programme at Wheelock College in Boston, has written a chapter about Internet porn in a new feminist anthology called Sisterhood is Forever. She notes that pornographers pioneered much of the Internet’s sophisticated technology by introducing such features as video streaming and pop-up ads. According to her, the effect of porn, first honed by ever-more-provocative sex magazines, beginning with the soft porn of Playboy magazine in 1953, is that even young boys are accepting the degradation of women as the norm. In other words, boys are seeing themselves as entitled to use females any way they want. The only real hope at the moment, Dines says, is that as more and more people are agitated by the waves of porn on their Internet screens, porn will again be viewed as harmful, rather than as a victimless crime. Many companies have fired employees for accepting porn messages at their computer workstations, sometimes innocently. Even though federal laws aimed at Internet porn have been unsuccessful due to unfavourable court decisions, several US states have taken steps on their own. For instance, the northwestern state of Utah offers a lengthy discussion of Internet porn and porn spam on the Website of its State Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. Last year, Utah passed a law aimed at prosecuting firms that, without being asked, send Internet porn into Utah homes, where children can view it. Utah will soon offer its
citizens what it calls a "virtual 911 button", named after the
code that people use to call for help by telephone in an emergency. This will enable Utah
residents to block further messages from undesirable Websites while at
the same time alerting the state attorney general. Utah hopes this new
technology will be an effective weapon against Internet pornographers. |
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INTERNET
pornography has become a big business in the USA with computer users
spending nearly $3 billion annually to see porn on increasingly explicit
Websites, according to a new survey.