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David Spates Porn in the Internet's attached string I say I don't do it. You say you don't do
it. Your parents, your kids, your friends, the shop owner, the
policeman, the president (well, maybe not the president), the
coach, the preacher and the woman with two buggies full in the
express lane at the grocery store all say they don't do it. I'm talking about pornography on the Internet. Now before you get all flustered, I know you
wouldn't ever look at such a site. Everyone else in the world
apparently is, but you're different. You and I are a better class
of people, right? It's those other people you have to
look out for. Internet pornography, the thing that nobody
participates in, is huge, and anyone who has ever done anything
at all on the Internet has felt pornography's presence. You don't
even have to visit a porno Web site to be exposed to it. Unsolicited
advertisements for Internet porn are as prevalent in everyone's
e-mailboxes as get-rich-quick schemes and tired old jokes. It
just shows up in your e-mailbox. I get them at my home. I even
get them here at the Chronicle. The communication revolution is here all right,
and it's injected with silicon. I'm not hear to attack pornography, and I'm not here to defend it. I just think it's interesting that porn is so entrenched in the e-world. Sure, you can ignore it, delete the messages and go about your business of bidding on Gilligan's hat on Ebay, but sometimes it gets tiresome. Every morning at the Chronicle, my
first chore is to check the paper's e-mail messages and route
them to the right person. Of the 25 or so e-mails we get at the
paper every day, I would say more than 80 percent of them are
completely worthless. And of that 80 percent, there's always
plenty of pornography. I delete them, of course, but it takes
time, but I guess that's the price we pay for technological progress.
Everything in this world has a string attached, and I suppose
bypassing a wave of porn is the Internet's string. All of this does provide me with a good laugh
every once in a while however. One of the latest porn ads sent
to the Chronicle was entitled "Check This Out."
Since I couldn't tell what it was regarding without opening it,
I looked at it. It was an ad for "The Nude Celebrity Collection." What drew my attention was the message's first
line: "Are you tired of spending countless hours searching
for pictures of nude celebrities? Well, the search is over!" That strikes me funny. Are there really guys
out there spending countless hours searching for pictures of
nude celebrities? Who are these guys? No one admits to doing
it, but obviously someone's doing it. Do these guys get home
from work after a long day only to hunker down in front of the
computer to search for nude pictures of Uma Thurman? Anyway, the ad goes on to offer a CD-ROM containing
nearly 9,000 nude pictures of celebrities. It even lists some
of the women whose pictures are on this CD, which by the way
is only $10. I continued reading, skimming by the names of the
bimbos you'd expect to see on such a list: Pamela Anderson, Jenny
McCarthy, Bo Derek, Anna Nicole Smith and the like. Upon closer inspection, however, I spotted
some names that surprised me: Barbra Streisand, Julia Louis Dreyfuss,
Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, Maria Shriver, Whitney Houston and
Grace Kelly. Obviously someone who's handy with a computer has
been pasting these women's faces on nude models. And that made me laugh even more. Apparently
there must be guys out there who get their kicks from seeing
Grace Kelly's face on the body of some surgically enhanced model.
To each his own, I suppose, but that's just goofy. I periodically stretch the truth for comedic
effect or to emphasize a point, but you can take this to the
bank. I have no desire whatsoever to see Barbra Streisand's face
on Pamela Anderson's body. I doubt you do either, but apparently
someone does. |