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| September, 2000 |
Index
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When I first logged onto the Internet, I surfed incessantly for porn. I spent days, nights, consumed probably hundreds of megabytes, astounded and breathlessly excited by the volume of it available online — for free. I could barely contain myself. I couldn't contain myself. I was the proverbial kid in a candy store. And when I got my first personal Internet account — disaster. A hundred pictures here, five hundred pictures there, and soon it would be daybreak. I skipped classes, missed appointments, didn't sleep. If I had been twelve when all this had happened, I wondered, would I have ever gone out at all? Would I have ever bothered with sex? And later, researching a story for this magazine, I diagnosed myself retrospectively as a sex addict. Dr. Jennifer Schneider, a member of the National Council on Sex Addiction and Compulsivity, was telling me, "The dean of the Harvard Divinity School was clearly a sufferer — he got fired because he had thousands of pornographic images on his computer," giving me a terrific jolt. "Cybersex addicts are obsessed, completely preoccupied," she was saying. "They continue despite negative consequences." Yes, yes, I was thinking, that's me.
Sex addiction probably wasn't among the foremost concerns of the federal government when it passed the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) two years ago, banning unrestricted access to online porn, but I feel certain it crossed their minds. A nation of porn-addicted adolescents? — okay, porn-addicted adolescent boys? — thought the outraged, sexually well-behaved members of Congress. We must close the floodgates, thought President Clinton as he signed the bill into law on October 21, 1998. Of course, the politicos also believed that not only would minors develop an unhealthy preoccupation for porn but would become corrupted morally and mentally as well (and yes, I'll grant you, there's some pre-t-t-y weird stuff out there, which is part of my job to bookmark and look at every few days). John McCain, who authored COPA, feels very strong about this issue. "As we wire America's children to the Internet," he said earlier this year, "we are inviting these dirtbags to prey upon our children in every classroom and library in America."
The last thing I felt looking at cyberporn was that I was being victimized by some phantom pornographer in the South Seas of China. On the contrary, I felt the warriors of the New Economy were doing me a favor. Through the early days of puberty, I had been limited to surreptitiously folding copies of Exercise—For Men Only! into copies of Southern Living at the local drugstore. With the Web, I had access to limitless amounts, and it didn't cost me a dime.
It wasn't as if the porn sites weren't trying to ward me off. Virtually everyone had some kind of warning; some, to my irritation, even required passwords from an age-verification service that charged a monthly fee. I remember one site that told me it would erase my hard drive if I wasn't of age, and another that listed the legality of looking at porn in eight or so countries (I only recall being baffled as to why Vietnam was on the list). Sometimes the website helpfully informed you of what you'd see if you clicked on "Enter" — as if the naked men dancing across the banner ads weren't any clue. Yes, I'm over 18. Click. Yes, I'm over 21. Click. Yes, I want to see naked guys. Click. Yes, I want to see naked guys in locker rooms and prisons and fields of grass, rolling around and engaged in explicit sex acts. One site said, Yes, I want to see ART. Why not? I glibly clicked through.
I was just over eighteen years old, which meant I had a First Amendment right to look at the stuff, but had I been a year younger, my viewing enjoyment could have constitutionally been made illegal. In fact, there have been several attempts to do so. In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which banned publishing "indecent" material online in a manner available to people under eighteen years of age. It was intended to clamp down on the explosion of cyberporn, which was, from the start, easily available to minors. However, the law was so vaguely worded that it effectively banned any website that published potentially offensive material (the government would have banned itself, for instance, from publishing the Starr Report). The courts struck CDA down as unconstititutional. Then McCain drafted COPA, or CDA II, as some called it, which more specifically criminalized publishing anything "harmful to minors" without also putting up age-verification restrictions, such as asking for a credit card number or an adult-identification code from a service like Adult Check. After a protracted legal battle with the ACLU, that law, too, was struck down a few months ago. Then, just last month, a federal judge banned Virginia from enforcing its law, passed in April 1999, which placed an outright ban on sexually explicit narratives and images on the Net.
A death knell has clearly been sounded for the government's attempt at regulating content on the Web. But why do they keep failing? First, one must understand that there are two kinds of objectionable speech recognized by the courts in this country: obscenity, which can be banned, and indecency, which can be restricted from children but must be protected for adults. Porn, online and off, falls into the category of indecency, as do the work of controversial artists like Karen Finley and Andres Serrano and the catalogs of popular retailer Abercrombie & Fitch.
Who determines what's indecent? Your community does. CDA and its successors rely on the litmus test of "community standards" — leaving it up to state and local authorities to decide on what is and isn't "harmful to minors." But, as every cyber-simpleton knows, a kid in Tennessee can access a webpage whether it was made by a friend down the block or a Czech pornographer. When photographer Sally Mann provoked a firestorm of protest from parents and savvy pols, who claimed she was sexualizing children, her books quickly got yanked from many bookstores across the country, but it's impossible to do the same thing to a website. As Judge Leonard Garth ruled in striking down COPA, the test of community standards is impossible to apply to the global Internet. Indeed, the only way COPA could be enforced would be to adhere to the most restrictive set of standards — and this, Garth ruled, places an impermissible burden upon free speech.
Still, this doesn't change the fact that indecency can still be banned for minors. So both the industry and policy makers are searching for another solution. Filtering software, a kind of V-chip for the Internet, is the basis of parental control, a system that many people, including Nerve's CEO; have favored. It's a logical and sensible alternative to implementing federal controls, and became a quite popular option when CDA tanked. A small cottage industry developed around a new filtering standard called PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection), and was backed by companies like SafeSurf and CyberPatrol. When Microsoft chose to build PICS into version 4.0 of its Web browser, it seemed to have become the de facto policy solution.
My version of Microsoft Internet Explorer (5.0 for the Mac) incorporates PICS into its "Content Advisor," which I can switch on to filter out websites with objectionable language and sexual content. Objectionable to whom exactly? To whatever ratings system I choose — in my case, the default system packaged with the browser, developed by a Stanford professor (although, theoretically, I could use one developed by anyone from my local school system to the Christian Coalition). With this system, I can adjust the amount of violence I consume from "harmless conflict, some damage to objects" to "wanton and gratuitious violence; torture; rape." There are also adjustable nudity, sex and language levels.
The problem with PICS is that participation is strictly voluntary. Not everyone joins. Nerve, for instance, has not rated itself. And even companies who do might not be truthful — the ratings are wholly self-administered.
There's an even bigger problem, however: Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law specializing in the Internet, makes the strong case that if filtering systems became too effective, they would pose an even greater threat to free speech because they permit censorship controls to be easily administered from a centralized authority. By mandating the presence of PICS on its computers, schools could filter out not only porn but also birth control information or websites devoted to controversial art and literature; the Chinese government could censor pro-democracy websites; AOL Time Warner could conceivably block out all Disney content from its websites. Filters, in effect, make governments and Internet service providers — or anyone playing the role of network administrator — our Content Advisors, pre-screening all Net content we consume.
In any case, I tried surfing the Web with Content Advisor's violence, nudity, sex and language levels on the tamest settings, and I still managed to check out Nerve's racier member galleries, some hardcore porn sites and a white paper on building a tennis-ball bomb. I tried it on a colleague's Windows machine, thinking Microsoft might be kinder to its own operating system, to the same effect.
I understand there are plenty of other proprietary filters out there, like NetNanny, that do indeed work, filters that actually employ staffers to rate sites instead of relying on the porn companies to do it themselves. Most of my investment-banking and consultant friends can attest they exist: they can't see Nerve from their work computers, because their employers filter it out. And the software industry promises the programs will be perfected — and they probably will be. There's growing support in Washington as well: Bush and Gore like filters, and so does the ACLU. With the defeat of COPA in June and the Virginia law last month, more politicians are rallying around the technology, and McCain has proposed a new bill that would withhold federal money from public libraries and schools that refuse to install such software (call it CDA III).
Yet even if these problems are resolved, filters will never be able to determine what deserves to be termed "indecent" and what doesn't. People must decide that. And we can't seem to agree. None of this, of course, affects the government's First Amendment obligation to protect the American public's access to certain forms of expression that others might wish to restrict or ban.
What's astounding about the COPA and Virginia rulings is that they both clearly recognize that the Internet has eroded what ability we have left to distinguish between what might be indecent and what isn't. The question Washington is asking — and the courts have become unable to answer — is, How do we protect minors from indecency? But the even trickier question we now face is, Do we even know what that is anymore?
Perhaps working at Nerve has retroactively inured me to it, but porn never seemed of such grave concern to me. Clearly not "indecent"; naughty, maybe. When I heard about the dean at Harvard Divinity being diagnosed as a cybersex addict, I'd been momentarily rattled; but I soon realized that the pastime Dr. Schneider deemed a potential pathology was not all that big of a deal — not only for me (once I recovered from my initial excitement) but my friends as well. In retrospect, sex addiction seems a ridiculous diagnosis for myself, and for Reverend Ronald Theimann, too. Fired? For porn? An ex-boyfriend used porn as a kind of aphrodisiacal opener — his way of lighting candles and playing Dinah Washington. A friend has copies of Freshmen lined up neatly on a living-room bookcase, organized in the kind of plastic magazine holders librarians use. My straight friends talk about it all the time. "Only three uses for computers," one said to me, recently. "Email, word processing and porn." It's kind of like marijuana: everyone rails against it, even though a lot of us, even most of us — our dear presidential candidates included — have tried it. Then again, until recently, I lived on New York's Upper West Side, where Inches and Mandate are featured on the newsstands right next to Martha Stewart Living (another gay pornographic magazine).
What's unfortunate about the Web regulation, however, is that every time attempts are made at legislating porn off the Net, publications like Nerve are endangered. Should a book like Portnoy's Complaint be filtered out of a public library, or Ulysses filtered out of a school's curriculum? I think we're the least of Congress' worries. Certainly I don't think I would have been reading Nerve as a kid, which, with so much text and so few spread-eagles, would have bored me to tears — Porky's was more to my taste.
So take a look around our website and look at the photography galleries. Read some of the short stories. Some of the poetry. Some of the essays. And tell us, can you distinguish what's indecent from what isn't? And did you ever really know it when you saw it?
— Albert Lee
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© 2000 Nerve.com, Inc.
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