Bitching about pr0n

Ok.... Well, it seem the Supreme Court has decided that porn is a big enough threat to our children that libraries should be able to be compelled to install Internet filters, whether they want to or not. This is supposed to be a way of keeping curious little kids away from all the big nasty porn sites running around in the wild hinterlands of Cyberspace.

I wonder when they're going to do something about all the porn that may be coming to kids - unsolicited, and with no effort on the kids part - to their inboxes.

If you're anything like me, you probably get several pieces of pornographic spam ever day. Sometimes I get pictures of women with their legs spread wide and the stupidest looks on their faces (which I presume are supposed to look sexy but tend to look more like someone who's constipated and sucking on a lemon), pictures of women getting ready to suck on a guys dick, pictures of guys standing with their flags flying at full-mast, women with, um.... well, lets just say if there's any truth to proteins being good for the skin, they'll have a FANTASTIC complexion soon. You name it, I get it. And while Pagans may have a reputation for being sexually liberated, I'm a bit unusual in that way. Ok, I'm pretty much a prig when it comes to porn or even "near-porn" (lets just say one of my boyfriends used to tease the daylights out of me because anytime we sat down to watch a movie that might have some kind of a sex scene in it - even a PG-13 rated one - I had to have a Newsweek handy so I could just read that while he watched the action).

Sure, it's no problem for me to delete it, and I'm old enough that even though I absolutely loathe the stuff, it's not traumatic if I accidentially see it. But I know that I never gave may name or email address to anyone who would be sending out porn ads, and I've never filled out any surveys, visited any sites, or anything else to give any indication that I'd be interested in porn ads or sites.

I mention that because I think it's important - I didn't ask for any of this stuff. I get it, though, and I know there are probably a million ways for porn pushers to get my email. Companies I've given my e-mail to may well have sold or rented their list to someone. Web crawling bots may have scooped it up off of any website where I've ever had my email address posted. Some of it is undoubtedly from programs that can just blanket a domain with emails, without knowing the specific user names (or the part before the "@" sign).

Obviously, NONE of these methods take into account how old the person in question might be. The porn pushers simply don't care. They want to get their message out to whomever they can - and if some kids get sent it, oh well.

So here's the current irony - a kid goes into the library, surfs around at the sites allowed by the filter, maybe posts a couple messages on guestbooks, leaving his email address, or something of that nature. The next time he logs on, that address has gotten scooped up by a web bot, and sold off to "Big Bobs House of Big Boobs" or some such enterprise, and when the kid goes back to the library to check his email, well, whaddya know, he's got some titty pictures to look at.

Many Internet filters try to filter out anything that might be pornographic from email, but no system like that is going to be perfect. I've been working with one on my home computer that catches about 90% of them (I can tell because it just transfers them to a different folder which I scan through to make sure it's not deleting something I actually need to read), but I still end up with several rather unpleasant surprises each day when I go through my regular mail.

So, is the next step maybe going to be to prevent anyone from sending unsolicitated pornographic images through e-mail? I have to admit, on a personal level, I'd love it, though on a political level, I don't know if I'd like the prescedent it'd set. It just seems to be an odd bit of inconsistancy, though. Trying to prevent people from seeing porn in a public library but not caring who sends it to whom through email. Hmmm...

I dunno. Any suggestions?