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Warning!
Probably most of the links below lead to pages
unsuitable for children. If it is illegal in
your country for you to read or possess the
material to which the links listed here
point, don’t click on them!
Further warning
: all kinds of fraud and malware are common in the realm of pornography. It is easy to become the victim of identity theft, get unexpected charges to your credit card, and have your computer acquire all kinds of spyware and other harmful software. Sites also change more rapidly than is true with other sites. A site that was safe and honest last week might be different this week. Be careful!
At least some kinds of pornography are illegal
in most countries, particularly porn
involving children. Laws change (partly in an
effort to keep up with the pornographers), so
if you wish to visit pornographic sites, keep
yourself informed.
Given all this, you might ask why this stuff
is here. There are two reasons. The first is
that pornography may be a significant user of
World Wide Web bandwidth. There are important
ways in which pornography is the primary
economic support of the Internet (some of our
technology for transmitting pictures or
videos has been heavily exploited by the porn
industry). The second reason for having these
links here is my firm conviction that it is
better to have things out in the open (so to
speak). The more repressive we try to be
about dirty pictures or stories, the surer we
can be that they are still being consumed,
but are being hidden so that there is less
real control over who sees or reads the
material. I am likewise convinced that all
forms of prior censorship are wrong and
impractical. It’s easy to find
“proof”: the writings of the
Marquis de Sade are still very much around
despite two centuries of vigorous efforts to
suppress them - and those writings remain
quite filthy, even by today’s standards.
I suppose there is a third reason for these
links: some of my writings deal with sex or
the effects of pornography. These links are
part of the background to those writings. See
especially Better Study Habits,
a glimpse of a future in which the
“anti-pornography” forces have
temporarily won the war. I have little doubt
that the “anti-pornography”
groups are in reality strong factors in the
spread and expense of pornography. Education
and openness are much better ways to fight
the ill effects of smut than censorship or
other, harsher forms of repression.
One final and
remarkable statement: after all the thousands
of years of having pornography around, we
still do not really understand it very well.
Obviously it provokes feelings of sexual
arousal - but only in some people and only
under some conditions. It may also appeal to
financial or social factors. Think about the
bland (by today’s standards) pictures
of Betty Grable that graced the noses of not
a few American bombers in World War II. Those
pictures also were a kind of
“soft-core” pornography. What
were those pictures really there for? The
pictures might have gotten a young man in
various kinds of trouble in many a small town
in America in that same time.
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All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms
of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License. Other licensing terms may be available.