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* COVER STORY
On a Screen Near You:
CYBERPORN
It's popular, pervasive and surprisingly perverse, according to
the first survey of on-line erotica. And there's no easy way to
stamp it out
By: PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT
SEX IS EVERYWHERE THESE DAYS-in books, magazines, films,
television, music videos and bus-stop perfume ads. It is printed on
dial-a-porn business cards and slipped under windshield wipers.
It is acted out by balloon-breasted models and actors with unflagging
erections, then rented for $4 a night at the corner video
store. Most ,Americans have become so inured to the open display
of eroticism-and the arguments for why it enjoys special
status under the First Amendment-that they hardly notice it's
there.
Something about the combination of sex and computers,
however, seems to make otherwise worldly-wise adults a little
crazy. How else to explain the uproar surrounding the
discovery by a U.S. Senator-Nebraska Democrat James Exon - that
pornographic pictures can be downloaded 'From the Internet and
displayed on a home 'Computer? This, as any computer-savvy
undergrad can testify, is old news. Yet suddenly the press is on
alert, parents and teachers are up in arms, and lawmakers in
Washington are rushing to ban the smut from cyberspace with new
legislation-sometimes with little regard to either its
effectiveness or its constitutionality.
If you think things are crazy now, though, wait until the
politicians get hold of a report coming out this week. A re-search
team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
has conducted-
ducted an exhaustive study of on-line porn-what's available, who
is downloading it, what turns them on-and the findings (to be
published in the Georgetown Law journal) are sure to pour fuel on
an already explosive debate.
The study, titled Marketing Pornography on the information
Superhighway, is significant not only for what it tells us about
what's happening on the computer networks but also for what it
tells us about ourselves. Pornography's appeal is surprisingly
elusive. It plays as much on fear, anxiety, curiosity and taboo
as on genuine eroticism. The Carnegie Mellon study, drawing on
elaborate computer records of on-line activity, was able to measure
for the first time what people actually download, rather than
what they say they want to see. "We now know what the consumers
of computer pornography really look at in the privacy of their own
homes," says Marty Rimm, the study's principal investigator.
"And we're finding a fundamental shift in the kinds of images
they demand."
What the Carnegie Mellon researchers discovered was:
There's an awful lot of porn on-line. In an 18-month study, the
team surveyed 917,410 sexually explicit pictures, descriptions,
short stories and film clips. On those Usenet newsgroups
where digitized images-ages are stored, 83.5% of the pictures were
pornographic.
It is immensely popular. Trading in sexually explicit imagery,
according to the report is now "one of the largest (if not the
largest)
* PORN IS IMMENSELY POPULAR: IN AN 18-MONTH STUDY, THE
CARNEGIE MELLON RESEARCHERS FOUND SEXUALLY EXPLICIT PICTURES,
SHORT STORIES AND FILM CLIPS ON-LINE *
recreational applications of users of computer networks." At one
U.S. university, 13 of the 40 most frequently visited newsgroups
had names like alt.sex.stories, rec.arts.erotica and alt.sex.bondage.
it is a big moneymaker. The great majority (71%) of
the sexual images on the news-groups surveyed originate from
adult-oriented computer bulletin-board systems (BBS) whose
operators are trying to lure customers to their private
collections of X-rated material. There are thousands of these
BBS services, which charge fees (typically $10 to $30 a month)
and take credit cards; the five largest have annual revenues in
(excess of $1 million.
It is ubiquitous. Using data obtained with permission from BBS
operators, the Carnegie Mellon team identified (but did not
publish the names of individual consumers in more than 2,000
cities in all 50 states and 40 countries, territories and
provinces around the world-including some countries like China,
where possession of pornography can be a capital offense.
It is a guy thing. According to the BBS operators, 98.9% of the
consumers of on-line porn are men. And there is some evidence that
many of the remaining 1.1% are women paid to hang out (in the
"chat" rooms and bulletin boards to make the patrons feel more
comfortable. It is not just naked women. Perhaps because
hard-core sex pictures are so widely available elsewhere, the
adult BBS market seems to be driven largely by a demand for
images that can't be found in the average magazine rack:
pedophilia (nude photos of children), hebephilia (youths) and
what the researchers call paraphilia - a grab bag of "'deviant"
material that includes images of' bondage, sadomasochism,
urination, defecation, and sex acts with a barnyard full of
animals.
The appearance of material like this on, a public network
accessible to men, women and children around the world arises
issues too important to ignore or to oversimplify. Parents have
legitimate concerns about what their kids are being exposed to
and, conversely, what those children might miss if their access to
the Internet were cut off. Lawmakers must
balance public safety with their obligation to preserve essential
civil liberties. Men and women have to come to terms with what
draws them to such images. And computer programmers have to come
up with more enlightened ways to give users control over a network
that is, by design, largely out of control.
The Internet, of course, is more than a place to find
pictures of people having sex with dogs. It's a vast marketplace
of ideas and information of all sorts-on politics, religion,
science and technology. If the fast-growing World Wide Web
fulfills its early promise, the network could be a powerful
engine of economic growth in the 21st century. And as the
Carnegie Mellon study is careful to point out, pornographic image
files, despite their evident popularity, represent only about 3%
of all the messages on the Usenet newsgroups, while the Usenet
itself represents only 11.5% of the traffic on the Internet.
As shocking and, indeed, legally obscene as some of the
on-line porn may be, the researchers found nothing that can't be
found in specialty magazines or adult bookstores.
Most of the material offered by the private BBS services, in
fact, is simply scanned from existing print publications.
But pornography is different on the computer networks. You
can obtain it in the privacy of your home-without having to walk
into a seedy bookstore or movie house. You can download only
those things that turn you on, rather than buy an entire magazine
or video. You can explore different aspects of your sexuality
without exposing yourself to communicable diseases or public
ridicule. (Unless, of course, someone gets hold of the computer
files tracking your on-line activities, as happened earlier this
year to a couple dozen crimson-faced Harvard students.)
The great fear of parents and teachers, of course, is not
that college students will find this stuff but that it will fall
into the hands of those much younger including some, perhaps, who
are not emotionally prepared to make sense of what they see.
Ten-year-old Anders Urmacher, a student at the Dalton School in
New York City who likes to hang out with other kids in the Treehouse chat room
on America On-line, got Email from a stranger that contained a
mysterious file with instructions for how to download it. He
followed the instructions, and then he called his mom. When Linda
Mann Urmacher opened the file, the computer screen filled with 10
thumbnail-size pictures showing couples engaged in various acts of
sodomy, heterosexual intercourse and lesbian sex. "I was not
aware that this stuff was on-line," says a shocked Mann Urmacher.
"Children should not be subjected to these images."
This is the flip side of Vice President AI Gore's vision of
an information superhighway linking every school and library in
the land. When the kids are plugged in, will they be exposed to
the seamiest sides of human sexuality? Will they fall prey to
child molesters hanging out in electronic chat rooms?
It's precisely these fears that have stopped Bonnie Fell of
Skokie, Illinois, from signing up for the Internet access her
three boys say they desperately need. "They could get bombarded
with X-rated porn, and I wouldn't have any idea," she says.
Mary Veed, a mother of three from nearby Hinsdale, makes a point
of trying to keep up with her computer-literate 12-year-old, but
sometimes has to settle for monitoring his phone bill. "Once they
get to be a certain age, boys don't always tell Mom what they do,"
she says.
"We face a unique, disturbing and urgent circumstance,
because it is children who are the computer experts in our
nation's families," said Republican Senator Dan Coats of Indiana
during the debate over the controversial anti-cyberporn bill he
cosponsored with Senator Exon.
According to at least one of those experts-16-year-old David
Slifka of Manhattan the danger of being bombarded with unwanted
pictures is greatly exaggerated. "If you don't want them you
won't get them," says the veteran Internet surfer. Private adult
BBS's require proof of age (usually a driver's license) and are
off-limits to minors, and kids have to master some fairly daunting
computer science before they can turn so-called binary files on
the Usenet into high-resolution color pictures. "The chances of
randomly coming across them are unbelievably slim," says Slifka.
While groups like the Family Research Council insist that
on-line child molesters represent a clear and present danger, there
is no evidence that it is any greater than the thousand other threats
* THE BIGGEST DEMAND IS NOT FOR HARD-CORE SEX PICTURES BUT FOR
MATERIAL INCLUDING PEDOPHILIA, BONDAGE, SADOMASOCHISM AND SEX
ACTS WITH VARIOUS ANIMALS *
every day. Ernie Allen, executive director of the National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children, acknowledges that there have been
10 or 12 "fairly high-profile cases" in the past year of children
being seduced or lured on-line into situations where they are
victimized.
Kids who are not on-line are also at risk, however; more than
800,000 children are reported missing every year in the U.S.
Yet it is in the name of the children and their parents that
lawmakers are racing to fight cyberporn. The first blow was
struck by Senators Exon and Coats, who earlier this year
introduced revisions to an existing law called the Communications
Decency Act. The idea was to extend regulations written to govern
the dial-a-porn industry into the computer networks. The bill
proposed to outlaw obscene material and impose fines of up to
$100,000 and prison-on terms of up to two years on anyone who
knowingly makes "indecent" material available to children under
18.
The measure had problems from the start. In its original
version it would have made on-line-service providers criminally
liable for any obscene communications that passed through their
systems - a provision that, given the way the networks operate,
would have put the entire Internet at risk. Exon and Coats
revised the bill but left in place the language about using
"indecent" words on-line. "It's a frontal assault on the First
Amendment," says Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. Even
veteran prosecutors ridicule it. "It won't pass scrutiny even in
misdemeanor court," says one.
The Exon bill bad been written off for dead only a few
weeks ago. Republican Senator Larry Pressler of South
Dakota, chairman of the Commerce committee, w which has
jurisdiction over the larger telecommunications-reform act to
which it is attached, told Time that he intended to move to
table it.
That was before Exon showed up in the Senate with his
"blue book." Exon had asked a friend to download some of the
rawer images available on-line. "I knew it was bad," he says.
"But then when I got on there, it made Playboy and Hustler look like
Sunday-school stuff."
He had the images printed out, stuffed them in a blue folder and
invited his colleagues to stop by his desk on the Senate floor to
view them. At the end of the debate-which was carried live on
C-SPAN few Senators wanted to cast a nationally televised vote
that might later be characterized as pro-pornography. The bill
passed 84 to 16.
Civil libertarians were outraged. Mike Godwin, staff counsel
for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, complained that the
indecency portion of the bill would transform the vast library of
the Internet into a children's reading room, where only subjects
suitable for kids could be discussed. "Its government censorship,"
said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"The First Amendment shouldn't end where the Internet begins."
The key issue, according to legal scholars, is whether the
Internet is a print medium (like a news-paper), which enjoys
strong protection against government interference, or a broadcast
medium (like television), which may be subject to all sorts of
government control. Perhaps the most significant import of the Exon
bill, according to EFF's Godwin, is that it would place the
computer networks under the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications
Commission, which enforces, among other rules, the
injunction against using the famous seven dirty words on the
radio. In a TIME/CNN poll Of 1,000 Americans conducted last week
by Yankovich Partners, respondents were sharply split on the
issue: 42% were for FCC like control over sexual content on the
computer net-works; 48% were against it.
By week's end the balance between protecting speech and
curbing pornography seemed to be tipping back toward the
libertarians. In a move that surprised conservative supporters,
House Speaker Newt Gingrich denounced the Exon amendment. "It
is clearly a violation of free speech, and it's a violation of the
right of adults to communicate with each other," he told a caller
on a cable-TV show. It was a key defection, because Gingrich
will preside over the computer-decency debate when it moves to the House
in July. Mean-while, two U.S. Representatives, Republican
Christopher Cox of California and Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon,
were putting together an anti-Exon amendment that would bar
federal regulation of the Internet and help parents find ways to
block material they found objectionable.
Coincidentally, in the closely watched case of a University
of Michigan student who published a violent sex fantasy on the
Internet and was charged with transmitting a threat to injure or
kidnap across state lines, a federal judge in Detroit last week
dismissed the charges. The judge ruled that while Jake Baker's
story might be deeply offensive, it was not a crime.
How the Carnegie Mellon report will affect the delicate
political balance on the cyberporn debate is anybody's guess.
Conservatives thumbing through it for rhetorical ammunition
will find plenty. Appendix B lists the most frequently
downloaded files from a popular adult BBS, providing both the
download count and the two-line descriptions posted by the
board's operator. Suffice it to say that they all end in ex-
exclamation points, many include such phrases as "nailed to a
table!" and none can be printed in TIME.
How accurately these images reflect America's sexual
interests, however, is a matter of some dispute. University of
Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann, whose 1994 Sex in America
survey painted a far more humdrum picture of America's sex life,
says the Carnegie Mellon study may have captured what he calls the
"gaper phenomenon." "There is a curiosity for things that are
extraordinary and way out," he says. "Ifs like driving by a
horrible accident. No one wants to be in it, but we all slow down
to watch."
Other sociologists point out that the difference between the
Chicago and Carnegie Mellon reports may be more apparent than
real. Those 1 million or 2 million people who download pictures
from the Internet represent a self-selected group with an interest
in erotica. The Sex in America respondents, by contrast, were a
few thousand people selected to represent a cross section of all
America.
Still, the new research is a gold mine for psychologists,
social scientists, computer marketers and anybody with an interest
in human sexual behavior. Every time computer users logged on to
one of these bulletin boards, they left a digital trail of their
transactions, allowing the pornographers to compile data bases
about their buying habits and sexual tastes. The more sophisticated
operators were able to adjust their inventory and their descriptions to match
consumer demand.
Nobody did this more effectively than Robert Thomas, owner of
the Amateur Action BBS in Milpitas, California, and a kind of
modern-day Marquis de Sade, according to the Carnegie Mellon
report. He is currently serving time in an obscenity case that
maybe headed for the Supreme Court.
Thomas, whose BBS is the on-line-porn market leader,
discovered that he could boost sales by trimming soft and hard
core images from his data base while front-loading his files with
pictures of sex acts with animals (852) and nude prepubescent
children (more than 5,000), his two most popular categories of
porn. He also used copywriting tricks to better serve his
customers' fantasies. For example, he described more than 1,200 of
his pictures as depicting sex scenes between family members
(father and daughter, mother and son), even though there was no
evidence that any of the participants were actually related.
These "incest" images were among his biggest sellers, accounting
for 10% of downloads.
The words that worked were some-times quite revealing.
Straightforward oral sex, for example, generally got a lukewarm
response. But when Thomas described the same images using words
like choke or choking, consumer demand doubled.
Such findings may cheer anti-pornography activists; as
feminist writer Andrea Dworkin puts it, "the whole purpose of
pornography is to hurt women." Catharine MacKinnon, a professor
of law at the University of Michigan, goes further. Women are
doubly violated by pornography, she writes in Vindication and
Resistance, one of three essays in the forthcoming George-town
Lawjournal that offer differing views on the Carnegie Mellon
report. They are violated when it is made and exposed to
further violence again and again every time it is consumed.
"The question pornography poses in cyberspace," she writes, "is
the same one it poses everywhere else: whether anything will be
done about it."
But not everyone agrees with Dworkin and MacKinnon, by any
means; even some feminists think there is a place in life and the
Internet for erotica. In her new book, Defending Pornography,
Nadine Stross argued that censoring sexual expression would
do women more harm than good, undermining their equality, their
autonomy and their freedom.
The Justice Department, for its part, has not asked for
new antiporn legislation. Distributing obscene material across
state lines is already illegal under federal law,
and child pornography in particular is vigorously prosecuted.
Some 40 people in 14 states were arrested two years ago in
Operation Longarm for exchanging kiddie porn online. And one of
the leading characters in the Carnegie Mellon study a former Rand
McNally executive named Robert Capella, who left book publishing
to make his fortune selling pedophilia on the networks was
extradited from Tijuana, and is now awaiting sentencing in a
New Jersey jail.
For technical reasons, it is extremely difficult to stamp out
anything on the Internet, particularly Images Stored on the Usenet
newsgroups. As Internet pioneer John Gilmore famously put it,
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
There are border issues as well. Other countries on
the Internet, France, for instance-are probably no more
interested in having their messages screened by U.S. censors than
Americans would be in having theirs screened by, say, the
government of Saudi Arabia.
Historians say it should come as no surprise that the
Internet the most democratic of media would lead to new calls for
censorship. The history of pornography and efforts to suppress it
are inextricably bound up with the rise of new media and the
emergence of democracy. According to Walter Kendrick, author of
The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modem Culture, the mod-ern concept
of pornography was invented in the 19th century by European
gentlemen whose main concern was to keep obscene material away
from women and the lower classes. Things got out of hand with
the spread of literacy and education, which made pornography
available to anybody who could read. Now, on the computer
networks, anybody with a computer and a modem can not only consume
pornography but distribute it as well. On the Internet, anybody
can be Bob Guecione.
That might not be a bad idea, says Carlin Meyer, a professor
at New York Law School whose Georgetown essay takes a far less
apocalyptic view than MacKinnon's. She argues that if you
don't like the images of sex the pornographers offer, the
appropriate response is not to suppress them but
to overwhelm them with healthier, more realistic ones. Sex on
the Internet, she maintains, might actually be good for young
people. "[Cyberspace] is a safe space in which to explore the
forbidden and the taboo," she writes. "It offers the possibility
for genuine, unembarrassed conversations about accurate as well as
fantasy images of sex."
That sounds easier than it probably is. Pornography is
powerful stuff, and as long as there is demand for it, there
will always be a supply. Better software tools may help cheek the
worst abuses, but there will never be a switch that will cut it
off entirely not without destroying the unbridled expression that
is the source of the Internet's (and democracy's) greatest
strength. The hard truth, says John Perry Barlow, co-founder of
the EFF and father of three young daughters, is that the burden
ultimately falls where it always has: on the parents. "If you
don't want your children fixated on filth," he says, better step
up to the tough task of raising them to find it as distasteful as
you do yourself."
-Reported by Hannah Bloch/Washington
Wendy Cole/Chicago and Sharon E Epperson/New York