In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 Bad Taste, Miasmic Forces, and the Ubiquity of Online Porn “Internet Is for PORN!!”—a World of Warcraft machinima video based on the musical Avenue Q—was uploaded on YouTube in April 2006, and it attracted over 6.5 million views within its four first years of distribution. In the video, Trekkie Monster interrupts Kate’s song about the wonders of the Internet by shouting “for porn” at strategic times. The message of Kate’s enthusiastic lines—such as “The Internet is really really great,” “There’s always some new site,” or “You can research, browse and shop / Until you’ve had enough and you’re ready to stop”—are radically transformed by Trekkie Monster’s recurring holler, “for porn”: “Why do you think the Net was born?—for porn, porn, porn,” the Trekkie Monster sings. The video is structured on the discrepancies between Kate’s and Trekkie Monster’s understandings of the medium. Applauding the speed and diversity of the Internet as an information and communication medium and claiming to hate porn, Kate accuses Trekkie of being a gross pervert because “normal people don’t sit at home and look at porn on the Internet.” To her surprise and horror, the “normal people” then stand up to praise the wonders of online porn in chorus: “All these guys unzip their flies for porn, porn, porn,” “Grab your dick and double click, for porn, porn, porn!” The video borrows from Avenue Q’s juxtaposition of bawdy humor with fantasy characters modeled after the classic children’s TV show Sesame Street, the “machinima effect” of WoW characters performing a lighthearted musical, as well as its take on the Internet as a medium. Like the musical, the video reiterates the piece of common knowledge that opened this book: not only is the Internet full of porn, but porn is its very reason for being (also Lillie 2004, 43–44). The video performs a coarticulation of the Internet and porn and connects the two in an intimate manner. Online porn becomes also firmly coarticulated and associated with male 32 Chapter 2 Internet users: grabbing their dicks, the men are a source of disgust for Kate, as encapsulated in her exclamation, “EEEWWWWW!” For Kate, porn, its masturbating male consumers, and ultimately even the Internet become sources of disgust, whereas the “normal people” loudly express their appreciation for online porn. A Killer Application It is common knowledge that the Internet is full of porn and that Internet users spend considerable amount of time masturbating by their screens. At the same time, this is something of a public secret in the sense that most people (unlike the “normal people” in the WoW machinima video) are unlikely to mention their fondness for such activities when asked about their uses of the Internet. Instead, “normal” users tend to be marked apart from consumers of online porn, who are seen as addicts, potential perverts, or impressionable victims of the porn industry. The wide popularity and ubiquity of online porn means that the category of porn user is far from marginal or homogeneous, yet users are sheltered from exposure to porn (often in a patronizing manner). Google image searches, for example, are filtered by default as a “moderate” SafeSearch, and anyone who wants to access sexually explicit images needs to turn off the filter. SafeSearch, in its “strict” and “moderate” variations, filters out images that “contain pornography , explicit sexual content, profanity, and other types of hate content.”1 This phrasing equates sexually explicit images with hate, while the notion of safety in SafeSearch associates them with risk and danger. This rhetorical move is not unusual and reflects the position of online porn as ubiquitous yet effaced, perpetually popular yet seen as problematic filth.2 Porn is also effaced from the listings of the most popular search terms that Google and other search engines freely publish. The Search Engine Guide listing the top five hundred search terms notes that, “Although this list is filtered, adult terms might still appear. Should you see any below, then we apologize in advance.”3 This disclaimer suggests that adult terms are potentially offensive , as are the actual search practices listed (and filtered). Ultimately, Internet users are offensive, and their activities have to be apologized for. At the same time, findings that children broadly search for porn and sex online make the news across national boundaries.4 Although porn is recurrently marked off from the field of everyday media and its agents (consumers, [3.135...

Share