People always forget how new the Internet truly is. I was a senior in college during the spring of 1994, and I knew exactly two people who had e-mail addresses. They wrote e-mails to each other. It seemed completely impractical and a total waste of time. From what I could tell, the only people who were sending e-mail were people who drank Zima, and they mostly used the Internet to discuss properties of calculus or to send Steven Wright jokes to other weirdos in Canada. They were mostly CompuServe users. I can recall an extremely antisocial MC Hammer fan in my dormitory who had a Macintosh in his room and once tied up the phone line for five hours while he downloaded the Batman logo for no apparent reason; soon after, he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of Ibuprofen. This did not seem like the future.
However, I can also vividly recall my friend Robert showing me something in the fall of 1994 that seemed legitimately amazing—and while it didn’t prompt me to get an e-mail address, it did reinvent my image of how prevalent the Internet was going to become. Robert had always been a ground-floor computer nerd, and I asked him if there truly was an avalanche of porn online (which was something I had read about in the newspaper). Robert said, “I could show you lesbians having sex in two seconds.” Now, I assumed he meant “two seconds” figuratively, as in “I just have to wash my hair and put on my makeup—I’ll be ready to go in two seconds.” Obviously, I was wrong. Robert meant two seconds as in 00:02. And the actual image of two vacant blond girls with serpentine tongues was not nearly as mind-blowing as the fact that someone has designed a hypercomplicated network to show me lesbian smut. I could not fathom why this technology—for this particular purpose—would even exist.
Almost a decade later, I still sort of feel that way. Internet porn has replaced going to the moon as the explanation for all that is unexplainable. Here’s what I mean by that: People used to ask rhetorical questions like, “How is it that we can put a man on the moon, but I still can’t get a good martini in downtown Seattle?” Neil Armstrong made everything less complicated than a lunar landing seem plausible. Meanwhile, Internet porn makes everything more reasonable—once you’ve realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it’s erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.
We all like to talk about how the Internet is such a ground-breaking educational tool, but we’re missing what it can teach us about ourselves. Porn sites are the window to the modern soul; they’re glimpses into the twisted minds of a faceless society. All the deviancy Freud tried to deduce through decades of analysis is now completely exposed in seconds (or milliseconds, if you have DSL). When Carl Jung introduced the concept of the “collective unconscious,” he was trying to explain why all humans are inherently scared of things like darkness and vampires—but net porn is the collective conscious. It’s where we all see the things people would never admit to wanting.
And what is it that we want? From what I can tell, that answer is twofold: We want imperfection, and we want heightened reality. The pornography everyone wants to see on the Internet focuses on (a) amateurs and (b) celebrities. We either want a truck stop waitress who’s a little overweight and sort of freakish, or we want voyeuristic shots of Britney Love Aguilera3 on a private beach in Italy. And some would say that’s simply human nature, but they’re wrong; that’s a reflection of how we’re still trying to understand how this technology works. Ironically—or perhaps predictably—we need porn to do this. It’s what keeps us interested.
Let’s say a guy is sitting in a bar in Des Moines and two women walk in. One of these girls is clearly a model/actress, and she has fake boobs and luxurious hair and a perfectly sculpted body; meanwhile, her companion is just a totally normal, decent-looking person. Who will our hard-drinking Iowan immediately want to see naked? The answer is obvious—he would want to see the model. And if there are twenty-five women in the bar that night and he’s given the opportunity to see any one of them nude, he will pick whoever he thinks is the most attractive. Yet this would not be the case if these women were 2-D thumbnail pics on a Web site called nakedtavern.com. The first female selected would be whoever seemed the most normal (i.e., neither ideal nor repulsive), or maybe the woman with the nicest smile who seemed just a tier below gorgeous. And porn sites are completely aware of this phenomenon. You often see banner advertisements that scream things like, TIRED OF SITES WITH MODELS CLAIMING TO BE AMATEURS? WE GUARANTEE REAL UNPROFESSIONAL SLUTS! This is one of those bizarre paradoxes that could only have been created by the acceleration of culture: Within the realm of their Gateways, men prefer to look at nude images of women they’d normally ignore in real life.
Now, I realize phrases like “the acceleration of culture” tend to be frustrating terms, mostly because there’s a certain segment of the population that throws around this term too often (and usually incorrectly), and there’s another segment that only vaguely understands what it means (they can define the individual words, but the larger concept still seems fuzzy). However, it’s the best explanation as to why amateur porn is more popular than professional porn, which is only the case in the online idiom. Before the Net devastated the smut mag industry, success had always been directly tied to professionalism: In the 1990s, Playboy was forever the front-runner, followed by Penthouse, followed by Hustler, followed by Perfect 10. The same still goes for live erotica: Whenever I hear guys talking about their favorite strip clubs, they always talk about how unbelievably hot the dancers are; I’ve never heard anyone raving about how unbelievably ordinary the dancers look. Yet with computer pornography (much of which is still free), the key is normalcy—the surfer is hoping to see the girl next door in an almost literal sense. This is the product of a technology that has accelerated faster than its user can comprehend.
In less than a decade, millions of Americans went from (1) not knowing what the Internet was, to (2) knowing what is was but not using it, to (3) having an e-mail address, to (4) using e-mail pretty much every day, to (5) being unable to exist professionally or socially without it. For 98 percent of the world, the speed and sweep of that evolution was too great to fathom. Consequently, we learned how to use tools most of us don’t understand. This has always been the case with technology, but not quite to this extent. I mean, I drive a car that I can’t fix and that I could certainly never build, but I still understand how it works in a way that goes (slightly) beyond the theoretical. I could explain how a car works to a ten-year-old. Conversely, I don’t understand anything about the construction of the Internet, beyond those conventional Newsweek factoids that everyone knows (and which still seem borderline impossible). I have no practical knowledge of the “information superhighway.”4 And I’m not interested in how it works; I just want to feel like I vaguely grasp its potential and vaguely understand how to use that potential to my advantage.
This is why amateur pornography became so integral to the adoption of Internet technology: It not only made people excited about using the Web (because sex is prurient and arousing), but it also made people comfortable with using the Web (because it’s organic and unsophisticated). Sex is so undeniably visceral that anyone can relate to it, assuming what they’re seeing does not appear to be an untouchable, unworldly fantasy. Imperfect, unpaid nudity tightened the parameters of the virtual world; it’s proof that this futuristic electronic network is still operated by humankind. This is not a pixeled construction of some Never Neverland character from Tron; this is some girl you saw at Pizza Hut. Amateur pornography grounds us in our reality.
Of course, it should go without saying that our reality is profoundly fucked-up. Twenty minutes on the Internet cum trade is all it takes to realize that the sexual peccadilloes of modern people are clichéd, sad, incomprehensible, and/or a combination of all three. If you are to take “real” porn at face value, you would be forced to conclude that women rarely have pubic hair, except for those who are advertising as having more pubic hair than normal. There seems to be an unab
ated demand for naked teenage girls, although there also seems to be a tacit understanding that any moderately small-breasted thirty-one-year-old woman can pass for a teenager if she has pigtails and a lollipop. There is an inordinate amount of bandwidth focused on girls urinating on themselves and/or licking their own nipples (is this fun?), and there’s a big demand for interracial sex, first-time anal sex, public flashing, and the ham-fisted implication of incest. What’s most disturbing is the amount of Internet porn that has absolutely nothing to do with sexual desire and everything to do with cartoonish misogyny, most notably the endless sites showing men ejaculating on women’s faces while the recipients pretend to enjoy it; this has about as much to do with sex as hitting someone in the face with a frying pan.
And—of course—there is also a pocket of men who masturbate to images of women getting hit in the face with frying pans. I guess there’s no accounting for taste. But there’s really no purpose in complaining about pornography, either. Yes, it’s socially negative; no, it’s not nearly as negative as Ted Bundy claimed before his execution. The tangible effect of pornography is roughly the same as the tangible effect of Ozzy Osbourne’s music on stoned Midwestern teenagers: It prompts a small faction of idiots to consider idiotic impulses, which is why we have the word idiocy. Arguing about the psychological merits (or lack thereof) of watching intercourse on a Presario 700Z doesn’t interest me. What interests me is how that habit changes the way people think about their own existence—and that brings me back to that second type of image porn surfers want to see: naked celebrities.
You’d think naked Hollywood actresses and naked West Virginia hairdressers would exist on opposite poles, but they’re closer than you think. They’re closer because—in a technical, physiological sense—they’re identical. There are certainly differences between the nipples of Alyssa Milano and the nipples of an Olive Garden waitress in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but the similarities of those nipples greatly outweigh the disparities. Here again, Internet pornography provides a bizarre sense of stability; it reminds us that we’re working in a hard reality; naked from the neck down, your wife and Gwen Stefani have a lot in common. What people want to see with nude celebrities is proof that these superstars are not gods. Web surfers are robbing celebrities of their privacy and—in effect—stealing back power. Psychologically, the Internet is very Marxist: Everyone with a modem has access to the same information, so we all get jammed into a technological middle class. You don’t need to be Lenny Kravitz to know what Lisa Bonet looks like when she steps out of the shower. You don’t even need to wear hemp pants. All you need is a modem and a phone jack.
Now, is aspiring to be as sexually informed as Lenny Kravitz a sad commentary on modern ambition? Perhaps.5 But that’s not the issue. The issue is that something that’s probably bad (i.e., porn) is helping us achieve something that’s probably good (i.e., delivering a technological notion to the common man).
Yet one question remains:
Why don’t women need this?
If this theory is all true, why are 99 percent of porn sites directed toward heterosexual men? Wouldn’t this imply that females can’t fathom the difference between the real and the virtual, even though they all obviously do? Why can women comprehend the power of the Internet without masturbating to JPEG images of dehumanizing sex acts? And why would no intelligent woman ever feel the need to rationalize her own weakness by arguing that her perversion actually expands her mind?
I can only assume it has something to do with licking your own nipples.
1. Except, of course, my mom.
2. One Web designer actually told me that focusing a discussion around the topic of porn sites “insults” the Internet, prompting me to ask him if the Internet gets jealous when I use the microwave.
3. Best known for her role as the teenage werewolf slayer.
4. Are people (besides Al Gore) still using this term? Probably not.
5. Well, actually, “yes.”
I’m pretty careful when it comes to my socks. Certain philosophers (Emilio Estevez in St. Elmo’s Fire, for example) have speculated as to why socks so often get lost whenever people do laundry, but—until recently—that had never happened to me. In the span of fourteen years, I never lost a single sock. But then I lost a sock in October of 2001. And then I lost another two weeks later, and then a third around Thanksgiving. And it slowly dawned on me that something was afoot. “What in the name of Andrew W.K. is going on?” I asked aloud while sorting my freshly cleaned garments. Why were my socks suddenly disappearing like Chinese panda bears? What had changed?
The answer: Mr. Smokey.
It occurred to me that the only aspect of my laundering that had changed in recent weeks was my newfound affinity for petting a feline of unknown origin. Accessing the public laundry room in my apartment complex required that I briefly walk outside of my building’s back door, where I consistently encountered a large gray cat I liked to call “Mr. Smokey.” Despite our initial differences, I struck up an amicable relationship with Mr. Smokey; whenever I saw him, I would scratch his kitty ears and his kitty tummy, much to his kitty delight.
Or so it seemed.
Evidence began to mount suggesting that Mr. Smokey was using this weekly exchange as a diversion to steal my socks, one at a time. It’s still not clear why he wanted my socks, since it had always been my assumption that kittens wanted mittens (in order to acquire pie).
However, there was no other explanation for these disappearances. In fact, I have reason to believe there was a whole network of cats involved in this: Perhaps Mr. Smokey stole my attention while a second cat (or cats) pounced into my laundry basket, snaring the best available footwear and fleeing into the darkness. I’m convinced an even larger cat ( “Mr. Orange”) from a neighboring building was part of this conspiracy.
“How often have I said,” asked coke-addict Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four, “that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” This is true; I am nothing if not logical.
Mr. Smokey must die.
10 The Lady or the Tiger 1:19
It’s no secret that cold cereal was invented to help nineteenth-century Victorians stifle their rampant sexual desires. Any breakfast historian can tell you that. Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), a so-called “philosopher and nutrition crusader,” was the kind of forward-thinking wackmobile who saw an indisputable connection between a person’s decadence and their eating habits; this was partially augmented by his perception that the medical profession was wicked. “Disease is never the legitimate result of the normal operations of any of our organs,” he wrote, a sentiment that would eventually spawn the creation of Quisp.
Mr. Graham suspected that bad food and inappropriate sexual desires—particularly masturbation—were the true cause of every major illness. This made the cure for all sickness relatively simple: sexual moderation (i.e., less than thirteen orgasms a year for married couples, which actually seems reasonable), daily exercise, and a proper diet.
By 1840, Graham’s career was in shambles; this does not seem altogether surprising, considering he was insane. However, his well-argued insanity influenced a New Yorker named James Caleb Jackson, and Jackson embraced Graham’s philosophy on his way toward creating a bad-tasting wafer out of graham flour and water. He called his food “Granula” (a precursor to Granola). Jackson was force-feeding his wretched Granula in his Dansville, New York, sanitarium when it was discovered by Ellen Harmon White, a Seventh-Day Adventist. She adopted the idea and started her own sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1866. In need of a staff doctor, White hired a scrappy young physician named John Harvey Kellogg. John hired his brother, William, as clerk of the institute.
John Kellogg was also a disciple of the Graham philosophy and agreed that a flavorless, grain-based food was precisely what America needed. By 1902, he had conjured a way to produce flake cereal—the ideal medium for a crunchy, soulless pabulum. He tried to make wheat fl
akes, but the technology for such a innovation did not yet exist. Corn flakes, however, worked swimmingly.
Initially developed for scientific purposes, corn flakes struck the brothers Kellogg as a savvy business opportunity. This crispy treat seemed perfect for a society assumedly filled with oversexed, disease-ridden lunatics. And while selling cereal made money, it also raised ethical dilemmas: The angelic White was devastated that the Kelloggs were making money from a food designed to improve human purity. Meanwhile, John Kellogg was upset that his brother added sugar to the flake recipe to improve sales, a supplement he believed would liberate the public libido and turn every corn flake aficionado into a raging sexaholic. The Kellogg brothers eventually sued one another. After winning the lawsuit, William Kellogg took control of the enterprise; his puritan brother remained a stockholder.
Years later, a trio of Rastafarian elves would promote puffed rice.
Today, few members of the scientific community see a close connection between cold cereal and sex, although advertisers still did in the 1950s. Early Corn Flakes commercials showed Superman eating cereal with Jimmy Olsen, but never with Lois Lane; this was to keep viewers from inferring that Superman and Lois Lane had spent the night together (evidently, the notion of Superman and Jimmy Olsen having a homosexual relationship was not a concern). However, sex is not the central theme to modern cereal advertising. In fact, selling cereal is not the central theme to cereal advertising. Saturday morning commercials for all the best cereals are teaching kids how to figure out what’s cool. They’re the first step in the indoctrination of future hipsters: Cereal commercials teach us that anything desirable is supposed to be exclusionary.