Here Come The Bastards...

I am burdened today by a most rare and unusual problem:  an over-abundance of subjects to write about.

I want to write about a party I went to on Friday night.  It was my friend's 40th birthday party, and it seemed that all of my oldest friends were there.  These are the people I would consider my best friends, and yet this was the first time in three years or more that I was seeing most of them.  Being surrounded by so many friends, and being confronted, viscerally, with just how long it had actually been since I'd last seen them, brought up a lot of different feelings.  And for a lot of other reasons, as well, this party ended up being very overwhelming to me.  I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about that evening, and the various things that happened there; almost too many to handle.  So, as much as I know this is something I should write about, and as much as I want to write about it, I don't think I'm ready yet.  I know that I thought and felt a lot about the experience, but I haven't been able to process it enough to know exactly what I thought or felt; to be able to say "I felt this" or "I thought that."  So I think I need to give that some time to sink in and settle, and figure out exactly what it is that I need to say.  It was just a lot to happen all at once, and I need to some time to figure out what to make of it.

So, instead, I'm going to write about something that happened to me at work today that pissed me off.

Our company's servers have a firewall that blocks access from the network to sites that are known to harbor potentially harmful code such as spyware or viruses.  That seems like a completely reasonable business decision to me, and I completely understand.  I always get a little twinge of guilt/shame/remorse whenever I click on a link and get the message from our server that the page I am trying to view is blocked by our firewall because it is a known malware site.

I have several webcomics that I read most days during my lunch break.  Two of these webcomics sometimes show explicit sex.  And today, when I went to read those comics, I received the message from our server saying that they were blocked.  But not because they were malware sites.  The message said that these sites had been blocked because they were pornographic.

This marks a significant change in the way our company monitors and polices our online behavior.  Up to now, it has been solely about protecting our company's network infrastructure.  But now, apparently, they have decided to start policing our morality, as well.

What pisses me off about this, is that I've never considered either of these sites to be pornographic.  Yes, they both show explicit sex, but I don't think that automatically makes them porn.  Porn is solely about explicit sex.  Its one and only purpose is to sexually arouse.  And clearly, these webcomics are not trying to do that.  Or, at least, they are about more than that.  One of them is a humor comic, making fun of nerd-culture, fantasy-tropes, and sexuality.  I've never been aroused by it, nor have I ever read it because it is dirty; I read it because it is funny.  (It is hilarious, in point of fact.)  And the other comic is a love story; very sweet and romantic, and also strange and psychedelic.  It publishes one page a week, and every once in a while (we're talking maybe every twenty pages or so) there will be a sex scene.  And while the sex is definitely explicit, it is still portrayed in the sweet, romantic style, a world away from anything that could be considered "hardcore porn."

Let me illustrate my point.  Imagine a movie - your typical, cliché of a sappy romantic-drama.  Now imagine that when we get to the inevitable scene where the male and female leads finally make love, the sex is shown explicitly.  There is vulva, erections, and penetration.  In every other way, it's still the cliché sappy romantic-drama - soft lighting, bad soundtrack, etc.; the only difference is that instead of just seeing the female lead's breasts (and maybe the male lead's ass), we see all of both leads, and they are actually making love.

Now, imagine your typical hardcore porn movie.

They're both sexually explicit, but they are clearly, obviously, not the same thing.

And that's what bothers me about this whole situation with my company's firewall.  I don't really care so much that I can't read these comics at work anymore.  That's not really a big deal, and I can just read them at home from now on.  What bothers me is that I have now been logged as someone who uses company resources to view porn.  And I don't think that's fair, because I don' think that's what I did.  Since they've labeled these two webcomics as "porn" there is no distinction between me and the person who tries to view hardcore pornographic videos in his office.  And I think that's a very important distinction to make!  It's hardly as if I was trying to log on to GangBangBitches.com, for crying out loud.

But our culture makes no distinction.  If it displays certain things - vulva, erections, penetration, semen - even once, for any reason at all, then no matter what else it may do or say, and no matter how else it may say it, that media is porn, and that is all it is, and that is all it will ever be.  And no matter what else it may do or say, and no matter how else it may say it, that media is exactly the same as Gang Bang Bitches vol. 8, and if you don't agree, then you are an immoral pervert.

For almost thirty-seven years now, I've managed to avoid getting caught in the hypocritical, puritan traps of this culture.  But today, I got caught.  And now I feel like I have a giant scarlet "P" on my chest.  "P" for "Pervert."  "P" for "Porn."

And now, for the first time in my adult life, I have to live in fear that any day now, the morality police are going to come knocking on my (office) door.