FBI Porn squad

[ProdigalJunkMail]

this may be appropriate for the Lounge but might spur discussion here.

How much porn in ok? Is it quantity or quality?

Where do we as a community draw the line? My opinion is that as long as it doesn't include minors, then more power to ya...government needs to stay the heck out of it...

Here is a Fark.com contest that might lighten your morning...

http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1675832

subjectProdigal

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. I just want to say HI ;)

And I concur..if it's two or more consenting adults, then the FBI has better things to do...if not, they should turn it over to local authorities to follow up and cooperate via extradition policies...the FBI STILL has better things to do.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

3. hey to you as well!!!

long time, no converse. Hope all is well...I shudder to think what the FBI would find on my PC...I think they would be bored to tears...

[Beaver Tail]

2. As long as it is consenting adults

Fill your boots. It's not my decision to decide what is best for someone else.

[Jon8503]

4. Like everything else; don't overeat, drink or over porn. Have always

felt a lot of the porn problem in our country is due to the repressive attitudes of sex. Sex is good and it is a healthy act with naturally two consenting adults.

You can compare the problems of drinking, sex, rapes, etc. in our country and look at Europe. Sure they have some of the above but not nearly to the extent of us.

They do not try to hide things from their kids, sex is discussed, nudity is around, sex is not looked at as a bad thing.

A dad can go have a beer with his son.

I think repression is bad as well.

[benburch]

5. Pornography is a positive force in our society, in general.

Pornography is the thing that pushes forward all new media technology!

Home videotape existed JUST for swingers and for porn in its early years.

BBS's and modems grew largely through the boards that exchanged porn GIFs.

Most of the actually profitable Internet sites were porn for many years.

DVD technology is being pushed ahead by the porn industry even now.

Most pornography is used to relieve sexual frustration by people who do not have sex partners, or by couples who get turned on by watching before or while making love to each other. I cannot think you can paint any one of those uses as a social evil unless you are a complete prude or brainwashed with fake Christianity.

[flying_wahini]

6. Sorry, but i disagree

Porn is not a positive force anymore than guns are good for our society. Porn may have always been around, but now (thanks to the internet)it is prolific. As a mother of 2 boys, I try to be Very Open and Balanced about sex, but most of the porn is just about submission and domination. As a 50 year old woman, I can tell you that there is a BIG difference between sex and porn. ask any european- they know the difference.
and home videotape did not come into existence for porn. Please.

[benburch]

7. Home videotape most certainly did!

I worked in the video equipment industry, and the "early adopters" were essentially ALL swingers - Like 70%. We had the surveys to prove it. Much the same as the polaroid camera. Why do you think that inexpensive camera Polaroid sold in the 60s and advertised heavily in Playboy was called "The Polaroid Swinger"?

And as somebody who has many friend in the adult film industry (my name is on the colophon in Adult Video News (AVN) magazine) I can tell you that surveys of commercial porn say it is used by adults for the uses I suggested in their private homes.

Now, PIRATED video, on the Internet might be abused by children. These videos are not licensed and are copyright violations. People ARE being prosecuted by the licensed copyright holders for these violations. But even banning porn now would not remove these illegally copied things from the Internet, and so that is not a valid reason to ban pornography.

Instead it is up to adults to keep control of their children's internet usage. There are a variety of family-friendly filtered ISPs which only allow G or PG rated material into your home. In fact, when my aunt adopted her two orphaned step-grandchildren a few years back, I set her up with such a service. You wouldn't subscribe to The Playboy Channel and then let your kids have unsupervised access to your cable box, would you? It is the same here. Your responsibility.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

11. It's A Neutral Force...

It's here...It's been here forever.... They found porn among the destruction of Pompeii... I agree the envelope is being pushed in areas I find disturbing but it's not going away and any attempt to make it go away is futile....To some folks it acts as a release and to some folks it acts as a guide...


I guess like anything it's good in moderation...

[lectrobyte]

13. Come on, I think you are making a lot of generalizations

here. "most of the porn is just about submission and domination." I've researched it quite a bit, and would disagree.

The technology would exist without porn, or erotica, whatever you want to call it, but things like computer multimedia in the 80's and 90's were definitely driven by adult offerings. Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but you could make a case for erotic art as the oldest art. People want it. Even on regular TV, although we probably take that for granted now. If network TV offered uncensored movies and series, do you think folks would shell out the money for HBO and the like?

Sorry if the internet makes parenting tougher. But that's part of being a responsible parent, keeping kids' fingers out of light sockets and so on until they are big enough to know better on their own. You wouldn't let your five year old go play in traffic, so why turn them loose on the internet?

[benburch]

15. And it is not hard to find a filtered internet DSL service!

Just Google Family Friendly Filtered DSL and you will find a selection to choose from.

And I recommend that all parents do just that.

[mongo]

19. How do you come to the conclusion of what "most" porn is about?

Do you watch much? Sell it? How do you define "most"?

If you define "most" by the largest and most successful companies, then I think you would find that it is more just sex and not about "submission" or "dominance". Adam & Eve employs a team of psychologists to certify that every movie is not "degrading" to women.

There are over 1000 releases every month, and yes, some of them are quite raunchy - and these are the ones that the RW always tries to characterize as the mainstream of the industry.

Oh, and Ben's right. The development of the VCR, and the adoption of VHS over Beta was driven by the adult industry.

[benburch]

23. Oh yes, I forgot the Sony factor...

Sony failed to meet the needs of the Adult Film Industry, and the rest is history...

Beta was technically superior to VHS - Beta was in the market first, had smaller cassettes, sharper image, fast-forward and rewind operations could be done with a "laced-up" picture still on the screen, which made searching easier, beta recorders could record in sound-only mode where you got amazingly good sound reproduction,

But the early Beta recorders, and in fact the early VHS recorders could record only one hour maximum on a tape.

This would have been perfect if what you did with a VCR was time-shifting a TV show or recording Christmas. But at the prices for VCRs back then, it was hard to like a TV show enough to justify buying one, and there were Super-8mm movie cameras with synchronized sound that were MUCH cheaper, and produced better results in home lighting conditions.

But there was something you could not do with a Super-8mm camera; Make films of your swinger's parties. You simply could not get any lab that was licensed to do Kodachrome to develop them! It was for this reason that Polaroid was working on a home-developing movie film technology in the 70s, which technology was just ready for sales when the VCR and Home Video Camera appeared and removed its market.

Swingers bought VCRs and they wanted to rent feature-length porn films. And nobody wanted to change cassettes in the middle of a feature. The VHS technology required only an adaption of the cassette itself to be able to do two hours, and fairly minor changes to the recorder (EP and SLP modes) to enable a 2 hour cassette to record 4 or 6 hours.

Sony could not change its smaller cassette to hold more tape, and did not promptly meet the demand for a slower recording speed.

By the time they did, the Adult Film Industry was already in mass production of feature films in VHS format, and Hollywood was jumping on the bandwagon with mainstream films.

Yes, eventually both porn and mainstream films on Beta appeared, but by then the market advantage Beta enjoyed from its first-out and superior picture had been overshadowed by the sheer numbers of other people who had VHS machines and who could loan you tapes or copy tapes for you.

In more modern times a very similar thing happened with Circuit City's "DIVX" technology. This was a technology that allowed a keyed DVD to be played in a player for a particular number of plays or length of time before it became useless or before a bit more money had to be handed over to make it play again. Conceptually this was a rental DVD that you never had to return. I worked on this project as Zenith's software liaison to Circuit City, and was never able to convince them that porn was a natural marketplace for their product; Some people who rent a porn video might not want to have to drive 20 miles to the porn store to return it, after all. Well, I never was able to convince them (they being bible thumpers) and DIVX is defunct.

(Note, this is not the DIVX video compression method currently in use on the Internet; It was named DIVX as a sort of "fuck you" to Circuit City by people who thought the real DIVX was an invasion of privacy and an abusive digital rights management system.)

[benburch]

24. One more factor...

One hour Beta could not record a football game, either!

Something that could do neither porn nor football had a very limited marketplace.

I'll leave up to the reader the comparison between sex and violence as motivators for significant monetary purchases!

(And do remember that we were talking well around $1500 (my source says 600 british pounds which I recall was about $2.50 back then) in 1975 dollars the recorder you needed to play and record videos, and more still for the camera and lights and tripod. This was not a casual purchase!)

[mongo]

21. and - don't take my word for it

"They (porn businesses) are the ones who are developing the tools that the mainstream will use," says Donna Hoffman, associate professor of management at Vanderbilt University.
It's not a new role for the porn industry. Before the spread of home computers, the possibility of watching and recording sexually explicit material at home accelerated the development of the VCR, the video camera and video rental stores.
Now, X-rated online sites are among the first to use expensive T3 phone lines capable of transmitting compressed, high-resolution images that appear to move naturally. Penthouse recently announced a $10 million venture offering computer video channels in a format that mimics cable television. And the industry has invented sophisticated charging methods to recoup their investments.

http://www.s-t.com/daily/09-97/09-07-97/f01bu212.htm

Cascio believes the pornography industry is "the stalking horse" of the Net, driving the development of technology for online business as it fueled the VCR revolution - and is now pumping DVDs. In his "other life," as he puts it, Cascio is a writer and online conferencing manager for the Global Business Network, an economics think-tank. "If there's going to be a part of the Net that figures out how to do electronic commerce, it's going to be the adult industry," Cascio says.

http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,9580,00.html

[lectrobyte]

8. I tend to agree. The academic studies I've seen seem to indicate

that every new technology, from cave painting to cameras, is used to create erotica. I don't have a problem with that, either, and wonder why this country is so hung up on it. Last time I was in Europe, it was not uncommon to see female breasts on billboards and TV commercials, and everyone seemed fine with it, as they did with teenagers drinking wine with dinner. The taboo seems to do way more damage than the actual thing itself.

[benburch]

9. I totally concur with that.

We are far too puritanical here. It is unhealthy.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

12. Everything In Moderaton...

I wouldn't want to live in a totally puritanical society nor would I want to live in a totally libertine one... Might want to visit such a place for a short time but not live there...



Nothing in the above statement should be construed to suggest I am telling two or more adults what they can do or view ...

I guess what I am saying is some activities are best left subterranean...

[benburch]

17. Well, nobody ought to be doing it in the road and "frightening the horses"

In spite of that Beatles song...

Sex is something adults ought to do in private where no children are present and no adults are present who do not consent!

[truebrit71]

10. So we've won the war on Turr then?

I think the FBI has more important things to worry about than what consenting adults do with other consenting adults on video, that other consenting adults watch...

But hey, that's just me...

:eyes:


The fucking self-righteous puritanical nutjobs running this country really make me wanna :puke:

[mongo]

14. As long as it is the filming of consentual adults

it is OK. No children or animals.

[benburch]

16. Here is the question I have been asking for years, mongo...

It is legal in most states for consenting adults to have sex with each other.

How can the depiction of a legal act be illegal?

What other legal act is it illegal to film, depict, or write about?

[mongo]

18. Well, to ask more questions -

It is legal to own any explicit tape - as long at it involves adults, yet it is technically illegal for me to sell it to you. If I have the right to own it, do I not also have a right sell it? If I have the right to own it, does that not imply a right to aquire it?

[benburch]

20. And it is legal for me to sell you any other work...

No matter how political, radical, or gross.

I am reminded of "The Faces Of Death" series tapes years ago. NO law against those whatsoever except the law of good taste!

And since when has explicit sexuality NOT been essentially political? Especially when the Right Wing makes explicit sexuality and the suppression of same their Number One agenda item?

They say that pornography has the ability to change the morals of society and to destroy Christian Religion. Sounds like a political process to me. Doesn't it to you folks?

No, sex and politics are so intertwined in America that there is no way that pornography ought ever to be banned or sanctioned in law provided that it contains nobody who is a minor and nobody who has not consented. (Note; A drawing is not a person, and neither is a character played by an actor or actress! We are talking about the consent of the actual humans involved, not the characters they play!)

[hunter]

22. Hmmm...

How much porn in ok? Is it quantity or quality?

Where do we as a community draw the line?

Think of this as an experiment; an exercise of the scientific method, not as a sex thread.