The Birds, The Bees And Hardcore Business

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By Matt Richtel

Steven Hirsch, the co-chairman of Vivid Video, the pornography film studio, plans on Saturday to take Google and Yahoo to task for being purveyors of smut to minors.

According to a news release put out by Vivid, Mr. Hirsch, in a speech he plans to deliver during “Sex Week at Yale,” intends to accuse Internet companies of failing to sufficiently “deter minors from accessing adult material.” He will tell the students at Yale’s School of Management that the biggest culprits are the biggest search engines and that they should do a better job of filtering content or using age verification before facilitating a connection to sex-related content.

“None of the search engines and portals, but particularly Yahoo and Google, has taken any significant steps in this direction,” he plans to say, adding, “Vivid will work with any company that is ready to make it much more difficult for children to be exposed, even inadvertently, to material intended only for adults. This is not about First Amendment rights, it is about protecting children.”

O.K., we must interrupt for a few reality checks, prefaced with a caveat. The caveat: we’re not going to attempt to make the point that Hirsch is somehow being hypocritical by trying to limit the market for smut. That ’s a cheap point.

But, that said . . .

Reality Check #1: Of course, Vivid wants to limit the Internet audience that can obtain pornography, especially the free stuff people can use Google, Yahoo and other search engines to find. After all, Vivid and the other traditional pornographers have found their business seriously challenged by the surfeit of free triple-X content on the Web. And so, of course Mr. Hirsch †whatever his other “morality” arguments are†would like to get search engines to do age verification or filtering, or some such action before helping to provide access to pornography to a young generation of potential consumers.

A key lesson here for Yale’s graduate students might be: executives tend not to be most vocal in making arguments that affect their bottom line, but are very effective in characterizing those arguments as being about something else.

Reality Check #2: Why didn’t the rest of us get to go to college where there is something called “Sex Week”? I think my college had “Career Week,” and “Sobriety Month,” and, probably “The Semester of Abstinence (Not Self-Imposed).”

I grew up unprotected from porn, and thanks to that my sex partners in my life have been very thankful that i know how to make love. WHen i was little my Mom put a copy of a masters and Johnson book in the bookshelf. I looked at it all the time, reading the comments about the pictures of couples making love, and i understood what all that meant later. now, i have the best sexual life with my wife. Why do you need to protect children?. give them the truth, and they’ll ask the most imaginative and sharp questions you’ll ever hear, and you’ll have to explain!. I think that is the inner fear of most adults in the US, the having to explain to a kid what sex is, how your relationship with it can improve your life, and what lessons can be learned from it that you can translate to everyday life. stop “protecting” and start communicating!

†Posted by julian Silva

What? Nobody commented on this article? Were they all, ahem, too busy elsewhere on the Net?

†Posted by Janet V

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