Posts Tagged porn

Amateur Lesbians

I’ve recently reformatted and reinstalled, and that means that – briefly – I ended up seeing advertisements on the Internet again, until I had my ad-blocker reinstalled. And so I came to see an advertisement that promised to let me see “amateur lesbians”.

Now you and I both know perfectly well what they mean, but I’ve always been amused by the term. It somehow carries the implication that there are “professional lesbians”, who aren’t just hobbyists or weekend-homosexuals. I get the image of a conversation along these lines:

A: “So, what do you do for a living?”

B: “Oh, I’m a lesbian.”

If there is such a thing as a professional lesbian, I wonder if it’s one of those careers that is protected from gender discrimination laws, so that it’s allowed to disallow men from applying. And I wonder if you can get a vocational qualification in the field: you know, a BTEC in Lesbianism or something. I also wonder if there are any perks to the job – I mean apart from the obvious: do you get a company car? Do you have to pay for your own uniform?

I wonder, sometimes, if I wonder about things a little too much.

Tags: , , , ,

OMG Child Pr0n (or is it?)

What a mess this is turning into! I am of course referring to the UK-wide internet censorship of a Wikipedia page (the one about the Scorpions album, Virgin Killer – if that last link doesn’t work, you’re among those affected).

The thinking is, according to the Internet Watch Foundation, that the cover of the 1976 album constitues child pornography and therefore we all need to be protected from it. It’s all a little controversial, though, because they’re not suggesting that Amazon US be blocked, for example.

But the worst of it is the amount of news exposure it’s generating is actually drawing traffic to the banned content. I wouldn’t ever have seen the album cover if it weren’t for the ban, for example, after which I realised how trivial it is to see the offending Wikipedia page. And that without the offending content appearing in a Wikinews article about the ban!

It’s hard to justify this kind of policing. In accordance with Wikipedia’s own policies, it is not a creator of content so much as a distributor: it takes content that is already “out there” and, in theory at least, legal, and disseminates it in an approachable form.

I’ll be interested to see how this plays out.

Tags: , , , ,