An Intertextual Approach to Child Pornography on the Internet - Essay Example

An Intertextual Approach to Child Pornography on the Internet Foucault's suggestion that our society constantlytalks about sex because we feel some strange need to do so may be applied to the Internet. Pornography has become the most successful industry on the Internet. Attempts to control it, especially child pornography, fail to understand the power of the interrelated texts that the Internet represents. Even though he was dead before the Internet became what it has today. Michel Foucault's famous, ironic commentary upon Western society's obsession with sexuality could be a description of the current state of pornography on the Internet: Surely no other society has ever accumulated, and in such a relatively short period of time - a similar quantity of discourses concerned with sex It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject, that, through inertia or submissiveness, we conceal from ourselves the blinding evidence, and that what is essential always eludes us, so that we must always start out once again in search of it. (Foucault, 1990) (emphasis added) The porn industry has grown from one that, both literally and metaphorically hid in the shadows - with the majority of films being made in a relatively small area of the San Fernando Valley in California and delivered to sex/shops/movie theatres (always in the wrong part of the town) to a multi-billion dollar industry that remains one of the few profitable industries on the Internet. Pornography has become the major activity within this most popular form of culture, and the sheer volume of pornography currently available has expanded exponentially. This analysis will argue that, as Foucault would suggest, the post-Sixties search" has begun all over again. This time people can indulge their taste for pornography from the comfort of their own homes without he distasteful necessity of entering establishments with frosted glass in dangerous parts of town. The 'text' of pornography used to be one that was limited to the physical spaces of the strip bar, the sex-shop and the pornographic movie-house. The space that this text was allowed was strictly delineated and often controlled by the authorities. But now the space of this "everywhere" (Foucault, 1990) - and by space both physical and cyber manifestations can be considered - has been perceived as invading the supposedly sacrosanct space of the home. In Europe and America there are often heated and desperate attempts to "stop" the supposed corruption of vulnerable people by pornography. One of the most taboo aspects of pornography has been that which involves (or appears to involve) child sex. In America, the Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996 (CPPA) expanded the definition of child pornography "to include not only pornographic images using actual children . . . but also any visual depiction that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct" (CPPA, 1996). This law was later struck down by the Supreme Court because it was "too vague" and because the Justices suggested that allowing virtual images of child pornography might actually protect children from abuse. Justice Kennedy stated that "few pornographers would risk prosecution for abusing real children if fictional, computerized images would suffice" (Kennedy, 2002). The Intertextual implications of this attempt to legislate against child pornography are as fascinating as they are complex. A semiotic approach will help to analyze the situation. The initial law had a signifier "child" which referred to a signified that consisted of both actual children and the simulation of children. Thus if a twenty year old woman was made to resemble a ten year old girl she would be regarded as a child or, most interestingly, a computer simulation of a child (which has no existence outside of computer code) would be regarded as a "child" as well. This initial sign for "child" was very complex, ambiguous and frankly absurd if the protection of children was of paramount importance. It would not be absurd if the supposed dangers/evils of the content of this pornographic text was the actual target. In this case it is the reader of the text who is being 'protected' from the pornography - and thus whether the child is real or not is irrelevant. Similar attempt to censor content, which have been made under the guise of "protecting children" have been made within the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime. As Williams suggests, it is the sheer range and reach of this text that most worries authorities (Williams, 2001). In fact the Internet may be regarded as a one huge text that is made up of a series of interlinked, smaller texts which in turn create the whole. One pornographic site will almost always provide a link to another, and this in turn to others and so a whole web of content is created. The difference from the traditional text - whether it be pornographic or otherwise - is that the 'reader' (or surfer in the case of the Internet) can choose their own story according to their own preferences. There are endless specialties within the pornographic industry that can appeal to even the most bizarre, or discriminating, taste. There is the hard-core scene, the black-on-white scene, the blowjob scene, the anal scene, the lesbian scene, the bestiality scene and - within the same continuum - the child sex scene . These different t genres, that are often sub-catergorized into a dizzying and often mystifying myriad of sub-genres, in general "show" what they purport to "show". The blowjob scene shows a blowjob, the anal scene shows anal sex etc.. One might sensible argue that the blowjob scene only seems to shown an actual blowjob as the careful set-up of cameras, lighting and acting bears little resemblance to the act as performed everyday by ordinary people. But the audience for the photograph or film reads this text as being a literally true - it is, merely, a "blowjob". In contrast, within the child sex scene there is often a requirement for the suspension of disbelief that goes beyond the normal catalyst for arousal within ordinary pornography. The fact that the models for most "child" pornography scenes are not children is (for obvious legal reasons) clearly stated on the man websites that cater to an audience that, paradoxically, desires real children. But the this fact is communicated in a manner that often seeks to remind the viewer of real children. The phrases "barely legal teen", "just eighteen" if entered into a search engine will yield thousands of hits. The sex involved is firmly placed in the imagination:- by concentrating on the fact that the girl is "barely legal" or "just over eighteen", the reader is tempted, indeed, even invited, to imagine her just a few months before - when she was not just over eighteen. Similarly, the phrase "barely legal" (obvious puns aside( invites the reader to imagine that she is not legal at all, that he is somehow transgressing a taboo by enjoying the image. Arousal comes then, not form the actual content of such images, but from the shared secret, from the imagined "illegality" of the scene and the imagined "risk" that the viewer is taking in seeing it. While the text of pornography thus produced is outside of government control - due to free speech concerns and the impossibility of effectively censoring an international phenomenon - it often becomes out of control of both the producers of the content and the users. Due to the sheer number of computer viruses, spyware, bot-ware and various other entities lurking on the Internet the viewer may be sent on a out of control journey as popup ads link to others and soon the whole text-screen is covered with a detritus of pornographic images. The text seems to be out of control here - or rather - it controls itself. To conclude, the Internet presents a brand new subject for Intertextual analysis. As of yet the Internet is only a neophyte of what it will become. But as this brief analysis has shown, literary techniques belonging to an age before the Internet was even a word may be effectively used to understand it. _______________________________ Works Cited Child Pornography Protection Act, 1996. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated, Richard Hurley. Vintage Books, New York: 1990. Kennedy, William. Opinion, Supreme Court of the United States, 2002. Williams, Katherine. "Controlling Internet Child Pornography and Protecting the Child". Information and Communications Technology Law, Abdingdon, London: 2003. www.yahoo.com Read More