So I’ve long been disgusted with the puritanical attitude which prevails in this country about porn but this new panic which has developed around ipod porn is particularly enraging. Apparently people are worried about the ability of children and employees to look at porn without fear of monitoring. If this was just cultural conservatives complaining about the moral decline of civilizations (wooho) it wouldn’t be so bad but apparently the FCC has been throwing their weight around on the issue.

This entire panic exists despite the lack of any compelling evidence that sexual content harms children. Despite having far more reason to believe that violence harms children than sexual content it is porn people seem to get all upset about. While I would guess that being forcibly exposed to pornography might be a bit damaging I doubt that kids who search out porn and watch it of their own volition are being harmed. Generations of kids have stolen/borrowed their dad’s copy of playboy and they seem to have made it out okay. Despite what people want to believe children aren’t innocent, they are scatologicly orientated little beasts and I doubt some boobies are going to make them any worse.

Ultimately I see little difference between not wanting your child to see pornographic content and not wanting your child to see atheistic content. Both are desires ultimately rooted in a moral, not scientific, sensibility out of a fear that the ‘wrong’ kind of content will corrupt the child. While parents have the right to try and manage their children’s exposure to such content the government shouldn’t be helping them do so. Besides, the idea that the iPod presents some particular danger is pretty stilly. Any teenager (before puberty you probably aren’t interested in porn) worth their salt can get around the content blocker their technologically incapable parents installed on the computer.

Ohh and the concern about viewing porn in the workplace is just silly. Ohh my god portable pornographic content…just like a magazine. Viewing porn on your ipod is just another workplace distraction and should be treated as such. Of course some people might raise sexual harassment concerns but in order for something to be harassment it really should require a choice to inflict the distastefull material on the other person (either by posting it on the walls or directly making comments). Private viewing of porn just isn’t harassment even if it happens in the office. Of course the law may not agree but businesses can deal with this the same way they deal with playboy.

UPDATE: Apparently I needed to be a bit more clear. First of all I’m not contesting that many people reasonably want to be the ones to teach their children about sex or just not have them learn from raunchy internet porn. My point is that without objective evidence of a harm this shouldn’t be regarded any differently than evangelical parents who don’t want their children learning about liberal theology or atheism online. If you can’t point to demonstrable harms how can you draw the line between the two besides just stamping your foot? Certainly the government shouldn’t be getting involved without objective grounds to back up their actions. If it is acceptable for the government to create content based inconviences just because you feel strongly about porn why aren’t people’s strong feelings always enough to warrant this response?

Secondly of course I’m not suggesting that internet porn in general is quantitatively like finding your dad’s playboy. The internet has way more porn and with a computer it is far easier to find and can be far more racy. Yet the relevant question is not how much porn a kid could access but how much they will and it is unclear to me they in fact will access more by using the internet. The very ubiquity of porn online dulls the attraction to rebelious teenagers. However, this is all irrelevant to the ipod. The ipod downloads content from your computer. If a child has enough unsupervised access to a computer to download porn to his ipod he can likely just watch it there anyway. Of course he could trade with friends to get porn if he is always watched at the home computer but now the situation is not significantly worse than that with playboys. The point is the ipod only allows portability it doesn’t provide a new means of access. Hell it doesn’t even do as much as a laptop.

Finally, what I think is the most compelling reason not to concern ourselves with these issues is that trying to restrict access just isn’t effective. Children before puberty aren’t really interested in porn and as long as it isn’t made tantalizingly bad and forbidden they won’t go looking for it and these technologies provide little danger. Pubescent children simply have too many computer skills and unsupervised time to make the oversight approach workable to discourage them from watching porn. If pubescent kids want to look at porn their parents can’t stop them and won’t even likely know (I don’t think my parents suspected…did you?).

I think it’s pretty obvious that it is just too late to stop kids from easily getting pornography. Unfortunately parents are very emotional about their role and feel the need to do something to protect their children especially when they feel some danger beyond their control threatens their offspring. Hence all the flailing around with ipods and porn as parents desperately try and convince themselves they can keep their child’s access to ‘bad content’ under control. I suspect this clamp down sort of reaction has exactly the opposite effect. I remember going to my catholic friends to read the Kinsey report at the library, not because it is intrinsically exciting (it is pretty boring) but because porn was off limits and mysterious and if you can’t deny children access to porn the last thing you want to do is to make it more exciting and give them a reason to go look for it.

Luckily their is a simple solution to concerns about children learning about sex from raunchy internet porn or being expoused to violent sexual content in their internet search. Be open and communicative about sex from the begining. If you teach them first the internet can’t. If you don’t want them to end up watching violent nasty stuff because they are tralling for free cheap stuff on the internet give them access to a high quality porn site on their computer. However, I doubt this solution will be widely used even though it is the one which would likely serve the child’s welfare the best. In my opinion this entire buisness is driven more by parents need to idealize their children as innocent than plausible concern. If you don’t believe me ask yourself how people come to believe their children should be protected from pornography, is it every because porn screwed them up as little kids or the result of research studies?