China Wages War on Internet Porn
I’ve written about online gambling. And I’ve written about online video games. And now, I will be writing about the third and final way to waste an inordinate number of hours sitting at a computer– online porn. As an American, it is difficult to imagine the internet without pornography. Nowadays, images of busty housewives and wholesome teens pop up onto screens, advertisements featuring breasts and thong-split asses adorn the borders of sites, and some websites like Craigslist.com, an otherwise reputable site, have areas in which pornographic images can materialize into an actual real-life sexual encounter. I know guys that use the internet exclusively for porn. This is America. It’s not really considered a problem. But as we all know, the internet is not confined to any border and that websites are accessible from pretty much anywhere. Including China. And the growing presence of blow jobs, toe jobs, cunnilingus, anal, rear-entry vaginal, 69, cowboy, reverse cowboy, froggystyle, frottage, piledrivers, spitroasts (look it up), and fisting on the web is beginning to irk China’s leaders. Especially the reverse cowboy.
Friday, China’s Ministry of Public Security announced the launch of a six-month campaign to remove all pornographic material from China’s cyberspace. The deputy minister of Public Security said, “the boom of pornographic content on the Internet has contaminated cyberspace and perverted China’s young minds.” The deputy minister blamed all the smut in China on the “inflow of pornographic materials from abroad and lax domestic control.” True and true. In China, porn is seen as a “Western thing,” one of the many agents of corruption that entered the mainland when China’s door swung open. Chinese guys are crazy about porn. At least the ones I know. And in a way, I envy the relationship Chinese men have with their porn. It’s pure in the way it was for Americans or Europeans when they were 11 years old. It was exciting, new and made one think about the potential awesomeness of sexual adulthood. This is the same for Chinese guys except they’re 20 and not 11. And then I wonder about this: if China could really rid its cyberspace of porn, wouldn’t they have done it already? Wouldn’t they start by blocking all URL adresses containing the word “porn?” That seems like a good place to start. Because as I wrote earlier this week on Stateside, I know firsthand that the video site YouPorn is not blocked in China. So before you China readers go on a downloading spree, for fear that your favorite nudie sites will be shut down, relax, your porn isn’t going anywhere. It’s too hard, there’s way too much and people just love it. And in my best Michael Scott impression, “that’s what she said.”
•AP: China Announces New Campaign Against Online Porn