David Hume on Internet Pornography

All those dirty little pleasures we get from shitty little kicks like revenge, domination, cruelty.  We all do it.  Act like dogs, and lick our chops.  See the drool there in the mirror, slurging out the side of our hotdog lips like a cartoon bully chewing tobacco.  We all victimise.  We are all, in turn, victims.

I just smile when it happens to me.  I’ve been so well-sexed lately, I could care less.

I’ve been sleeping with this travelling acrobat.  I met her out on the south bank, near Gabriel’s Wharf.  There was this tightrope, strung between two gigantic pylons, about twenty feet long and nearly four feet off the ground; and there, straddling the wire on one gorgeous, tiny foot with the other leg extended parallel with the ground and rope, crouching with her arms reaching forward, was my Amelia, cutting quite a shape.  Watching her perform her routine several times through, hearing the same song over and over, finally I found the courage to approach this creature.  I felt like I should lay my head in her lap.  Her green eyes.  Orange hair.  I am only Scottish.

While I am out to the grocers, going to the printers, calling at consulates – I am appreciating women’s bodies.  The female form: objectified.  Just the sight of it brings pleasure to me.  Aesthetically.  Pruriently.  I don’t see anything wrong with this.  I have heard the pornographers explain what is in your own headspace generally stays there, and should inspire no shame.

The pornographers!  They are everywhere these days, doing their interviews, promoting their websites and sex toys.  The past weekend alone, I have had two dinners interrupted by pornographers.  They all want to thank me for what I’ve done.  I try not to begrudge them their gratitude.  But how did they find out it was me?

It was four years ago that I discovered internet porn.  Four years’ worth of jacking off to half-hour scenes, ten minute clips, five minute trailers, thirty-second teasers.  Streamed, downloaded. What did I ever do before this?  Well, I had been fantasizing, making erotica up in my head, and there seemed to be some purpose in my onanistic act.  But what is the meaning of this?  Choose some pixelated version of a few filmed sex acts and settle for a crudely presented, yet raw, horribly arresting event?  And whether imperfect, blotchy, asymmetrical and uncombed, shot from a stationary cam; or airbrushed with layers of pancake makeup, holding poses, him grunting in perfect time with her squeaking like a rusty gate, and maybe a seasoned director of photography insinuating us, the viewers, with alacrity into the very crevices of the duo, trio, the gangbang – the practice is always robbing me of the fantasy.  Stealing the purposive activity from my self-intimacy.

And whatever thoughts do come to mind while I watch, they’re always in negative frame: that’s not how my dick looks.  I’ve never had a girl that bent like that.  Why is he fucking her asshole the whole time when there’s a perfectly good vagina right there?  Even more prosaic: when I start complaining about unjustifiably extended close-up shots of disembodied genitals.  Every drop of warmth squeezed out of a purely fricative interaction by poor framing, poor editing choices.  I shake my fist at the screen.

As opposed to the erotic reveille – not just a picture in my mind, but the words of courtship and the rush of quicksilver libidos, always very much on the positive ends of spectrums.  My tactile memories picking the best bits, my ears recalling the sounds of the most fervent fucking, the olfactory broadcasting sticky odours through my headspace.  And it’s always the exact girl I’m always lusting after, the exact type of face I want to see her make from deep within a wave of endorphins from coming the thirteenth, fifteenth time of the day.  Or night.

That’s where we are right now, Amelia and I.  After our initial chat, which went excessively well and just long enough in my opinion later, I went to see her again.  Tracking her down in the city was quite engaging: where would a travelling acrobat be?  Covent Garden?  Temple Gardens?  Ravenscourt Garden?  I thought about her smile, which curled slightly at the edges.  Her tiny feet, with the nails painted like electric robin’s eggs.  And I knew she would be in Sloane Square.

After her wire-bound dance had ended, I asked her to pub.  It’s what is done here, although she is a foreigner herself, and the question came out so naturally I realised only after I had said it that there were probably lots of other activities I could have asked her to.  Anyway, she said she would love to.  We pulled up the stakes and took down the pylons, which folded up into two long bundles, and rolled everything up into a pack, which I offered to carry.  This is like taking a schoolgirl’s books, I remarked, and she tittered approvingly.  We didn’t drink much as we were carrying on so well, and at one point she implied she might like to sleep in a properly sized bed if she got the chance, and we ended up running for the last trains and Amelia spent the night with me.

She didn’t move from my bed for nearly twenty-four hours.  We did nothing but feed each other strawberries, read aloud from our favourite stories (I love Twain and Zora Neal Hurston, hers was Kundera and Harold and the Big, Purple Crayon), and test the bedframe.  Making love slowly, frenziedly; one giving tensed orders, then the other making breathless requests.  A little fucking marathon.  For such an old man, I only pulled some muscle or another around my groin near the end of this first encounter.  I didn’t fuss about it, though, as the mood was very light, almost as sheer as this graceful lady’s tights.  As I strolled with Amelia to the station, the evening smelt of autumn, and the breeze gave advance notice the Green Man was on his way.

And it has gone on since.  These love making sessions have lead me to this late revelation on the state of my fantasying faculties.  And this has had a further knock-on effect, and bear with me here: this has in part lead to my involvement in serious international wire crime.  Against the very pornography hubs I frequented online, some only a few weeks ago.  Striking right at the heart of the mushy, soft rotten parts of the internet.  Things just clicked into place.  I am the bully.

Let me walk you through the calculus.  Firstly, there’s the talent.  I know a ton of men and women, tops and bottoms, who work  the shooting communities in the Valley, Clearwater, Florida, north Vegas.  My friend Tyler, he’s a veteran cocksman.  He has said the same contracts in 1998 paid five times more back then than they did in 2010.  That’s “teh internets” at work.  You can’t beat ‘free,’ he says.  While we are beating off to free web portal content, other people’s bread and butter is being threatened.  There’s a way the business model can adapt, but first the marketplace has to be purified.

Second, let’s be honest here – from Sony to the FBI, entrenched institutions have been challenged by people from their home computers.  Does it matter what their various reasons were for doing so?  Let us focus instead on what we can be sure of.  Everything becomes open to change when you hook up to a network.  By definition.  It only follows that somebody, for whatever reason, decided to attack the free porn hubs.

Thirdly, I’ve been into hacking systems for a few decades.  It started with an issue of 2600 magazine in a hash and opium den off Wabash, back in mid-‘80’s Chicago.  The way it discussed the geography of the coast-to-coast telephone network as a physical system controlled by tones and switches aroused my interest.  When they started hooking personal home computers up to that network, new, even richer and dynamic systems arose.  For us to fuck with.

When I met the Anonymous faction at OLSX last fall, another piece fell into place.  Smart kids, just using their talents to help corporations do their business.  For a while.  Just taking the money they’re paid.  And then doing something they’re actually interested in.  Like crashing the corporate party.  Is system engineering only really a few steps away from re-engineering faulty, old ways of doing things, as these young hackers intoned?  I had only been involved because hacking is a golf term, thereby a Scottish enterprise by association.  But this cast everything in a new light.

Lastly, there was Amelia.  She left the circus to perform her work in the street, she told met that first night, because she got sick of producers, investors, club owners giving her advice on her act.  Expression, artistry, decisions on these things should be left to the creative spirits.  Not some business-minded arseholes.  So she split to take her art where she run a fair business, without compromise.  I thought of the people in porn.  They just want to make a fair trade: I did it as much out of love for my muse as much as any other reason.  But don’t tell her that.  She won’t like that I’ve turned to crime.

So, along with the Anonymous people, I coordinated massive denial of service attacks against the major free porno web portals.  Meanwhile, I had my press people organise a campaign to spread the word: the business model is changing.  Buy a monthly subscription to a pornographer’s website.  Save the blowjob, Tyler said when I phoned him about the idea.  I even got another friend who runs a screen-printing company to do up t-shirts.  Save the Blowjob.

So far, so good.  Although the story kept migrating deeper and deeper into the pinky folds, even the Financial Times covered the attacks for three days.  We had camera coverage from RT and a few others at the speaking rally in Hyde Park.  Not that I spoke.  Or even attended.  I had to remain behind the scenes, my lawyers explained to me.  This is wire crime.  I could face charges.  I don’t worry about this.  The word has gotten out there: for those who cannot go back to mental masturbation, save the wild Midwestern waitress-cum-adult model blowjob – pay for your porn!

My little acrobat has things to do during the day, she has her art to attend to.  When she decides to move on, to Pisa, to Dubrovnik; will I fill my nights with a carousel of faces; will I push my own face into the stacks in the Senate House library; will I try to be someone else’s London affair?  It’s difficult to see.

But what is a certainty, in my very own heart of hearts, is that no matter what happens to me or to my fair and wild Amelia; we have struck the first blow against free internet pornography.  The battle is here!  And what of winning this, I can only call on others to continue on, take the fight to the very walls of the place.  Old Adam Smith, he calls it the chance that Lowest Common Denominator is beaten by the scalable Prime Mover.  He wears his t-shirt everywhere these days.