Internet Censorship

china porn, chinaporn, china, porn, internet censorship

Until recently these were the three main searches leading people to this blog. After finishing this post I’m guessing they’ll be back at the top of the list.

The absolutely ridiculous idea of the Australian Labour Party, and in particular Stephen Conroy, trying to censor the Internet has been raising it’s ugly head again.

There are so many arguments against filtering the internet at the ISP, but none for it. In a recent article psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg inferred that the internet was responsible for  an increase in oral and anal sex amongst teenagers, as he put it:

"Oral and anal sex have become almost normalised among 13-year- olds,”

I’m sure Carr-Gregg is a qualified psychologist, but I’m not so sure he’s qualified to discuss Internet ISP filtering. I’m also not so sure that because he has seen a “supposed” increase in teens engaging in oral and anal sex that this is due to the increase of porn available on the internet. Following from his inference, I would like to know if there has been an increase in the various forms of fetishism available on the internet. Has  fetish porn on the net caused teenagers to get into BDSM? (From Google searching for BDSM – Results 1 – 10 of about 33,800,000 for bdsm – the things I do for research!)  Do more teenagers dress in tight latex, rubber or leather gear whilst carrying out fellatio? I tend to think not. Truly how many teenagers are dressing up as dragons and getting into this fetish “dragons having sex with cars"? Honestly you can find all sorts of weird shit on the Internet, but that’s hardly a reason for the government to censor it, that’s a parents responsibility.

From the rather brief search I carried out the two main reasons for the “supposed” increase in teenagers engaging in oral and anal sex are:

1. An increase in reporting, significantly due to the question being raised by health care workers who may not have asked those questions in the past.
2. An increase in teens thinking oral sex isn’t ‘real’ sex (you can probably thank Bill Clinton for that), particularly prevalent amongst the religious who are "saving themselves” (sexually) for when they get married.

I didn’t find any mention of the increase of pornography available on the internet being a reason for the apparent increase in teenagers engaging in oral and anal sex. So inferring that it is, is plainly just a scare tactic to make parents thing the internet should be filtered.

As this article on about.com says

Panicking about whether our teens are having more or less oral sex … isn’t the point …. The point is that if more, less, or any of our teens are engaging in sexual behaviours like oral sex and anal sex, they need to know the risks and they need to know how to protect themselves.

Filtering the Internet is not going to cause teenagers to suddenly stop engaging in sex, but better education can help them avoid any problems if they do.

I also believe the general mass media, magazines, TV, movies, music (especially music video clips), and the fashion industry have been more responsible for the sexualisation of teenagers than the Internet ever has. Does the government propose bans on these as well? I think the government just sees the Internet as an easy target because it is relatively easy to access porn compared to other methods. One has to admit that there is a lot of porn on the net but I tend to think the children actively seeking it probably aren’t going to be affected by it. For younger children, parental guidance and filtering locally on their own PCs should be adequate safe guards against accidently viewing pornography.

I have heaps more to say on this topic, including the hypocrisy of the Australian government complaining about China’s Internet censorship, but I’ll leave it at this for now. Hat Tip to Sean for the link to the courier mail article. I better go for a run now and post my letters to Senator Conroy and my local MP requesting they drop the idea of the ISP filtering.

Please check the No Clean Feed link at the top of my side bar to learn more and what you can do to try and stop the Internet filtering.

Update

Just received an email from GetUp requesting I do a short survey. The survey, amongst other things was canvassing my opinions on the Internet Censorship and whether GetUp should do something about it. This is the survey link, it will only take about 5 minutes, why not have your say? (Not all GetUp members received the email so I’m not sure if that link is tied to my account or not, but have a go anyway.)

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