PORNOGRAPHY

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Human beings are excellent at detecting patterns. It is a primeval skill vital for survival. A man-eating lion is watched carefully. With time, the watchers become familiar with its basic behavioural habits and prepare a trap to kill it. Because human beings mastered the skill of pattern identification they taught it to computers which can do it much better and on huge scale involving super-fast mainframes where hundreds of millions of people are digitised into processable date obtained and analysed by almost every industry in the world including prostitution and pornography.

Websites can restrict viewing of pages of all sorts of porn but that doesn’t mean nobody except those with permissions can see the content. Programs downloaded free can be modified to empty entire websites. Not much can remain hidden nowadays. You take a few photographs using your own mobile phones and the best shots are sent back to you beautifully enhanced and sequentially arranged in a free professionally constructed picture story.

The same can be done with tens of thousands of porn images or videos. People can hide away things and lie about their existence. Computers neither lie nor hide things. If you know the code you know the computer, and if you know the computer you can know its contents and retrieve them.

Google chose catchy names for the search engine and “YouTube”. “Plus Pages” is very vague so it takes even experienced users of computers and maintainers of websites and blogs time to find out what’s on offer and discover excellence, a standard Google appreciates and tries to provide for users of Plus pages with very comfortable conditions. You can have as many pages as you like and Google can offer help and services offered by neither Twitter nor Facebook where you can’t run a gif image though it is offered in adds and they may soon be screen on normal pages. Websites will continue to be needed for a long time but users of limited needs may find plus pages a good choice.

As a search engine, Google has to guide people to the relevant pages they are searching for including pornography and brothels. There are some wild statistics about Internet pornography that seems to be exaggerated by the industry itself to give the impression everybody is watching porn but the case doesn’t appear to be so.

According to Forbes, (https://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html) the attention lavished on the pornography industry–as a business– is vastly overstated and many have claimed it is large and profitable, especially on the Internet. Many of the claims are cut from whole cloth, but are accepted without question by the legitimate press.

Figures available about online pornography seem vastly overstated and most are very old. Porn websites do not represent 40% of the top 100 websites by traffic. The realistic figure is more like 3% or 4%. According to industry sources, there could be up to 30,000 Internet viewers watching porn each second. Again, this is nothing. As these words are typed the number of Internet users was 3,613,181,370. http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/

I predict the product that made online porn thrive is likely to be the product that will bring its un-ceremonial demise in its present form any time after five years from now or maybe less. The body of a woman has been the subject of permanent interest by man since the creation of our species. Had it not been, we wouldn’t be here today. If one studies the ancient stock of words on sex the conclusion may be that everything that can be done with the body of women as a source of pleasure has been done.

The pornography industry can’t reinvent itself because it can’t reinvent the body of a woman. If the industry can’t reinvent itself it can’t survive. It is thriving on women and women are most likely the ones who will kill it but only if they stop killing their marriages. This is unlikely to happen soon. Though lower by 6% from the high 72% in the early 1990s, UK court figures for 2011 point to women initiating divorce in 66% of cases.

There are signs that porn is beginning to worry some women but there is no panic. On their plus side is a porn bankrupt modality built on the industry’s illusionary assumption that consumers will not realise any time soon what they are paying for. On the minus, more men are getting divorced and some of them may turn to porn.

Sooner or later, watchers of pornography will realise the industry must be one of the most bizarre that ever flourished. Whether one is watching free porn or paid, one may realise that one is paying with time or money or both to watch people enjoying themselves, or appear to try to. We are confused as for some women the cries of pleasure don’t sound much different from cries of discomfort or even pain so one is never sure.

The analogy of the porn business is that of a hungry man watching two or more people having a nice meal from behind a window. The pleasure is a transitional illusion that is likely to make the watcher less satisfied and much more hungry.

Some couples are said to use porn to help create appetite. Those should be careful because comparisons are easily made and those watching from behind the window may realise the local meal on offer is actually poor and not very appetising. This seems to be a human perception. The hen in the neighbour’s garden is a peacock. People also get tired even of the most beautiful and tastier things, as Moses discovered in the wilderness of Sinai. One is said to have summed it up nicely, “Show me the sexiest woman in the world and I’ll show you a man who’s absolutely tired of sleeping with her.” The same can be said by women.

In all cases, it seems safe to assume the novelty of the best porn material will wear off so the porn industry is busy trying to re-kindle it with videos of gentler intercourse at one side of their yard stick or videos of sex acts of violence or bestiality or both on the other. If there are those who enjoy such scenes maybe they should try to imagine themselves for a second or two not at the giving end but at the receiving one and then decide if enjoyable or otherwise.

Luckily for girls not much can remain unbared with total nudity. The bodies retained the size but shreds of rags covering them are getting smaller. Those following the trendy trends may have noticed that even the scantiest of covers are being replaced by exotic painted shapes of foliage or strips. It is still experimental but a group or groups out there are up to something that may surprise us, or probably not.

There is a race between some mums and their little daughters to wear tops and shorts with generous cuts that keep getting more generous. This is not surprising if certain historical records are consulted but it may be surprising historically due to the relative speed of copycat emulation.

For example, it took human beings 25,000 or 30,000 years to start covering the basic private part with G-Strings. Some 5,000 later our ancestors moved on to cover most of their bodies not because of modesty, it seems, but more so because costumes were very expensive to make. Wearing as many pieces as comfortably possible became a sign of wealth and nudity a sign of poverty.

The almost global re-migration to G-Strings took a few years. Even the pouches advertised for men are several thousand years old. The member in some ancient graves was found to have been encased in cold containers.

It is said, as a joke it seems, that men will marry any girl and girls would marry anything but that, probably, is not true. Equally not true is the choice of men between cows and glasses of milk provided by impatient girls.

Reality may be different. A man may sift through thousands of photos to select the one hundred most beautiful girls on show but it is unlikely any would be a chosen girl friend or wife. Popcorn is not a meal and it doesn’t stay fresh for long. The faces of some very beautiful women active in the business remain fresh but the body looks like the inside of a family car.

The porn industry is aware of this. The older wave of their stock of girls, barely 30 in most cases, is being replaced by a new wave of 18 or as close as available to 18.

This is for general viewing. For special viewing ages below 18, it is claimed, is a must, and it can go down alarmingly. Abhorrent as it should be, child pornography is a fact. In this writer’s opinion, the industry, its pimps and the viewers of the product are all guilty because they are watching their own future being raped, and probably some of their own daughters or sisters.

Women are very intuitive. Their pain tolerance is very high and so, probably, is their patience but they hate competition that threatens their status as the ultimate human attraction and some of them will respond intuitively, i.e. not necessarily consciously. Both man and woman are born pre-programmed but some may say motherhood is instinctive and so, probably, is intuition, a type of natural intelligence.

However, the economic independence of an increasing number of women may have downgraded the historical status of men as providers. A large number of women don’t seem to think that their children need a dad at home with them and an increasing number of children in Europe are born outside marriage.

When one looks at the products marketed by pornography, the conclusion may be that there is no need for women to worry. It is a longish aberration that will disappear in due time. Their permanent standing appears to remain intact. However, some are not convinced and they are beginning to respond by revealing more of the actual not the digital attractive parts.

Most men seem to be happy just watching both the real and the digital but they know the difference. If that’s the case, women who feel threatened by pornography are not looking at the right screen. The main target online and on ground is men. Some may want to choose whether they are after attraction for attraction’s sake or after partners who will love them not just during one sexual encounter and another but during these and all the longer times in between.

Modesty may be a good word. It implies there’s much more than the eye can see but only to those who deserve to see them. The digital attraction may appear more glamourous but it is something one can see on a good screen. Real women are real and they do love back if men are kind and loving.

But then it takes two to tango and one to ruin the party. Probably more than men, women appear to have more courage, or less fear, in breaking up their marriages and sending their ex-husbands to other women or pornography. The temptation to get their hands on 50% of joint assets and life-time maintenance may be regarded by some women as a opportunity not to be missed. The fact that mums can keep the house and receive maintenance for herself and their children may be more temping than keeping the husband.

Women are expected to fight pornography but organised objection is not evident. There are cases when pornography can be considered a threat to women but some women may want to take some of the blame for its growth.
Watching diners eat from behind windows does not fill the stomach. The meal at home maybe humble but it should be enough. A journalist drunk during and after working hours used to tell anybody who wants to listen that sleep with the wife is like hospital food – clean and healthy but unappetising. One wonders what his wife may say about sex with her husband.

Image: https://twitter.com/femen_movement/status/294907086918270976

About the author

Adel Bishtawi

Adel S (Said) Bishtawi was born in Nazareth, Palestine, 1945. He read English Literature at Damascus University, attended short courses of familiarisation of languages including Latin, German and Russian, and attended a course in Linguistics at the Central London Polytechnic.

Adel published more than 20 books in both English and Arabic. the last of which is Only When Desire Screams co-authored by Selvi Sado. A journalist since the late 1960s, he became Front Page Editor of Al Arab Newspaper (London), the first pan Arab Newspaper launched in Europe. In 1978, he joined Jihad Al Khazin in launching Asharq Al Awsat Newspaper (London) as Business and Supplements Editor. In 1980, he was appointed Central Managing Editor of the Emirates News Agency in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. In 1988, he joined Jamil Mrowa (who later re-launched the Daily Star in Beirut in 1996) in London for the re-launch of Al Hayat Newspaper and continued under the editorship of Jihad Al Khazin until he left in April 2001 to dedicate what is left of his time to literary and historical writing. as well as investigating origins by means of historical and etymological linguistics.

Adel produced and co-produced a number of TV documentaries. He produced, directed and wrote “Muslims along the Silk Road”, a five part-60-minutes-each documentary tracing Muslim culture and heritage and the legacy of Muslim pioneers and merchants along the Silk Road starting from China.

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