Omnipresent, Yet Oh So Suboptimal

In our increasingly uncivil, information-exploding times, the Internet has become the window to the American sexual soul. And what the Net reveals about the gross national erotica is mind-numbing.

Sex, sex everywhere, and not a brain cell to think.

Can there be anything more dull and uninspiring than the disconnected games that cybersexers play and sometimes pay 20-cents-a-minute for? (I’ve hazarded a peek for research purposes, stopping short of porn site “membership.”)

OK, maybe Playboy and Penthouse, with their pouty, come-hither pictorials. Yawn. But if self-indulgent, predictable, outer-body cybersex is one man’s - or one woman’s - idea of a sexy good time, it’s no wonder the divorce rate is out of sight and emotional walls between the sexes are rock solid.

I want a revolution. A sexual revolution. Let’s put lovemaking back into sex. Privately, please.

These days, pornography and the First Amendment are engaged in an illicit affair. Every week there’s a new challenge to yet another anti-Internet-porn law. Among the latest: Virginia professors are contesting a statute that prohibits Commonwealth employees from using state-owned computers to “access, download, print or store any information … having sexually explicit content,” unless the use is for “bona fide” and approved research.

It seems Virginia can’t just fire employees who diddle on the Net at taxpayer-expense; it has to enact an unconstitutional statute first.

So-called Netizens, on the other hand, sleep with a disk of the First Amendment under their pillows and relish engaging in confrontational rhetoric about free speech without actually confronting or speaking to anyone. Heaven forbid that real flesh - it’s so messy - would come into play.

Well, I’m a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, but gimme a break. Porn, porn, porn. Hard porn. Soft porn.

In the courts, in the legislature, in the library, the school, the home. I’m sick to death of porn. No, it doesn’t offend, shock or dismay me. It bores me to tears.

Are there any adults in the “adults-only” room? If so, read D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, Anais Nin, or even Erica Jong. Get an emotional grip. You’re not 15 or even 25 anymore. How long you going to swim in the shallow end of the pool?

The key to dealing with porn, I think, in cyberspace and elsewhere, is not to brand it immoral, which only makes it seem more titillating; or to fear and revile it, as Congress has done in its soon-to-be-struck-down Communications Decency Act.

Let’s recognize porn for what it ultimately is. Unimaginative. Uncool.

Pornography, says Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist I’ve selected as unofficial leader for my sexual revolution, is “the total trivialization of eroticism because it doesn’t allow individuals to enjoy their own creativity. … That’s what I see as symbolized by magazines like Playboy or Penthouse. They reflect a programmed, banal, superficial and, quite often, very tasteless form of eroticism.”

Eroticism, on the other hand, he says,”is the enrichment of physical love with the help of the imagination.”

Ah, music to my ears, my eyes, my lips, my. … But, this is a family newspaper. (Amazing, what ideas without pictures can do).

Pornography succeeds only when it takes a person away from him or herself. And if a person is away from him or herself, where does that leave the person he or she is with?

If I were a librarian, I’d exile the Internet computers to a corner so that children wouldn’t catch an eyeful of naked unreal flesh, start giggling and disrupt the few readers left in the world. I’d also impose a time limit on the drooling masses; regulate the computers during “peak” hours like treadmills in a health club.

But no filtering software. Blocking racy Internet sites is a cop-out. It doesn’t work. And like it or not, “dirty” pictures are part of life’s knowledge.

If I were a parent, I’d keep an unobtrusive eye on junior’s cybersurfing. But eventually, I’d step aside and be available only for “consultation.”

Download your pictures, son, daughter. Do what you must. Heck, I read True Confessions magazine when I was 13. (And that’s all I’m going to confess to.)

There’s a place for curiosity in any time. But if you want to make the most of yours, go read a book.

xxxx