The internet has a lot of pornography, because human beings are fascinated by sex. How much, though? If you try to google the stats, unfortunately, mostly what you get is horrified anti-porn crusaders who are prone to inflating the numbers and calling it an epidemic, or a plague, or a perverted nightmare of hellish hedonism. But here’s one estimate that seems sober and reasonable:
● In 2010, out of the million most popular (most trafficked) websites in the world, 42,337 were sex-related sites. That’s about 4% of sites.
● From July 2009 to July 2010, about 13% of Web searches were for erotic content.
That sounds right: common, easily found when you look for it (and many people are looking for it!), but not exactly flooding your browser at the instant you turn it on. I know about the big name porn sites, like PornHub, and I’ve even seen them a few times, but that kind of content is also easily avoided…well, except for when some asshole gets the clever idea to email me piles of gay porn, but that’s what the delete key is for, and gmail filters.
I didn’t even know there were Twitter accounts that distribute pornography freely, until now. Now I know. Because Ted Cruz’s twitter account favorited a tweet by @SexuallPosts, and that’s all the internet is babbling about this morning.
OK, I know that the hypocrisy is delicious, but I just wish that we could get half as much mocking, laughing, smirking finger-pointing over Cruz’s sanctimonious public prudery that we get over his closet prurience. This is a man who tried to ban sex toys, who wants to control what people are allowed to do in the privacy of their bedrooms, and wants to oppress LGBT people. We ridicule when he’s caught watching a porn clip, which I’d guess nearly everyone reading this has done at some point in their life, and we call down a greater firestorm of scorn over that than we do his attempts at anti-human, anti-woman legislation, which I hope most of us deplore.
The difference is that you can get elected on a platform of denying abortion, hating gays, and suppressing sexuality, while the ‘revelation’ that you have seen moving pictures of naked people having sex, and maybe even liked it, can kill your political career. That seems backwards to me.
I haven’t seen any actual scorn; just joyful laughter, really. This might be the first thing in American politics that has made me smile since Trump won the election.
I think the whole point is that he’s been such a prude, including saying that people “don’t have a right to stimulate their genitals,” and now he’s been caught with his, uh, pants down.
Well, when someone like Cruz is caught watching porn, that is so terribly hypocritical it does deserve mocking. Besides that, I totally agree with you. In that fucked-up country the US have become, you can grab ’em by the pussy and become president, but watching porn is a no-no. And smoking pot.
4% is also equivalent to about an hour out of every 24 hour day.
Carry on.
Well now, it’s not going to kill his political career. It’s generating a lot of mocking, but that’s about the extent of it.
This may be the best thing I’ve ever heard about Ted Cruz. I read on another site that this was lesbian porn. We are all so very complicated.
But pointing out hypocrisy is fun! Plus, on a slightly more pragmatic note,…
…with somebody like Cruz, I wouldn’t be particularly concerned about what exactly ends his political career – if it would only end!
So my hard drive is a higher percentage porn than the internet as a whole? That’s kind of embarrassing…
Well, Teddy is falling back on the ” It’s not mine, baby!” defense. He’s blaming an aide–predictably cowardly.
Look, if there was actual sex involved I’m sure Cruz didn’t enjoy it – that wouldn’t be allowed.
I expect he just sits there in a puddle and cries afterwards.
You mean, a religious-right politician and/or preacher got caught being a hypocrite in matters of sexual morality? This is the most socking scandal since the last ten-thousand times it happened.
I think I’ll call my next band Obscene Devices.
“The difference is that you can get elected on a platform of denying abortion, hating gays, and suppressing sexuality, while the ‘revelation’ that you have seen moving pictures of naked people having sex, and maybe even liked it, can kill your political career. That seems backwards to me.”
I think that’s a function of where he ran for public office. Someone with his views would not be elected from California or Massachusetts or New York, and a revelation that a politician from one of those states watches computer porn would be greeted with yawns.
I’d love to agree with the people saying that the play this is getting is because he’s a hypocrite, but I don’t think the evidence agrees with that. It’s because he’s a hypocrite about sex. There have been a lot of very obviously hypocritical politicians — at the risk of inviting ire, Democrats widely condemned the Bush administration for lying us into an unnecessary war which destabilized the mideast and helped terrorists gain a lot of ground, but then nominated someone for the presidency who did exactly the same thing with Libya, even down to the “on investigation, it turns out that these lies must have been known to be lies even as they were told” part. That went under the radar — or, more accurately, was stomped into the dust by people who didn’t want to admit that anyone running against Trump could be as despicable as the Republicans — and the reason that it was possible for it to get no traction was that it had nothing to do with sex. Only a few tens of thousands of immediate deaths plus an indeterminate-but-growing number of further deaths contingent on the destruction caused by the war, plus a huge number of lives ruined but not ended. Yawn.
I think part of the problem is that a proportion of the outrage about Cruz’s hypocrisy is not coming from people who like to laugh at the fact that he prates openly about a ridiculously toxic form of faux sexual ‘morality’ while failing to live up to his twisted value system in private, but instead is coming from people who dearly wish that he actually were as purely sex-hating and delusional in all aspects of his life as he is in his public persona – people for whom he is not fanatical and prudish enough. People desperately seeking a sexually ‘unsullied’ Prophet of Prudery to lead their crusade against ‘smut’ and ‘perversion’ (read as; anything that doesn’t conform to their entirely non-functional notions of propriety, with double points if it can be used as a means to oppress women, the LGBTQI community, or ideally both at the same time), and preferably will be the one to set the first taper to the first pyre, and that would probably not even be a metaphorical pyre for half of them. After all, women ‘morally corrupt’ men by sexually ‘tempting’ them according to their Babble. That ability to tempt men is a form of power, and as every good Xian knows power in the hands of a woman is merely another name for witchcraft, and they do so desperately want to have a good witch burning or two…thousand, just like the good ol’ Puritan days.
Salem-fest 2017; be sure to bring smores…
Busterggi: “I expect he just sits there in a puddle and cries afterwards.”
OK, unfortunately, I read that a paddle, and now I have an image of Ted and Heidi that I just cannot unsee in my mind. The problem with a mental image is that you can’t just claw your eyes out.