Just yesterday I was Googling some trivia about early grunge bands and found a piece of writing that I honestly thought was a reminiscence about those days (along the lines of “I can’t believe Nirvana made it so big when there were so many other great Seattle bands, hey do you remember that chick who used to go out with Andy Wood…”) until some girls came over and they started having sex.
So there’s “erotica” about the rock geek fans of early grunge bands. I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting that. I wouldn’t have been surprised (disturbed, but not surprised) to encounter real-person slash about the members of Soundgarden or something like that, though. I’m not Googling it, but I’m sure it exists.
Well, I will admit that I enjoy playing around in fandom, which is sort of a catch-all name for the internet subcommunity that produces fanworks like fanfiction and fanart. Part of it’s because I genuinely enjoy it, and part of it’s because I’m an anthropologist at heart and I find it really fascinating. Fandom has its own culture, with its own rules, lingo, and ethics. As a result, I can tell you with some certainty that there is pornographic fanfiction about pretty much EVERYTHING. (No, I’m not interested in 99.99999999999% of it. My knowledge comes from fandom!secret and fandom!wank.) There are fandoms producing NC-17 rated fic about Nickelodeon cartoons, robots, the kids in the epilogue of the last Harry Potter book, the kids on South Park, politicians, Korean pop bands, football players, Final Fantasy characters, you name it. I don’t know how porny it is, since the site supposedly doesn’t allow adult fic, but fanfiction.net has 23 Solitaire fics and 76 Tetris fics. (May not be safe for work? Or life? I don’t know and I don’t want to know.) So I’m a pretty firm believer in Rule 34.
THAT SAID, I could not immediately find any Mary Tyler Moore fanfiction, pornographic or otherwise. But I still suspect it’s out there. And if it isn’t, it’s not because it’s too wholesome. I tried to think of the creepiest, most wholesome thing that no one would EVER want porn of, and immediately located Care Bears S&M. Exactly as safe as you think it is.
Oh my god, I found more. Oh, thank god for the internet.
Assume it’s back around 1990 and I’m at work searching for online porn. So I type in porn as a search word on Archie and, thirty minutes later, I’ve got an ASCII picture of a naked woman. And the next day I get called in to the personnel department.
Undaunted, I go back online for more pictures of naked women. But to avoid triggering the “porn” alarm, I cleverly type in “pron” as my search word. And the search engine tells me there are no hits for “pron” online and suggests I check my spelling.
My point is that was there any reason to use pron as a substitute for porn before it became a widespread alternative? And once it became widespread, wouldn’t it have been detected just as readily as any other suspicious keyword?
I’m not saying that’s WHY pr0n came into being, and I’m not saying that using it to actually look up and download actual erotica would be effective. I’m just saying that when discussing something like this subject on a message board (like in this thread) while you’re at work, it’s useful to use “pr0n” so you don’t wake the netwatchers up from their afternoon nap.
The group blog BoingBoing has had a few Rule 34 Challenges on its IRC channel, one of which can be found here (that’s text only, so there’s no pictures or clickable links). No porn could be found for some subjects, so there are exceptions to Rule 34–unless the participants weren’t searching hard enough.
