The Child Online Protection Act is a piece of legislation designed to restrict web content deemed "harmful to minors." What makes COPA special is how broadly defined it is--there is no language specifying that this "harmful" material has to actually be obscene. Theoretically, I suppose, you could argue that a website about how to make an internal combustion engine could be banned according to COPA's guidelines...I mean, what if they try it at home?
On a recent NPR piece I heard a spokeswoman for the family watchdog group that sponsored this thing telling us all about how COPA is really perfectly reasonable and all it will do is stop children from having access to pornography and we shouldn't get uptight about this censorship thing. All of that is, of course, an unbelievable load of horsehockey. If COPA were actually to be enforced--which it hasn't been because a lower court has already struck it down--any site containing this "harmful to minors" content would have to install an age verification system. Not the "don't click here unless you're over 18" thing, but an actual screening system that would demand a valid credit card number and other ID before allowing the viewer to continue--or face criminal prosecution. Even better, the definition of what counts as "harmful to minors" is to be determined by individual judges or courts according to "community standards." Yeah, I like the sound of THAT.
There are two reasons that this pisses me off. No, three. One: I am an American. Two: I am an adult. Three: I am a writer.
1. I am an American.
Much as I would like to disavow it at this particular moment in time, I am an American; I was born and raised here, and I'm used to a lot of the things Americans take for granted. Freedom of speech is one of them. I'm used to it. I like it. It bothers me a lot to see that freedom being curtailed. In the print and television media, freedom of speech is already severely restricted, not through government intervention but through corporate censorship, which prevents most mainstream media outlets from printing material that would cause the American public to become irritated with that media outlet's sponsors. For a long time now, the internet has been doing what print and TV can't or won't do--providing a forum for viewpoints which are unpopular, unconventional and/or simply unfunded. If that changes, then we have to all intents and purposes lost freedom of expression in this country.
Oh come on, you say. Stop being so alarmist, you say. Free speech existed before the internet. I mean, even if COPA passes, you can say whatever you want, right? You can go on writing whatever twisted screed your brain cooks up and nobody's going to come bother you. So what are you complaining about?
Well, it is true that things would have to get much worse before people had to worry about their actual oral speech being regulated--although FBI surveillance of phone and email communications is certainly a start. However, I would argue that the freedom to express an idea implies the freedom to get it to an audience. It's pointless to speak if nobody's listening. I don't have my own newspaper column; I don't own my own TV station; I don't know anyone in radio; the only way for me to get people to read my stuff is to slap it up on the web. The same is true for untold hordes of other crackpots out there; and sure, a lot of them are lunatics whose drivel would be no great loss to the world, but a lot of them are intelligent, committed people who just want everyone to know that there are other ways to look at the world and other things that could be done. Organizations and individuals who could never afford access to traditional media can get a domain name and get their message out to anyone with internet access. Limited as it is by the cost of the technology that supports it, the internet is one of the only kind of media that is potentially within everyone's reach. It is the one form of mass communication that neither the government nor the corporations have quite figured out how to control. If we lose it, we're losing one of the last truly democratic forums we have left.
All right, you say. But COPA isn't about politics, it's about pornography. You're not trying to sell porn to children, so why do you care?
Well,
2. I am an adult.
This website is not designed for children. I am an adult talking to other adults, and that means that sometimes I use adult language. I know that this has come to the attentions of various search engines, because in the logs for this site are many records of hits from people searching for various kinds of pornography. They find my site because it occasionally includes profanity, because it alludes in passing to certain body parts, and because I accidentally invented a word for my Women On Fire series which turned out to be identical to a Japanese word used to refer to a special kind of pornography involving tentacles and underage girls. (Imagine my surprise.) According to some "community standards," any or all of those things would be enough to classify my site as "harmful to minors." Never mind the fact that my site is queer-positive, and contains several items in which same-sex relationships are portrayed in a positive light. Suggesting that heterosexuality is not the only acceptable option is definitely harmful to minors, according to most of the people who would support something like COPA in the first place. Well, if hypervigilant fundamentalist parents want to keep their six year olds away from my site, I have absolutely no problem with that. What I object to is being told that because one of these six year olds could potentially stumble across The Adder's Lair, I need to purchase and install software that will verify that each potential viewer is at least 18 years old. First of all, I don't have the money or the necessary technical expertise to do that. Second, who in their right mind is going to fork over a credit card number to some total stranger who won't even give them her real name just so they can read her demented ravings? Nobody, that's who. For me, as for a lot of personal or organizational sites that might potentially fall within COPA's vast purview, requiring that kind of 'protection' for children is equivalent to shutting the site down.
This becomes even more infuriating--not to mention ridiculous--when you consider that it is called the World Wide Web for a reason. COPA might be able to shut me down, but there are armies of pornographers all over the world who are just waiting to shovel their shit down the throats of anyone unlucky enough to encounter them. If I thought COPA was going to stop Albanian porn merchants from spamming my guestbook or prevent porn-peddling hackers from insinuating links to their sites into search engines and weblogs, I'd be all for it. But of course COPA will not do anything to protect America's children from the fetid tidal wave of international pornography, any more than it will stop me from getting spam about penile implants. All it will do is make it easier for COPA's proponents to harass groups in this country who are challenging their world view.
And this is what at last brings me to
3. I am a writer.
I am, really. I've been published, in print even. Of course, all my print-published stuff is nonfiction that I churn out for the day job. The writing that I really care about--fiction, poetry, personal essays, political commentary, humor and parody, and so on--is only published online. Why? Well, as regards the commentary, etc. I really have to blame my own laziness before I blame the market. When it comes to the fiction, though, I can blame the industry--and I do! You can read the saga if you don't believe me, or you could take my word for it. Well, since the gatekeepers have refused to lift the portcullis, I get my fiction to readers the old-fashioned way: by circulating the manuscripts. I do this electronically, of course, which allows me to get the books to the people that want them fast and for free. It's an inefficient system, and will never lead to my developing a very large audience, but it cheers me up to know that people are reading the books, and it would make me very sad not to be able to distribute them.
I went through a dilemma a while back about whether to distribute the books to underage readers, and eventually decided to put an age restriction on it because of exactly this kind of we-must-protect-the-children-from-online-smut hysteria. I personally don't consider most of Women On Fire to be harmful to minors; with the possible exception of Better To Burn, which includes representations of sexual violence I would consider too disturbing for immature readers, I think WOF would do minors nothing but good. By "minors" I'm talking about high-school age readers, not children, who in most cases would not be reading at an advanced enough level to finish or understand the books anyway. But I'm quite sure most right-wing "family" groups would consider it harmful to minors--not because of Better To Burn's representation of a brutal heterosexual rape, but because of three scenes in Darkness Bright in which homosexual sex between consenting adults in a lifetime committed relationship is depicted in what I fondly hope is a sensitive, affirming, non-pornographic way. The pro-COPA chick they dug up for NPR was trying to defend the law on the basis of a provision it includes exempting material that has "artistic, social, or moral value." It briefly amused me to imagine myself in a court of law attempting to prove that WOF has artistic, social, or moral value. But of course, it's not really funny, because if this legislation passed and were actually enforced, it could potentially make distributing WOF--even to people who are not only over 18, but older than I am--illegal. When I started asking for an age statement, a lot of WOF's readers told me I was being paranoid; a series that makes you read, literally, a thousand pages before you get to the first sex scene hardly qualifies as internet porn. But a bunch of people who will try to prevent their children from viewing impressionist paintings of nude women will forbid anything; and if COPA were to become the law of the land, I could conceivably face criminal prosecution just for trying to get my work to an audience.
Now, you all don't have to care about my stupid books; but I'm not the only writer who has been turned away by the gatekeepers for no reason other than that their work happens not to be liable to grease the wheels of capitalism. These people deserve an audience; and you deserve access to ideas and stories that the industry refuses for one reason or another to underwrite. And if COPA is upheld, and "community standards" are enforced on all of us, your surfing time is going to become much less entertaining and edifying than it currently is.
Why is there such anxiety about the Web on the part of these conservative groups? After all, any kid with an older brother can get his or her hands on a copy of Hustler. Why should internet content be more exposed to censorship than the print media? Well, my crackpot theory is that it comes down to territoriality. Amongst the members of our fundamentalist right, it is easy to detect a kind of siege mentality, where they see themselves as the last stronghold of purity and decency being daily battered by a barrage of filth and sickness. According to their mythology, anyway, the one place where it should be possible to exclude these evil things is in the confines of one's own home. What makes the Web more threatening than print culture, TV or film is that it opens up that hermetic and pristine space to outside influences. Since a lot of this content is available for free, parents can't keep their kids away from it by refusing to give them spending money; since it's on the same web with a lot of stuff that the parents presumably would like to have access to, they are reluctant to just pull the plug on their home internet access (the way my parents were constantly threatening to pull the plug on our TV when we were growing up). This isn't really about protecting children; it's about protecting the home as the one space where these parents can achieve total control over their children's environment. Which of course is a myth anyway, since their kids will inevitably be exposed to other influences outside the home and then bring those ideas back into the home inside their little minds. So essentially, this huge sweeping censorship law is really just about protecting this fantasy of totalitarian parental control.
Ah well. It's the Supreme Court, and anything could happen. If I do end up running afoul of COPA-mandated "community standards," I guess, I'll just have to subpoena all six of the Adder's Lair's faithful readers to testify about how artistically valid, socially useful, and morally uplifting this site truly is. That is, if No More Blood doesn't get me hauled before a military court for sedition first.
The Plaid Adder
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