Nerve launched on June 26, 1997, the day the Communications Decency Act was dealt a fatal blow. Now a second bill, also intended to cleanse the Internet of pornography, is waltzing through Congress.
When I explain my opposition to the bill, people often ask me whether I am concerned about Hooksexup's effect on the occasional wandering child or teenager who comes upon our pages. I tend to reply: though I cannot answer for others, I think my own children would find on Hooksexup a less distorted view of sexuality than they are likely to find elsewhere.
"But you don't have any kids," they say. Ah yes, good point, I don't -- I have conjured imaginary children who are wise and curious and do the dishes, but I accept that the flesh and blood ones I am dealt may be more impressionable and confused.
I do worry about what my bright little imaginary house-cleaning toddlers will be exposed to -- I worry that they will play Doom and 007 and ask Santa for an AK-47 with an automatic conversion kit; I worry that they will start reading Seventeen at age seven and conclude that sexual allure is the surest form of social power; I worry that they will see billboard after billboard of faultless, bikini-swathed goddesses and come to believe that being observed is more important than observing; I worry that they will read that the people most determined to impeach Clinton at the end of the Twentieth Century were those who had behaved most like him, and assume that morality is always a diversionary tactic in a chess game of self-aggrandizement.
I worry that my children will begin to suspect that the national preoccupation with protecting them is less about their real needs and vulnerabilities and more about the need adults have to protect their own memory of childhood innocence. I worry that they will see that we are a nation, more than any other, that doesn't want to grow up -- that fears the appearance and existential sobriety of age -- and consequently wants to create for children a biosphere of blissful ignorance. I hope my children are able to travel, to immerse themselves in cultures that consider experience and wisdom ample compensation for the capitulations of adulthood.
What is it like to be fifteen and realize that your parents want to be you? No doubt this is confusing and painful for all involved. I wonder if we as a culture can worship youth, envy youth and wisely guide our young people.
So what should be done to protect children from the pages of hooksexup.com? Parents should install Netnanny, Cybersitter, or an equivalent filtering software. The connivingly named Child Online Protection Act (or CDA-II), which would force us to demand a credit card number from every reader, or install an elaborate, cumbersome age verification system, threatens to stigmatize all sex-related web content, however positive, honest and educational. The most graphic sites require credit cards because they cannot attract advertisers, so the free market already provides a measure of protection.
I believe that we as a society are gradually becoming more mature about sex, better able to treat sex as a natural and normal part of our lives. But if we insist on treating sexuality as something dirty and frightening, we'll raise children who see things the same way.
Rufus left his reliable salary and position as an editor and director of new media at Cader Books, a publisher of bestselling humor and entertainment titles, in order to co-found Hooksexup in 1997 with Genevieve Field.
Before working at Cader, he was managing editor for two years at August House, a publisher of contemporary storytelling and folklore. Earlier still, he was book review editor at The Free Press in Little Rock, Arkansas. His writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Baltimore Sun and The Wall Street Journal, among other places. He graduated from Brown University in 1991.
