Things my Kids Will Never Experience III: Life Before the Internet (or) How Pornography Became my Coworker

This one is the biggie.

Have any of you realized that we adults living today are the last generation in the history of the planet to know what life was like before the Internet? Further, we are the only generation to have intimate knowledge of life both before and after the advent of the World Wide Web. Our experience is unique in the entire scope of history. Our parents were the last generation to live their lives looking things up in phonebooks instead of on Yahoo. Our kids will be the first generation to not know how to use an encyclopedia or the Dewey Decimal System. We are the generation right in the middle, who grew up thinking that "www" was a miss-spelling of the World Wrestling Federation, but who now use email and web-surfing for everything from work to entertainment.

Kinda makes you feel special, don't it?

Remember what it was like to write a report for school? My first written report was on Crazy Horse the indian. We didn't live anywhere near a library (my parents were notorious lovers of "country living", which was a prison sentence for me) and so I did all my research via good old Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Actually, I don't think our encyclopedias were Brittanicas. I don't remember what brand they were, but they were probably something my parents (or even my grandparents) bought from a door-to-door salesman. They had bright red hardcover bindings, with gold embossed titles on the spines. Near the top of each spine was a black bar with gold edging and a large gold letter in the center. In my case, I reached for the volume with the letter "C" on it, lay down on the fat carpeting of the living room floor rather hopefully with my spiral bound notebook and a couple of sharpened no. 2 pencils, and began my "research".

When you opened the encyclopedia, there was a smell. It was, I assumed, the smell of learning, of intelligence, of knowledge. In reality, it was the smell of large, heavy books that have occasionally spent months at a time in slightly damp cardboard boxes, forgotten after a move until someone pulls back a flap and says, "Hey, it's the encyclopedias! I s'pose we should put these on the shelf in the den or something." To me, the smell that wafted out of the "C" encyclopedia when I cracked it open seemed to raise my IQ ten or twenty points, and I completely ignored the waterspots and the slightly green patch on the title page. To me, those were signs of high-learning, like ivy on a university wall or a pocket protecter.

The pages were thick and heavy, as if the dense words and invariably black and white pictures that crammed the volume added their own weight to the paper. The encyclopedia was short- attention-span heaven. Every page was a deep-sea dive into something completely different and intriguing. In the years to come, when I was bored, I'd pull down a random volume and leaf through it, learning about the Doppler Effect, and Eisenhower, and how pigs are butchered, and the history or the automobile (up to 1965 or so). In the "A" volume, there was a ten page section of transparent pages displaying, in full color, all the layers of human anatomy, from the skeleton out. This was one I returned to over and over, relishing the creepy, ghastly skinless man that was so prosaically represented.

Writing a report was a grammatical and linguistic challenge, rather than a compositional effort. With only one source for facts, one simply had to re-arrange what the encyclopedia said so as to avoid the high crime of plaigerism (which, if it were to be found in my report, would quite likely have resulted in my breaking rocks on a chain gang in Georgia, according to my parents and teachers). Thus, where the encyclopedia stated "Even as a young man, Crazy Horse was a legendary warrior," I would turn aside and write (with many sideways glances), "While he was still a non-grown adult, Crazy-Horse was a fighting guy that was, um, legendary." Whew, that was close. Althought I probably didn't actually include the "um".

Going to the library was much different in the epoch before the Internet. Nowadays, if one wants a book on the subject of, say, spelunking in Wyoming, one merely goes to a station on a bank of computers and types "spelunking and wyoming". The library computer will immediately return a list of dozens of books, including travel guides, cave maps, spelunking technique handbooks, and quite possible connect you to a free online service that'll plan your complete Wyoming spelunking package including airfare, equipment rental, and a local native American guide complete with subterranean Wisdom of the Ancients. (it's important to conduct this search on a library computer, and not your home PC, since a standard Internet search will likely contain several pages of references to spelunking as some sort of acrobatic sex act with a porn star named Wyoming.)

In the days prior the Internet, one entered the library and approached, with the sort of low-grade dread that usually befits an unscheduled visit to the Principal's office, the stonehenge rows of card catalogues that was the Dewey Decimal System. Your information was in there somewhere, without a doubt. Dewey was extremely thorough. It would be there, information about a book about spelunking in Wyoming, typewritten (with an actual typewriter, including the subscript 'e's and the occasional bit of painted on White-out) on a thick, yellowed 3x5 card with dog-eared corners and a few pencilled addendums. That card was buried in the center of a two-foot-long horizontal stack of nearly identical cards, that stack laid out like a corpse in a narrow wooden drawer on well-oiled casters. The drawer had a metal name-plate on the front of it, displaying an even smaller card with something like "556.097 - 556.202" on it. Above and below this door, and on both sides, were more drawers, absolutely identical except for tiny incremental variations in the numbers on the nameplates. These stretched into their tens and dozens, occupying a gigantic block of wooden cabinetry ten feet wide and five feet tall. Next to the cabinet was another, identical cabinet. And another. And more and more. The eye couldn't contain it all. It was like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where the Arc of the Covenant is wheeled in a wooden crate into an endless maze of similar wooden crates stretching, as far as we can tell, into dark, catalogued infinity.

When you finally found the card referring to the book you wanted, you couldn't take the card with you to find the book. God help you if you removed a card from it's place in the System. Invariably, on the tops of the cabinets, were stacks of tiny, roughly cut squares of paper (usually with bits of bake sale flyers and Weekly Readers on the backsides) and very dull, tiny pencils. There were only two places on the planet that these tiny pencils were ever found: libraries and miniature golf courses. They were inevitably dull, greasy and so short that one instinctively felt he should be holding it with a pair of tweezers. In this manner, you scrabbled down the information for where to find your book, slid the drawer containing the appropriate card shut, and went off into the canyons of books to search out your tome on Wyoming spelunking.

When you got there, your book, without fail, was checked-out, leaving a tell-tale empty slot on the shelf. Next to it, however, would be a miss-filed book on spelunking as an acrobatic sex act with a hooker named Wyoming. The end result was that I, at least, usually left the library more knowledgeable than when I entered, but rarely about anything I had intended to learn.

Now, in the age of the Internet, who even needs to go to the library anymore? Many of the classics of great literature are actually available royalty-free to be downloaded and read right off your computer. And really, who needs books as reference anymore? If you want to know about spelunking in Wyoming (especially if you DO mean acrobatic sex with geographically-named prostitutes) or hiking in the outback, or refinishing your deck, or repairing your antique watch, or wooing your wife, or becoming an astro-physicist, you can find pages and pages of information regarding it instantly on your own home computer. Granted, the information may not be entirely accurate. It may, in fact, be entirely and fantastically false. When it comes to verifiable, reliable truth, the Internet is a bit like the Wild, Wild West. You may get shot down at high noon by a scam artist or a bit of surprise pop-up porn or a few made-up factoids, but you know that's a distinct possibility whenever you set foot on the dusty main street of the information superhighway. If one is careful, shrewd, and a little teeny bit cynical, it's possible to get what you want to know out of the Internet and make it out whole. It's easy. It's a little TOO easy.

Which brings me to porn on the Internet.

In one Simpson's episode, Homer's website is praised by Lenny as being "The number one non-porn related website on the Internet! Which," He adds, "makes it the five-hundred-thousandth favorite site overall." In an episode of Futurama, typical American schlub Phillip Fry tells us with glib finality, "Well, thanks to the Internet, now I'm bored with sex." Wow. So I am going to avoid getting preachy about the evils of Internet porn. What would be the point? The people who agree with me know it already, and the people who don't agree with me are probably so hopelessly jaded as to be beyond convincing. I will simply say this:

Back in MY day if one wanted to look at pictures of naked women brazenly showing off their girl parts, it was hard. It was (if you had even the remotest sense of shame) embarrassing. You had to go out in public and peruse the rack in the back corner of the drug store with all the metal faceplates hiding the covers of the magazines. Nobody believed (then or now) that you were reading Penthouse for the articles. When you stood in line at the cash register and laid your copy of Hustler on the counter, nobody assumed you were doing research for a paper on Crazy Horse. Buying porn was like buying condoms: there was only one purpose for it. And at least when you were buying condoms you were implying the luxury of a partner. When the clerk rang up your porn and asked you if you wanted a bag, you might as well have just answered in an overloud stage-whisper, "No, I'm gonna go use it now. Where's your bathroom? I'm gonna go MASTERBATE."

The first time I saw porn I was about twelve. Really! I was staying overnight at a friend's house. He took me out to a fort he had assembled from spare planks and construction debris, and there he produced, from the dirt beneath a slab of plywood, an issue of Playboy. The magazine was grungy and old and well-riffled. The pages were damp and moldy. On the cover was a frankly alluring image of a beautiful woman holding a white parasol and wearing a white, spring dress. The wind had caught her skirts and had blown them up, showing the fine curve of her bottom and the tops of her white stockings. She was looking at the camera with that look of vapid, idiotic surprise that men seem to like to think women will exhibit when something mortally embarrassing happens to them. It was intriguing and sexy. Until my friend opened the magazine and flopped out the centerfold.

I had never seen, or even dreamt of, what might be hidden under all the many layers of the demure female mystery. The closest I had come to exploring the hidden world of feminine delights was the lingerie section of the Sears catalogue. I liked the secrecy and suspense of it, the pure, unaulterated enigma of the female shape, and the untold delights I knew, instinctively, it represented to me, a boy who was going to be a Man.

Until that moment, I probably thought I wanted to know. I didn't. And I learned it a half a second too late. Shock does not begin to explain what I felt when I found myself staring at the proferred centerfold. It filled my vision, shoved the entire world aside in one clumsy, rash gesture. It was terrible. It was cold and horrid and creepy and threatening. It crushed all my burgeoning dreams of the mystery and beauty of women, of the delightful suspense of romance and intimacy, under that ten-ton image of naked reproductive anatomy. It spun a Kleig light onto my hazy, candle-lit fantasies of girls and romance and revealed only SEX, biological as a trip to the bathroom and raw as an anvil.

My brushes with porn from then on were as rare as I could make them. I am an unusual male specimen (or so it would seem) in that the raw blatancy of porn completely repelled me, and still does. When a group of guy friends produced a porno movie or a copy of Hustler for us all to ogle over, I'd sample it fleetingly and move on, sorry I had even glanced at it. Still, it wasn't difficult to avoid. After all, and this is the point, porn was hard to get! It was rare. It was shameful and forbidden. The guys I knew had to steal it from their fathers or grandfathers. Kids like us weren't allowed to buy it. We weren't even allowed to look surreptitiously at it in that back corner of the drugstore. It trickled into our lives irregularly and rarely, and was hoarded for exactly that reason.

And now, in one generation, thanks to the Internet, porn is more than easy. It is ubiquitous. In one generation, my generation, it has gone from a rare tittilation for the boldest of adults to something that shows up freely and without provocation in my own home. A completely innocent Internet search produces references to sexual jollies of all kinds and shapes. And God help you if you are doing an image search. As a digital animator, I search images on a daily basis looking for texture and reference materials. I have come to simply accept, as part of my dairly routine, that searches for anything so apparently prosaic as "antique doorknob" or "muscle-car hubcap" will produce the most random and absurd (and thankfully tiny) images of pornographic inanity. Today, porn is insistent. It doesn't hide in the corner of the drugstore behind metal faceplates. It jumps out at you, flashes it's worst like a deranged man in a trenchcoat.

Now, inquisitive boys don't have to wait to find a cast-off copy of Penthouse in the dumpster to hasten their knowledge of women's barest secrets. They don't have to slink off to the fort in the woods to peruse a lone, moldy centerfold, hidden under the floorboards. At the slightest whim, any boy or girl can simply type a word into a search engine and be bombarded. And the least of what he or she will discover is simply images of naked girlies. They may end up learning about things that make "spelunking with Wyoming" look like a day at the library.

But I don't think the Internet is evil. It isn't evil anymore than guns are evil or TV is evil. Well, OK, TV is a little evil. The Internet is just a thing, and humans use it, and humans are, well, confused at best about their own mental health and that of those around them. The Internet changes everything, irrevocably. It is without a doubt the greatest difference between the world of my kids and my world growing up. I am sad, for some odd reason, that they will never know what it's like to look something up in the encyclopedia, like I did. I am sad that I will have to be, quite possibly, fanatically vigilant about what they do online and even what their friends do online. I am sad that it has become so seemingly hopelessly difficult to protect their innocence in the face of the blindingly perverse hurricane of the Internet.

But I am no Luddite. I use the Internet, and generally I like it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the Internet is nearly essential to me and my occupation.

Still, isn't it funny that I live in an age when it'd be a relief to catch my son someday learning about sex from an old, musty copy of Playboy?