Sex on the internet: If You Build It, They Will Want to Cum

Sex on the internet: If You Build It, They Will Want to Cum

– Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com

The first thing I ever did online, back in the late 1980s, was more than a little mundane; I sent an email. Exciting stuff, right?

This was in the pre-“internet” days, when the more in-the-know folks using the massive network of interconnected computers called it the “ARPANET” – but oblivious students like me were barely aware of that term, let alone what it stood for. Honestly, I don’t remember referring to the network itself at all; to me, it was just a tool used to send what my computer science teacher called “electronic mail”, nothing more.

By the time I sought out an adult website for the first time, I’d technically been “online” for close to 10 years – but it wasn’t until I saw my first porn site that I fully absorbed the commercial potential of the network I’d been using for all those years.

As I waited for what seemed like hours for individual naughty images to download over my painfully slow dialup connection, I thought “Someday, this internet thing is going to be HUGE.” Little did I know that seeking out that adult site was my introduction to an industry I’d call my home for over 25 years (and counting).

Go Figure: “Early Adopters” Like Sex, Too

In the early days of the commercial internet, there were a lot of complaints about the ubiquity of online porn, in part because online porn marketing people were among the first to get serious about flooding search engine indexes with pages that were tailored to attract search engine spiders, rather than appeal to (or make sense to) human eyeballs.

If you were online back then, you know that usenet was chockfull o’ porn back then, too. Just how omnipresent was porn on usenet? According to a 1995 TIME magazine article, 83.5% of all images on usenet at that time were pornographic. Put another way, nearly 7 out of every 8 images on usenet at the time was porn.

In the age of social media, many platforms have turned to large teams of human moderators and editors in an attempt to keep their platforms porn-free, because despite the presence of countless sites which exist precisely for the purpose of uploading porn to them, many users still look to put porn in places where it’s not wanted, hoping to get their brands, affiliate links and/or creative works in front of a larger audience.

As you read this, you might be wondering: Why is Calico taking me on this walk down Obvious Internet Memory Lane?

‘Perverts Among Us.’ Or Maybe that Should Be ‘Perverts/Among Us’?

As reported by Kotaku.com, “People Are Using Among Us Lobbies For Sex.” If you’re not familiar with Among Us, the game’s distributor describes it as a “game of teamwork and betrayal… in space!”

The multiplayer game is designed to present groups of 4-15 players a scenario in which they’re prepping a spacecraft for departure, but in which “one or more random players among the Crew are Impostors bent on killing everyone.”

According to Kotaku’s reporting, Among Us lobbies have also become home to a “multitude of horny gamers, searching for like-minded individuals to cyber with.”

“As a 27-year-old looking to play their favorite guilty pleasure game, but with no intention of exploring those peculiar places, I selected ‘Eggsalad,’ a seemingly innocent lobby,” writes Ali Wire. “And that’s where I met him: the blue astronaut who asked me to be his girlfriend the second I chose the pink skin.”

Why would people choose the lobbies in a game like Among Us to seek out cybersex? Because they can.

If there is an enduring lesson to be taken from the internet where sexually explicit expression is concerned (or to be taken from the histories of just about every other technology, medium and forum that can be used to create, publish and/or distribute a visual depiction or textual description) it is this: A certain percentage of people will discuss, depict, distribute and consume sexually explicit material anywhere and everywhere they can.

This is not to say that platforms, marketplaces and communities that don’t want sexually explicit material to be a part of what they offer should give up on moderating content or change their official policies to accommodate the whims of such users.

All I’m saying is, this phenomenon isn’t a mystery – or shouldn’t be one, sitting here in 2022. It’s quite simple, really: People are interested in sex, websites and platforms are made for people to use, so some percentage of people using those websites and platforms are going to want to use them to talk about, seek out, or depict sex.

Now… on to a tougher question: Are ALL crop circles fake?