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North Americans are terrified of accidentally exposing their children to pornography.

It's an interesting fear. Pornography hasn't been shown to harm children in any studies; it's just that we find mentioning children and sex in the same sentence to be distasteful. Because it makes us uncomfortable, we figure the idea of sex must harm children - but it doesn't.

It's only an unsupported gut reaction which tells us we should embark on a crusade to rid the Internet of pornography. The Internet isn't just an American, or just a North American, pastime. It's a worldwide phenomenon. A gut urge is not enough to justify trampling on the enjoyment and free speech rights of everyone on the planet.

It's mainly religion that claims thinking of sex, masturbating, or randomly running into an online picture of a Nasty Nun in her Knickers to be harmful. Those who believe such things to be dangerous to the soul due to their "sinful" or "degrading" nature should probably stay off the Internet, or at least, keep their children away from it. It isn't the Internet's job to cater to a group's religious views.

Here's some news for all the prudes out there: pornography does not degrade women any more than it degrades men. It is not sexist. What's sexist is thinking that women should feel personally degraded by their sexuality, while men should not. The truth is that sex is not degrading by nature for anyone, the sexual arts are wonderful (while admittedly, some examples of such arts are of much higher quality than others), and there's nothing unhealthy about occasionally indulging in them.

The Internet, we must remember, is a beautiful, dangerous wilderness of free speech and open trade. If you can not prevent your children from viewing pornography while surfing, it's your parenting style which needs to change, not the Internet. It's hard to believe that some parents think the most popular method of instant communication in the entire world, used by the entire world, should change for them! It's preposterous.

We all know pornography is prevalent on the internet. About a quarter of daily searches are related to pornography; young people tend to run into pornographic images while browsing; children's characters are linked frequently to pornographic websites; and, of course, as the popular song goes, "The Internet is For Porn." There's a lot of porn out there because people want to see it - even the really weird stuff, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle orgies.

"Rule 34" is an important rule

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