Viewer mail: underage pornography

Hi Kevin,

You’re not the first to ask so I’m putting the response up on the site.

The data for Young nude girls came just from my weblogs; roughly from May 2004 to January 2005. When you are sent to a webserver (any site) the URL (uniform resource locator) of the previous page is normally passed on as the referer [sic]. So, for example, you can search on Google for “young nude” and this is the resulting URL (trimmed of inessential parts):

http://google.com/search?q=young+nude

That URL would be logged in my webserver when someone clicks through to Sedition·com along with the visitor’s Internet address, IP. From the IP you can usually determine, with publicly available databases, geographical location. I wrote a program in Perl to parse the logs (they are tens of millions of lines long for a given year even for a moderately popular site) and look for nude|naked and for numbers next to it. Things like “naked girls 13-15” appear quite often so for the graph I considered that the same thing as searches of 13, 14, and 15. I threw out searches like “underage nude” and “young nude,” of which there were many. I tried to be accurate, doing things like removing self-referential queries—ones that came from Sedition·com—but I don’t claim any statistical soundness to my methods. It was a big enough data pool though that it is probably solid. [Sidenote: I don’t have the raw numbers anymore, so the graphs and the mean, median, and standard deviation is all there is right now.]

Ass + u + me

Statistics lie easily. The meaning of any datum without context is going to be subjective. It will mean whatever one wants it to mean.

So I caution you against assumptions about the data. I was, in part, playing for effect and maybe I should not have. There is no way whatsoever to divine a person's intent or identity from a single search string. While many of the searches were certainly by adult pedophiles looking for unripe goodies, many of the searches were by people who were just doing research. I know because a few of them have written me.

Some of of the searches are certainly kids. Imagine all the 10-15 year old kids out there whose parents have told them nothing about sexuality. Of course they’re gonna be curious if pubic hair is normal, how developing breasts are “supposed” look, and what the opposite sex looks likes under their Catholic school girl uniforms clothes.

One reason Young nude girls came about is because it’s a traffic magnet. Online writers know this, so they use it. This inflates the perceived presence of the subject matter. I knew the page would bring many extra visitors. I didn’t realize it would sometimes turn up as #1 on Google and MSN search and such. Goes to show how well actual pornography, generally content free but for the skin, is marginalized by the search engines.

If a national news story comes on and scares half the parents in America about how supposedly rampant online stalking and kiddy porn is, many of those parents are going to head straight to a search engine to see what they can see.

Underage porn is inexcusable but the definitions for it are often ludicrous. I have pictures of my kids playing in the yard naked. I shouldn’t have to be scared that I might do hard time because it gives some corrupt old bastard in a judge’s robe a boner. Digitally generated images of underage kids in provocative poses, where no child was involved at all, have been ruled as being illegal. Ten to twenty years in prison for drawing a picture on your computer? Or maybe going to prison for life because you share a computer with someone who saved child porn on it? That’s not part of the America in which I want to live.

Curiosity is, perhaps, ultimately the greatest thing humans contain; all advances in technology, science, and art stem from it. I suspect the actual market for kiddy porn is drastically smaller than anyone’s numbers imply. Creating a climate of fear, punishment, and repression regarding general sexual issues is, so I say, the main cause of unhealthy sexual deviance.

Thanks for writing. You’re welcome to the numbers. They are tantalizing but without context they are mostly meaningless so please use them responsibly.

–Ashley

PS: see also QueryLog and the referring searches page.