The Net - once the province of researchers and scholars - has been swamped with torrents of lurid imagery, sizzling GIFs, and kinky Quicktime clips depicting forms of carnality that St. Augustine never had to conquer.
The question is: How do you sort through it all to find exactly what you want?
The most popular indices of adult sites, like persiankitty.com and naughty.com, are little better than "build-your-own advertising for adult webmasters," claims Jamais Cascio, an advisor at the Eroscan Index, a site that's aiming to become the Yahoo of the adult Web.
By offering succinct, objective, logically organized summaries of the contents of tens of thousands of adult and related sites - from British water-sports showcases to Usenet newsgroups to safe-sex resources - Eroscan is attempting to reverse the "drive to the lowest common denominator" and bring "intelligent erotica" to the online world, Cascio says.
Cascio believes the pornography industry is "the stalking horse" of the Net, driving the development of technology for online business as it fueled the VCR revolution - and is now pumping DVDs. In his "other life," as he puts it, Cascio is a writer and online conferencing manager for the Global Business Network, an economics think-tank. "If there's going to be a part of the Net that figures out how to do electronic commerce, it's going to be the adult industry," Cascio says.
James Kraft, the webmaster of a guild of content providers called the Adult Chamber of Commerce, thinks Eroscan is "awesome. Anyone can just put up a site with a million adult links, but if the site stands for a set of values, you can really serve the public. Eroscan seems unbiased. They're on the up-and-up."
Janice Cripe, who is married to Cascio, gave up her job as the GBN's webmaster to become the editor-in-chief of Eroscan - a job that began last June with eight hours a day of paddling around in the sexy end of the bitstreams, mapping and filling out the categories. Now, says Cripe, there is such a backlog of sites waiting to be summarized and indexed - over 30,000, with 4300 in the index to date - her days of serendipitously following links from sexjoy.com to the Purgatory Boutique are pretty much over.
She's not burned out on the entire subject, however: "Occasionally I find something I like and keep a copy of it. When I find something that strikes my fancy, it still works for me."
Cripe says that classic black and white photography, and the literary erotica of Nerve, are more to her taste than online GIF galleries, anyway. "Personally, I'd rather go into a liquor store and buy a magazine than look at those images on my computer screen," she says.
Personal preferences aside, however, Cripe has assembled a hierarchy of links that renders a diverse and representative picture of the erotic life of the Net, organized into overlapping categories like "polyamory," "gay VRML," and "fetish fashion." Part of the value of Eroscan is that it widens the purview of an adult index from mere T & A links to include sections on cyber rights, censorware, health - and even a section for erotic poetry.
The site is supported by advertising revenue, and is produced by Blowfish, the first purveyor of mail-order erotica to put its catalog on the Web, back in 1993. A link exchange with the Microsoft Network's now defunct Mungo Park travel channel, says Cascio, fell through when Microsoft got cold feet about linking to an erotic site - even one as well-mannered as Eroscan.
The most frequent search term used by site visitors is "bestiality," says Christophe Pettus, president of the company. Pettus attributes this to the fact that there are really only a handful of such sites online, and hits on the term on other search engines lead surfers to Eroscan's index. The second most sought-after category, out of 580, he says, is "photos of women in bikinis and swimwear."
Eroscan aims to be "encyclopedic rather than selective," Pettus says. The only sites that are excluded from the Eroscan index are those depicting minors. Pettus calls the current cultural climate around issues of teenage sexuality, pedophilia, and the Net a "witch-hunt," but says "the legal liability is too great" to link to sites in foreign countries where such imagery is not banned.
Pettus agrees with Cascio that the porn industry is going to be utterly transformed by the Net. "The VCR completely changed the adult movie industry in ways no one could have predicted, and created a huge demand for new product," he says. "The Web is going to do that again."
