All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
It looks like the Powers That Assign are finally giving the green light to a red-light district for the web: the .xxx top-level domain. At long last, after years of wheeling, dealing, squealing and peeling, nothing's going to change.
Various companies will dutifully add the entire domain to blocker programs with names like KiddySafe Web Sanitizer Plus Bluenose Edition, and that's about it. It's not like Pepsi is going to launch a new adults-only, porn-flavored soda just to utilize this new webspace.
There's been some talk of sending all current porn sites out onto a Trail of Bodily Fluids That I'm Not Sure What They Are But Not Tears and marching them forcibly into the new domain, but for reasons best explained by those with mouths frothier than mine, that's not going to happen and it wouldn't change much if it did.
However, it's nice that we've reached the point where there are public arenas designed specifically for porn. I think this is a trend that should be extended and thrust into the civic sphere repeatedly and with great gusto. It's a hard task, but once we've got it in hand innuendo innuendo innuendo anyhow. Here are some other public arenas that could use their own porno-geography.
Interstate Freeways
The analogies between the internet and the interstate have, after all this time, been ground into pulp like a binary raccoon being squashed by a data truck. Nonetheless, nobody can deny that they're exactly the same in all important ways, and that's why we clearly need a Car Porn Lane, limited to passenger vehicles where people are naked and/or having sex.
If nothing else, the rest of us will know to steer wide of that lane in case someone's experiencing sudden unintended acceleration, as it were. Also allowed in the lane: Women who lift up their shirts when truckers blow their horns at them, and people on motorcycles (because people who ride motorcycles are basically having sex constantly).
Municipal Water Supplies
Who doesn't want warm lube available at all times? Probably dumb and lame people. If we can make it so that every home has a lube warmer in the basement and a lube tap in the bathroom -- or better yet, bedroom -- then we will clearly improve life to the point where we will have to redefine luxury. There will be third-world countries, first-world countries and countries where you have access to viscous, coitus-enhancing liquid at all times. USA! USA! And probably Canada! And probably the Netherlands first!
Public Restrooms
With the increasingly prurient concern over wide stances and similar issues related to anonymous sex in public restrooms, there's an obvious solution that will make everyone happy, and some people more relaxed: sexrooms. In public parks, highway rest stops and any restaurant providing table seating, you'll see three doors with familiar symbols: the "man" icon, the "woman" icon and something that at first glance might be mistaken for the pictogram for Olympic wrestling.
National Endowments
It's kind of funny to think that each of us is the product of a sex act that we really, really don't want to think about. That's a hell of a thing to do to an organism. I wonder if young mushrooms yell, "Mom! Quit saying 'spores'!" At any rate, the point here is that if we're all going to be the result of a sex act, it should at least be a good sex act. That's why I'm calling for the establishment of the National Endowment for the Bedroom Arts, to encourage those who are thoughtful and imaginative lovers with wide recognition and boxes of cash.
Medical Charities
Porn movies have given many people the impression that physical examinations are just a flimsy prelude to gettin' it on while wearing white. We could work to eliminate that stereotype, but as the .xxx domain demonstrates, it's best to just label it. Doctors Without Panties and the Nude Cross would be worldwide charities devoted to visiting well-built people who aren't actually sick, and providing them with some "health care," some "medical attention" and some "sex."
- - -
Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a public servant, a private eye and a personal assistant. You can access his comedy offerings at Bad Gods.
See Also:
