I forgot to post something on the revelation the other day that when the news broke that SEC employees spent their days surfing porn as Wall Street collapsed:
The memo was first reported Thursday evening by ABC News. It summarizes past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:
— A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
— An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as ”Sex” or ”Pornography.” Yet he still managed to amass a collection of ”very graphic” material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC’s internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.
I don’t know about you, but that’s just the kind of persistence I want in a Wall Street regulator: A guy who gets knocked back 16,000 times, but keeps on tryin’.
Anyway, Republicans who don’t like the idea of commerce being regulated anyway are pointing to this as evidence of the utter futility of government and the amorality of all bureaucrats. This has inspired the WSJ’s House Liberal, Thomas Frank, to scoff. But along the way, he has to get in an obligatory swipe against the right for crusading against porn at all:
Ever since the dawn of the culture wars, when widespread obscenity seemed to symbolize all that was going wrong with America, no subject has furnished more demagogue gold than pornography. Of course, it backfires against the family values set on a fairly regular basis—the latest example being that Republican National Committee outing to a bondage-themed nightclub in Los Angeles—but for grandstanding purposes nothing can beat it….
As we know, no tirade from the Left would be complete without the ritual mention of The Hypocrisy Of Those Holier-Than-Thou Republicans, suggesting that anyone concerned about common decency is also a hypocrite — which makes as little sense, of course, as suggesting that all bureaucrats are lazy, useless porn fiends.
Allow me to suggest a Third Way to look at the subject. How about we not stretch the fact that these guys were looking at dirty pictures to make either the point that regulation is useless, or that everyone who tries to make a buck on Wall Street is a crook who needs five reglators looking over his shoulder? Either way, it’s a flimsy edifice you’re constructing on a foundation of dirty picture.
How about we say that the ubiquity of dirty pictures on the Web — the extreme ease of access to people of all ages and all proclivities — is in itself a problem? I’ve always sort of doubted that “sex addiction” was a real thing. When one speaks of celebs such as Tiger Woods having an addiction problem, I think, He’s not an addict. He’s just a GUY without any barriers, external or internal. If women don’t say “no” to a guy, and he doesn’t say “no” to himself, this is what you get.
But when I hear about a guy trying 16,000 times to overcome barriers to simply look at some pictures, I’m thinking we have a guy with a problem. And it’s a problem that wouldn’t emerge without such pictures being there, enticing him. If the pictures hadn’t been there, he’d have quit trying, and who knows? He might have caught a crooked trader or two.
I’m not suggesting a solution, mind you. I like the fact that we have access to all sorts of info on the Web, and I’m not suggesting that we set up an Internet Censorship Agency — not least because these SEC guys would sign up to work for it.
I don’t know what the solution is. But it seems like, if we care about the fact that there are thousands (maybe millions) of men obsessed with this stuff — whether because you see the body (including the eyes) as a temple or you don’t like seeing women degraded and objectified — and realize that before the Web, these same guys might have gone their whole lives not seeing the amount of porn they could see in a few hours on the Net, it seems we could at least acknowledge that it IS a problem.
What I don’t understand is why the SEC itself isn’t (or wasn’t) monitoring its computers usage. I know that the one I used was regularly checked. It’s not like those folk couldn’t afford to have their own, private computers at home. And this guy was only suspended, not fired? After wasting that much of company work time??
The copious free time they had on their hands arose from the vigorous deregulation and nonenforcement policies of their employer. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.
Columbia’s parking czar explained how he got ALL of his permit enforcers to be as diligent as the one who viewed catching cheaters as a challenge. He compiled statistics on how many violations each monitor rang up. Suddenly, enforcement was up over all shifts, and I can find a parking space near my house. The issue with the SEC was the “don’t ask; don’t tell” free-market policies about regulation. Supervision could have easily defeated the slackers, if anyone had any work to do at the SEC.
I dislike porn and the coarsening of our culture that results from its easy prevalence, but I believe that everyone is a consenting adult, so the First Amendment seems like a good idea. As a taxpayer, I have been robbed just as much if someone is reading your blog instead of working, as if he is watching Debbie do Dallas.
Pornography has lead artistic and technological innovations for centuries – if not millenia. Sort of like war.
And about as destructive . . .
I don’t think anyone that much in the grip of a compulsion is a “consenting adult.”
Also, I don’t think chicks can get it. Guys do, but then watch — because they ARE subject to the attraction of porn, their protestations that consenting adults should be left alone will be FAR more vehement than yours.
I’m a guy. Pictures of nekkid women are arresting to my attention. So I can understand that compulsion, up to a point. Fortunately, I have enough of a grip on reality to understand that the 16,000 times guy has a sickness, and it’s a sickness he wouldn’t have if the stuff weren’t there.
And don’t say he would act out some other way. I don’t think he would. Pornography itself has an insidious effect on guys. It gives them ideas. I can testify that if I look at a picture of a nekkid woman for 30 seconds, the way I look at real women will be altered for the rest of the day. And not in a good way. Here, let me show you… no, just kidding. But I do feel the temptation to go check out a porn site, for the sake of research. You know, for the good of the blog, to expand the horizons of understanding, etc. But I won’t. No, I WILL NOT…
Truly, I believe there’s a lot of grief in this world that wouldn’t exist if guys couldn’t view this stuff so easily. I think a lot of what we see in everyday life now — from the way people dress and act on reality TV to the divorce rate — is to some extent attributable to guys polluting their brains looking at women who seem SO much more exciting and available and willing than real women.
As someone with a major online shopping jones, I can well appreciate the lure of the online connection. Shopping can be just as “addictive” as porn-watching, gambling and other compulsive behaviors. So what, we ban online retailing because I and many like me find it (sometimes) excessively appealing? Trust me, plenty of people have lost their homes to credit card debt accrued through shopping while at work.
Well, again, we have this gender gap in communication. It’s like, we all know it was a chick who named that recipe “better than sex” cake. A guy would never name anything that. Not even beer.
But you raise a point: I am on record (BOY am I on record) as opposing the “crack cocaine of gambling,” video poker. There was research that indicated those games did something to people’s brains that made it far, far harder for them to stop than with normal cards and dice and racehorses gambling. It was neurological, and had to do with the feedback their brains got from that screen. Women were particularly susceptible, as I recall.
That wasn’t why we eventually came out for banning it, by the way. The reason we came out for banning it was alluded to in this morning’s editorial: “…the Legislature had legalized one of the most addictive forms of gambling on earth, and allowed the poker barons to grow into a force strong enough to take out a governor and cow the entire Legislature.” It was pulling in so much money (grossing as much as $3 billion a year) that it was distorting our political system. By the way, I didn’t so much mind the taking down a governor — it was Beasley (I think this bothered Cindi a good bit more than it did me, which is why it still crops up in editorials) — as I minded what that did to burnish the industry’s rep, and further terrify lawmakers. For us, it was about saving the political system from corruption.
But the effect it had on its addicts was pretty awful, and I can see an argument to ban it based solely on that.
And Robert Ford wants to bring it back.
I knew somebody whose husband ran up $20,000 in debt playing video poker on HER credit card. Don’t talk to me about your victimless crimes.
I also knew a girl who was a “dancer” at the strip club that used to be on Rosewood. Let’s just say it did NOT have a good effect on her life….
Like, I assume, 100 percent of other men out there, once you discover you can look up porn on the internet, you do so. Me too.
* If you’re at all curious about other people, it’s interesting. But for me, the interest ran out pretty quickly. In an hour or so. Maybe I bore easily. Which is not to say I didn’t approve of BoobQuake.
* The only thing I found fascinating is that ANYTHING or EVERYTHING is of erotic interest to SOMEBODY. I figured this out when I stumbled across a site in which nekkid ladies smoking cigarettes used them to pop helium balloons. You’re amazed, but out there, there are people getting off on it. You either have to laugh or shudder.
* I build model airplanes and such, and belong to newsgroups that had MODEL in the name. You can imagine the kind of unsolicited email I used to get.
* This dude who was rebuffed 16,000 times hunting for porn — that has to be about more than a big appetite. It’s a kind of compulsive problem-solving behavior.
It took 4 billion years of evolution to produce that guy who tried to look at nekkid broads 16,000 times.
Wow, Brad. Statistical samples of one! Two different issues.
Look, I have gotten into more trouble than you can imagine, even this very week, because I am transgendered in my communication style. You cannot be a lawyer for long in big city white-shoe law firms without being able to talk like a man….so spare me.
You say porn is bad. Really really bad, especially when it is so readily accessible.
I agree with you.
You say you don’t know what the solution is.
I agree with you, except to say that I am not in favor of banning free speech except in the most strictly scrutinized cases.
I say there are plenty of things that people get addicted to, including your beloved Yuengling, and we don’t ban them.
Not sure what we’re talking about beyond some trumped-up “gender difference.” For the record, lots of women like porn, especially porn aimed at them.
http://jezebel.com/5521943/filament-the-thinking-womans-porn-magazine
I think it’s a good thing that the guy only had access to the SEC’s computing power to get that many denials. Bet there are guys at the NSA and other such agencies who never get refused . . . wonder what they are missing?
You know, I went to call up that link Kathryn provided just so I could scoff at what passes for porn among womenfolk.
But man, that was some sick stuff. Unappealing sick stuff. Definitely not guy porn.
But to return to my point: Let’s take that female porn site and pretty much any of your leading porn sites aimed at guys, and I think you’ll see a big difference in the page view count.
Even Roger Ebert was expressing envy recently over the amount of money a woman can make off of dirty-minded guys just by posting nekkid pictures of herself.
Well, the female porn appeals to a subset of women–mostly younger I think, (it’s a magazine, btw, and not all that “sick” to me–but hey, I’m just a chick albeit a non-porn-loving one— unlike what one could see on spankwire, say), and is fairly new on the scene–Playgirl is a joke, of course, and isn’t made by women for women; as far as I could see back in early 80s (the folks upstairs had a subscription and moved out), it was aimed at gay men.
Whatever–the point remains: do we ban all things that someone has a compulsion with, or do we try to help the person with the compulsion. Prohibition didn’t work all that well, and you know, your daughter’s ballet dancing attire could get her stoned in a great swath of the planet. Let’s ban ballet!
Porn exists to meet demand. It has existed in whatever forms of media have been available to man going back thousands of years. I’m sure there were a bunch of cavemen who stood around staring at stick figures carved into a rock wall imagining something carnal.
The fact that SEC workers had time to look at porn isn’t the issue. They could have been playing solitaire, checking their fantasy football stats, bidding on items on Ebay, sending personal emails, writing blog entries on bradwarthen.com. In any case, they weren’t doing their jobs…. which goes back to a comment I made on another thread about the relative efficiency and work ethic of government workers. Too often, there is a “you cover for me while I watch porn and I’ll cover for you while you IM your friends” mentality. While that may go on in the private sector for a short while, eventually those non-performers get laid off or fired. It doesn’t happen in the public sector until they are exposed by third parties… and even then the punishment is less severe.
I don’t have a problem with porn, except for myself. But then, I don’t care for video games either. It all just seems like a huge waste of time.
Maybe I’m on to something here. Is porn really just an interactive video game?
I look at it it like this. These people went to work, drew a salary, and did not do their job. If an addiction caused this, these men should stay home and get treatment. It is wrong to take money for doing work you do not do. It is wrong to accept a salary for supervising people and not do the job. the pornography angle is complicating a simple truth. If you are a man and can’t help it and an addiction makes you look at porn rather than work, you cannot accept pay for working.
Doug, As I said on that earlier post, I worked the public sector for 32 years, and my experience was that almost all of us worked hard. Have you worked in the public sector and observed all this slackness, or are you angry, and simply throwing stones at those you perceive as “other?”
Karen,
I worked for a SC government agency as a contractor for over a year; I ran for school board in 2002 and saw things that the general public does not; my wife works in for a school district; and I’ve been a citizen of the state for 20 years and have had to to deal with all sorts of government agencies. The anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. For example, try to get an adjustment on your water bill. It takes 45 business days to get something applied that should take 1 day. That’s the government monopoly at “work”.
I’m not angry, just observant.
Oh snap… Y’all dissed porn and video games in the same comments thread… Alright it’s on… You know what I don’t like…
Golf…
There… Take that!
🙂
A good walk, spoiled….except no one walks any more, do they?