Thursday, March 20, 2014

Rule 5C, Revised and Extended (and a Related Question, Answered)

In his excellent manual on driving blog traffic, "How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less than a Year," Robert Stacy McCain includes rule 5C:

Sex sells -- Back when I was blogging to promote Donkey Cons (BUY TWO!), I accidentally discovered something via SiteMeter: Because the subtitle of the book is "Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party," we were getting traffic from people Googling "donkey+sex." You'd be surprised at the keyword combinations that bring traffic to a political blogger who understands this. Human nature being what it is, the lowest common denominator is always there, even if it's sublimated or reverse-projected as puritanical indignation ...

Stacy gets a lot more than a million hits a year these days. How? By taking that lowest common denominator as low as he can get it. Over the course of the last year or so, he's turned The Other McCain into what can really only be accurately categorized as the Internet's top social conservative porn blog.

Teen lesbians. Teacher-student sex. Mother-son incest. Barely legal college porn stars. You name it, Stacy serves it up in SEO-tweaked "no prurient interest here, honey, I'm just keeping up with politics" format.

I stand in awe, and think Stacy deserves recognition for having pioneered this porn genre, even though I got banned from commenting on his site for bringing up substantive issues. I should have known better -- substantive issues don't belong on porn sites, especially porn sites dedicated to an audience that likes to get its fap on while pretending to righteous indignation and moral outrage. The point of porn is, after all, to serve up fantasy ... and this particular niche is no different.

So, why this post, other than to get all those juicy porn keywords into The Goog? Well, Stacy does actually ask an interesting question (at the final link above), and after thinking about it I'm prepared to anecdotally answer that question:

Are "most" 12-year-olds watching porn? Really?

I suspect the answer is "yes," at least as regards 12-year-old boys (I was never a 12-year-old girl, so I can't really speak to their habits).

I turned 12 in November of 1978. At that time there was no Internet for me to "watch porn" on. But I was aware of "girlie magazines" -- Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, et. al -- well before the age of 12, and by the age of 12 I was interested enough in them to look at them when I could find them. Which was more often than you might think, since I knew other 12-year-old boys, some of whom had older brothers, etc. Let's just say that there was a reasonably natural transition from trading baseball cards to trading beaver shots.

There was also cable television. My family didn't have it, but some families did. Our neighbors had it, and their signal was leaky enough that I could pick it up on the garage sale black and white TV that I kept in the corner of my room nearest their house. Showtime in particular had a pretty regular schedule of R-rated "soft porn" late at night.

Of course a few years after that VHS arrived and porn was off and running for home movie viewing.

Now, I am not saying that every 12-year-old boy was a 24-7 porn freak back in the late 1970s. But my perception was that most 12-year-old boys liked looking at pictures of naked women back in the late 1970s.

So, now it's 2014. Have 12-year-old boys changed much? I doubt it.

These days, any 12-year-old boy with access to a computer can easily find porn online, free for the viewing, instead of having to sneak it out of his older brother's or dad's collection or try to convince a convenience store cashier that he's old enough to buy the latest issue of Oui from behind the counter.

At most, he may have to click a button affirming that he's 18 rather than 12.  I suspect most 12-year-old boys are quite comfortable with little white lies of that type.

So yeah, I'm willing to bet that "most" 12-year-olds, or at least most 12-year-old boys, "are watching porn" these days -- at least as much of it, and probably more of it, than 35 years ago. The tech and the format may have changed a lot (as Stacy himself demonstrates), but I doubt that people have changed very much.

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