Thursday 20 March 2008

Spam and Life

(No one comments here any more. Was it something I said?)

This isn't quite SM-related, but I'd rather put it here than my blog, so:

I keep getting rather ridiculous spam email. The same old same old they target at het men: use our product and enlarge your "manhood" and she'll never laugh at you again! Some of them began to get directly misogynistic, too: Love 'em and leave 'em. Stuff her mouth completely.

I bring this up because every once in a while I see stuff like this talked about in the radfemisphere, as an example of the sorts of creepy things most men do/want under patriarchy, the way they use women, etc. Other examples of this I often see cited are spam emails for porn, and ridiculous searches people use when they hit upon radfem blogs, like "teen rape animal" and the like.

And I'm thinking about this absolute inundation of "make yourself bigger, the ladies love a thick c0ck" emails I'm getting, and how... well... little I care.

And that I think is a major difference between the "radfem" and the "sexpos", or at least between the usual people in the two camps. For them, everything is a big threat, a revelation of how men really see things. For me, that's a somewhat creepy but generally amusing look at how weird people get when they're desperate for attention. We'll promise you T3N 1nch3s! We'll show you GOATS! We'll show you secret cams!

To me, it's all so obviously about the novelty. I mean, I'm sure that some people who put "incest daughter monkey asshole rape" into Google are actually interested in incest and monkeys. But I'm equally sure some of the people putting this into Google are interested to see just how weird of a thing you can easily find on the 'Net.

And I'm also willing to bet no small sum that the people who are actually habitually interested in the daughter monkey asshole rape aren't using Google. The websites (and in olden days, BBSes) where you can actually find this stuff are underground, and people know about them by word of mouth. There's this little organization called the FBI... and however ineffectual they may or may not be, they are in fact spending at least some of their time looking for child porn.

So... revelatory of a society that has a diseased attitude toward sex, based on women and girls being objects to degrade and violently dominate? Well... actually, maybe so. But not so clear a correlation as some think, imo.

10 comments:

Mighty Fast Pig said...

I agree. I think things like the infamous "Two girls one cup" video that went viral a few months ago get a huge amount of attention, but that kind of scat fetish is actually arousing only to a very few people. 99.99 per cent of the people who click to see it are motivated by curiosity, not lust or misogyny.

alterisego said...

I'm still reading, even if I don't comment.

I was just going through my spam the other day (it seems to accumulate at an alarming rate) and wondering what exactly the point of it all is. I can't even imagine anyone with a penis clicking on one of those penis enlargement links.

thene said...

I recall that once when I was about 16 or 17, a male friend nervously asked me if I got penis enlargement spam too. That stuff isn't about what men want, any more than adverts for the beauty industry or the diet industry are about what women want; it's just trying to make someone feel inadequate in the hope of getting a few bucks off them.

How do the radfem bloggers know that all those nasty search terms are coming from men, anyway? I get a lot of clearly out-for-porn Google hits too; about half are fishing for slash, and I'm willing to bet that few or none of those are from male searchers.

Anonymous said...

One hysterical evening not six months ago (meaning when we were all adults supposedly old enough to know better), three friends and I were wondering if the URL penis.com is taken.

It is. As is penispenis.com. (giggles) And penispenispenis.com. I think we got all the way up to 8 penis repetitions before the URL was invalid - we were in stitches. It worked with vagina, too.

I think those google searches are in that spirit. They're just gross out competitions - who can come up with the worst possible combination of words? Maybe you can argue that there's something meaningful in the ability to generate that string of words, but I don't think so.

Trinity said...

"That stuff isn't about what men want, any more than adverts for the beauty industry or the diet industry are about what women want; it's just trying to make someone feel inadequate in the hope of getting a few bucks off them."

Yes. THAT.

I mean, the "radfem" point may be that we live in a world where those sorts of strings of phrases *make* men feel inadequate, or those sorts of strings of phrases *are* gross-out humor. And maybe there's something to that. But I'm really not sure that one can get from that to (which I've seen) "NOW DO YOU REALIZE HOW WRONG PORN OR SEXUAL DOMINATION ARE? HUH HUH DOYA DOYA SEE SEE?"

Trinity said...

"I was just going through my spam the other day (it seems to accumulate at an alarming rate) and wondering what exactly the point of it all is. I can't even imagine anyone with a penis clicking on one of those penis enlargement links."

I think thene has it right -- the idea is to make people feel bad about themselves, such that a few who are prone to desperation will click and try it.

Trinity said...

"I agree. I think things like the infamous "Two girls one cup" video that went viral a few months ago get a huge amount of attention, but that kind of scat fetish is actually arousing only to a very few people. 99.99 per cent of the people who click to see it are motivated by curiosity, not lust or misogyny."

YES! Note that recording people's disgusted reactions to it became a viral meme. It's the shock that's the fun part, to people.

Anonymous said...

In other news, your weblog is now the top Google hit for "incest daughter monkey asshole rape."

Congratulations. ;)

Trinity said...

*snerk*

Anonymous said...

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