Pornography - a community of its own?

I surprised even myself when I went on a search to get an idea of how many communities there were based around pornography. Of course I knew there’d be a lot… it’s one of the few things everyone worldwide has in common – the appreciation of the opposite (and sometimes the same) sex!



Every Google search for different terms brought up a whole new list of possibilities. These ranged from people posting amateur pictures of themselves (or so they said), to message boards sharing general porn pictures they’ve found, as far as entire communities built on sharing candid photos of nude celebrities. Whatever you’re into – there’ll be a community of people into the same thing!

One in particular that I clicked on was http://www.celebforum.co.uk . The point of this site was simply for users to post pictures of celebrities on a message board format, nude or otherwise. It was intriguing the way the community operated, in that an entire message board had been set up for people to request photos of people and there seemed to be several people that must have immense private collections of pornography, simply replying to peoples messages and posting the relevant photos. The interaction was there between the different people, and the more active of the members seemed to take great pride in supplying the photos that everyone wanted.

The arguments have been made in the past that pornography on the web was just a place for perverts to hide. But when you consider it, what’s more natural than sexual urges? As well as the myth that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, all the Internet has done for this is to digitalise photos and create a place where users can find pictures relating to their fetishes, likes, etc, without it being shoved in the faces of people that don’t like it. Think of it like this, what’s more likely to catch the attention of a child – a website with age restriction, or the porn magazine that sit on the top shelf of every newsagent in the country?

From what I’ve seen after checking out a few of these sites is that they’re no different to any other community, except that they have a goal – to share photos. Arguably, that’s more than be said for general chat rooms, full of inane chatter about what the person had for dinner last night…