Got a problem on the Internet? Even if you don’t, Internet Guy Rick Polito tells you what it is. Write him. Tweet at him. Do something. Polito is a freelance writer with two novels he can’t sell, a screenplay he’d like to show you, and a “sinister monkey” art installation that would look great over your sofa.
Dear Internet Guy,
I was visiting my mom and signed on to my dad’s laptop to check my email. Whoa! There’s a lot of porn on there. Do I have a talk with him? Do I tell my mom? Do I bookmark some of those pages because they were hot?
–Dirt on Dad
Dear Dirt,
In the olden days, a young man had to go through his father’s sock drawer to find dad’s porn. And it wasn’t even good porn. It was usually Playboy and they didn’t even have silicone. Or waxing! You didn’t get a lot of insight into dad’s dirty mind. All you learned was where his lame jokes came from.
He actually might have read it for the articles.
Of course, now with the Internet, we’ve all leapt into a giant pornographic blender turned on high. You raise an interesting question. Everyone’s worried about kids on porn, but what about our parents? Why does no one worry about the parents?
We’re not saying porn is necessarily bad. We’re just saying there’s lots of it now.. You don’t even need to wear sunglasses and park around the corner from the adult book store. And nobody really knows what happens at this dosage.
Psychiatrist Norman Doidge, author of The Brain that Changes Itself argues that we build up a tolerance for porn, as though the bar for perversion gets raised so high you can’t even reach it to attach the handcuffs. And less could really be more—more sex that is. A study of 28,000 habitual porn surfers released last year by the Italian Society of Andrology and Sexual Medicine found that porn binges can cause erectile dysfunction as sex in the real world fails to meet the ever-higher expectations. How are you going to keep ‘em up on the farm once they’ve seen “A Night in Paris?”
So are dad’s downloads out of, well, whack? That’s for him to decide. Is it something mom needs to know? Maybe she already does. Have you checked her cache? Did you even think about checking her cache before reading this? You’re sick! Dad’s old enough to make his own decisions and the birds and the Double D’s talk only goes one direction. It’s not like you can casually drop “how’s it not hanging?” into the conversation.
But you might say something like “Did you hear about Chrome’s “Incognito” feature. Firefox’s “Private Browsing” tab?
Or you could leave a note in his sock drawer.
Photo by quinn.anya