If you have an iPhone, accessing high-quality porn clips is as simple as opening up Safari and heading to iphoneporngrid.com (or gay.iphoneporngrid.com). If you’re connected to wi-fi, loading up a clip that’s long enough to be, er, useful should take less than a minute. Truly, we live in wondrous times.
Even more wondrous, though, is why website porn is the only porn available on the iPhone. Apple makes no money off you sneaking your hand down your undies this way—not even collateral bucks, thanks to unlimited data plans. Jerry Ropelato of Top Ten Reviews notes that over $3,000 is spent on porn every second, and about 28,000 Internet users are taking a look in that same second. Porn is plenty monetizable, and Apple is the master of monetizing consumer patterns. So why is there no porn in the App Store?
Someone asked Steve Jobs just that, and he replied by email that, “Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.”
Wait. “Folks who want porn?” Around 78 percent of iPhone users are ages 18 to 49. I’m not a marketing genius, but I think it’s a safe bet that that's pretty much the majority of the “folks who want porn” market. What gives, Your Jobsness?
It turns out that there really is some method to the apparent turning-down of abundant profit. Pointing to the Android’s wide-open doors, Jobs notes: “You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go.”
If you’re like me, you might say to yourself, well, that’s all well and good, Sir Jobs, but only 6 percent of iPhone users are below legal age, so a PIN and some decent boundaries should take care of that, right?
Ah, but here’s the rub: A whopping 46 percent of iPod Touch users are 17 and under! Make an app for the mostly-adult iPhone market, and you’re making an app for almost half the iPod Touch users who are underage. (Android, which is solely in the phone market and not the “gadgets for kids” market, has no such demographic concerns when allowing porn onto its device. Indeed, the relatively open-source platform Android has built its branding upon would be damaged by any attempt to censor.)
Apple executive Phil Schiller once noted that they began pulling sex-related apps when “we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.”
Fair enough.
If we are generous, we can assume that maybe Jobs really is thinking of the children and the conservative when he issues statements such as: “We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone.”
Actually, that only works if we are both generous and blind.
Hop on the App Store and browse through the Social Networking category. Within the first few results of free apps is “Free Foto Messenger,” an app that enables free photo and text messaging, even if you don’t have a text messaging/MMS plan—or even if you only have an iPod Touch and a wi-fi connection. By the fourth user review, there’s a 15-year-old giving away his username because, “I’ll talk dirty and send pics.”
A few more down, a 16-year-old seeks ladies “16 and up please” willing to send nude photos. These are not unusual comments for this app, and this app is not unusual.
To put this in the framework of conservative extremist fear mongering, this is an app which enables children to proposition one another to create and distribute child pornography. This takes place in the open, right on the review page in the App Store. The difference between an app that delivers professionally-shot nude photos of models (which are not allowed in the App Store) and an app which delivers the capacity for engaging an underage amateur in the same behavior is...what, exactly? Not to mention the extreme legal ramifications for minors who “sext.” There’s some legal precedence for those involved receiving sex-offender convictions which haunt them for the rest of their lives. Why doesn’t Apple go after that as well?
The dilemma Apple faces is that communications technology, by its very nature, enables all kinds of behavior and content creation that may be morally or legally questionable. One might effectively crack down on this particular app, but it’s not doing anything that the phone can’t do with baked-in apps, or that the iPod Touch can’t do with any number of more popular and “wholesome” apps.
The iPhone isn’t special amongst cell phones in its capacity to take and send crotch photos, nor its capacity to access websites full of hot dickings. Crippling these capacities—if you could even figure out how—would make the phone fundamentally less usable than its contemporaries, independent of porny uses. A phone without (obvious) porn is one thing; a phone infantilized into inoperability is another.
Lastly, to be perfectly frank, the problem is us. The voices of moral panic are always louder than the ones advocating sex-positivity. Tell the guardians of those 46 percent of minor iPod Touch users that the iTunes birthday gift card Kelly got can buy boobies and dicks, and they're going to have something very loud to say—with their mouths and their wallets. Tell the rest of us that we’ll have to fire up Safari to spank our monkey, and we blog-clog with cranky comments while drooling over the specs for iPhone 4.0. It’s a double-pronged problem: “moral panic” types are masters at mobilization, while the liberal front tends to be techno-geeky enough to overlook Apple’s concessions in order to get their hands on shiny new toys.
Lest that sound disparaging, I don’t in fact see a problem with it. We have to pick our battles, and if I had one to win tomorrow on the sex-positive front, it wouldn’t be free titty apps for everybody. I am as guilty of the “boo to porn crackdown, yay to new Apple updates!” hypocrisy as anyone. I am a pornographer and sex-positive author not only by trade, but all the way down to bone, I have an iPhone (on which I do a lot of my pervy business), and you can pry it out of my cold dead hands after the moral panic crowd have lynched me in the name of protecting the children.
Just please, wait until I get to play with iPhone 4.0 first.