Porn attack

A couple of commenters have asked what is going on with the beastiality links in various comment boxes. Presumably they haven’t been paying attention to the fact that (apparently) most blogs running on a Moveable Type or similar platform are now subject to periodic attack by blog spam purveyors. James Russell has been the main victim over the last week or so, and now it seems to be our turn again.

I apologise to readers for the appearance of this distasteful material on Troppo Armadillo. I’m doing all I can to prevent it and remove it as soon as I can. Unfortunately I don’t currently have a home Internet connection, so if the spam appears after around 5.30 or 6pm each evening (when I usually leave work), it’s going to remain there until about 9am the following morning when I get to my desk again. More positively, MT Blacklist makes it very simple and quick to delete the spam comments as soon as I discover them. What I might do in an attempt to achieve quicker spam deletion, is to send access details for the MT Blacklist facility to Geoff Honnor and Wendy James (assuming both are still TA bloggers at least notionally) and Wayne Wood. That way, any one of them can delete the spam if they discover it before me.

Speaking of porn, yesterday I attended various presentations at the Charles Darwin Symposium “Creative Tropical City“, including one by porn researcher Kath Albury that I recently foreshadowed. Sadly, Kath didn’t dress in her Nurse Nancy outfit, nor did she make any real attempt to titillate the audience in more subtle ways, jaded as we were by a series of turgid papers about aspects of urban “cultural” planning. Nevertheless, there were a few interesting aspects to her presentation, which readers can listen to here (in Windows Media format).

For example, apparently Kath’s porn research has revealed that regular porn consumers who self-identify as Labor voters feel much more guilty about their habit than Tories. Sadly, Kath didn’t pursue the angle of why that might be so. Is it because Labor voters include a higher proportion of Catholics, who are taught to feel guilty about non-procreative sex? Or because Labor voters are more likely to have a social conscience, and therefore feel guilty about enjoying a product that may involve the exploitation of women (and the workers who make it generally)?

Kath also mentioned an emerging trend for “ethical” porn, usually manufactured in a cottage industry situation rather than by the corporate sector. ‘Macrobiotic erotica’ or ‘hippie porn’ was one such category she mentioned. Again though, she didn’t explore the implications of the concept. What does hippie porn involve? Licking mung beans off each other’s genitalia? Inserting organically-grown asparagus into bodily orifices? Sex while manacled to a tree in an old-growth forest? I was dying to ask Kath these vital questions, but I decided discretion was the better part of valour.