When you create a walled garden, if it’s got something inside that people want, they’ll go inside and get it. Prohibition for something like “sex entertainment” simply doesn’t work, no matter how hard you try to make it to get. Simply walling off the fruity garden and putting a sign out front to tell people what’s inside the walls will only make it more identifiable, more accessable, and more attractive to the audience that consumes it. In the end you can’t keep people away from what they want by building a wall around it and saying, in effect, don’t eat the forbidden fruit inside.

Incedentally, Blockbuster has “Youth Restricted Viewing” stickers that closely resemble bullzeye targets in bright red and white colors on soft-porn offerings right alongside the usual R, PG-13, etc. offerings. To me, that’s hardly a “walled garden,” it’s more of a bright and flashy neon sign saying “sex inside, rent me, sex inside…”

The .xxx domain is a fiasco for several reasons, mostly due to the technical structure of the Internet. We can legislate all we want about the Internet, but I (or anyone else) can point a browser at non-.xxx’d sites in Amsterdam and get live streaming sex shows with a credit card. How do you legislate against that? Start putting filters on all the IP points of entry to the US? That’s *exactly* what China does.

There’s a flip side to creating a “walled garden” for xxx type entertainment. It creates a “safe and approved” place for it to happen. In effect, the efforts to “contain” porn and sex work only legitimize it for adults that consume it. It makes it *explicitly legal*.

Unlike a movie rental place where all the explicit stuff is in a back room, but there are plenty of R and PG13 box covers that may not show sex and complete nudity but are shocking enough that most parents wouldn’t want their kids looking at them.

It just makes so much more sense to section off kid safe stuff than adult only stuff. Rather than fighting a daily assult over what is decent for EVERY new webpage, its easier to have kid friendly sites submit for review. Its a much more elegant solution.

If only Sam Sugar were in politics. I think we’d all be more satisfied.