Escaping sexual moral codes on the internet
Yesterday I stumbled upon a very particular news item in a Turkish daily.1 At first I was shocked by the news item itself and soon after by the very fact that I was shocked in the first place. In my few trips to the Middle East, the very first thing that I noticed was exactly that what appeared from this news item. It was actually nothing new for me, was it? Or was it just that I hadn't expected it to be that pathetic?!
I'm talking about the conclusions of Google's Zeitgeist and Trends services, which report about search trends all over the world. The funny thing is that you can actually look up the information yourself! Try it out!
Anyway, the news item focused on a couple of very remarkable keywords: sex, porno and child porn. In all three cases Turkey ended up in the top ten - and in the last case even as number one.2 I especially found the top ten for "sex" very interesting, please have a look at it:
1. Pakistan
2. Egypt
3. India
4. Turkey
5. Morocco
6. Viet Nam
7. Iran
8. Saudi Arabia
9. Indonesia
10. Serbia and Montenegro
I don't know anything about Viet Nam, but isn't it just so typical that all the others in the list are countries with a rather conservative sexual moral code? Isn't it funny that those who criticize the West for lacking sexual morality, are actually embarassed by members of their own society on this specific subject? I love the irony!
Searching "sex" on the internet itself is a quite trivial consequence of the suppression of sexuality by society, but it can actually lead to much more worrying situations. Several months ago women were sexually assaulted by gangs of men in downtown Cairo in broad daylight. The incident was much discussed in the Egyptian blogosphere; read this account of Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey (who has just quit blogging). This was apparently not the first time. Journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy writes in his blog that a similar incident occured in January last year.
On Malek's blog you can actually see pictures of the incident (the blog is in arabic, scroll down for the pictures).
Just don't ask me where the police was when all of this happened. OK?
1. "Seks arayışındaki tanıdık ülkeler" ["Familiar countries in the list of googling sex"], in Radikal, internet baskisi, 05/07/07; available at http://213.243.28.21/ek_haber.php?ek=sa&haberno=3473 (accessed on 05/08/07).
2. Please note that this does not imply that these keywords are the most googled keywords in Turkey; they are not! The top ten of most googled keywords is in fact not very unusual and certainly not embarrassing: Most googled keywords in Turkey
5 comments:
I think: "one of the" reasons for this is that people from these countries are unprofessional by using internet. In countries in which people are more professional nobody use google to open a sex site, because most internetusers are knowing sex site's URL.
I really don't know whether that it is the case. The top ten is like this already for quite a time now. I mean, those guys who're googling for sex, must have become so experienced by now, that they too should know the urls of porn sites. Don't you think so?
I think as you said these internet users are professional in finding sex websites but i beleive thet for example in country No. 7 it is the statesmen pleasure to see that their internetusers are involving in sexwebs searching not another society concerns. When they know that their people are looknig for sexwebs they would become happy that the most important concern of their people is sexwebs ( surely after nuclear technology) not political shortcomings.
I think as you said these internet users are professional in finding sex websites but i beleive thet for example in country No. 7 it is the statesmen pleasure to see that their internetusers are involving in sexwebs searching not another society concerns. When they know that their people are looknig for sexwebs they would become happy that the most important concern of their people is sexwebs ( surely after nuclear technology) not political shortcomings.
My name is nobody
An interesting point you make.
Post a Comment