I know this has been around for a couple of years, but I just found out about Rule 34 today. From ye ol’ trusty Urban Dictionary:
If it exists, there is porn of it.
I can, unequivocally, state that this rule is as sound as they come (heh). Several years ago I got a job at a small webcam company in Barcelona that specialized in cybersex and homemade erotica. My job title was “producer” and essentially I was tasked to recruit models, check up on their chat rooms to make sure they weren’t sleeping or bad-mouthing the guys, and to screen the homemade videos which were sent to us. Besides the daily influx of shaky-cam videos featuring everything from hirsute ogre orgies to college coed action, the guys and gals in the office sent around clips of the latest internet outrage. It was here I learned of “tubgirl” and “goatse”, amongst other things which can only be classified as “things you cannot un-see”. Do not, do not, search for those if you do not know what I am talking about. I am telling you: you’ve reached the end of the internet once you’ve seen these. To paraphrase Bladerunner:
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Shemale caviar domination movies. German guckmal vids involving toilet brushes and gerontophilia. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain….
Time to die.
Another part of this job was to deal with irate customers. You see, the key element of all of these porn sites is what is called the “recurring payment”. The site I worked for had a special deal where the client could try out the site for 1 euro. This was advertised to the clients using flashing, gaudily-colored banners on a homepage which featured a camgirl doing a live, partially-clothed chat. Since it was a Spanish-language site, a lot of the girls were recruited from South America, which had, shall we say, more amenable pay rates compared to girls on the continent. Some of them looked like they had just been released from the roughest of the rough Colombian prisons. I’m talking prison tats, gnarly teeth, thousand-yard stares. But, put some of the more attactive girls in skimpy clothes, throw a bunch of flashy banners all over the screen advertising carnal pleasure for just 1 euro, and the guys were game. They entered their credit card numbers, subsequently entered the “VIP” rooms, did their thing, then closed their browser and forgot about it… until many months later when they noticed a strange recurring 30 dollar fee on their credit cards from a company with an innocuous-sounding name.
We had indignant wives and their husbands come into the office demanding to know what this fee was, only to leave in shame; emails and phone calls came in constantly from people with similar stories; guys who were addicted and had blown 1000s of dollars in a matter of days… and you guessed it, it was also part of my job to deal with this. The messed up thing, besides being (at the time) semi-fluent in Spanish and dealing with irate customers in a second language, is that, in the end, they always lost their money despite being decieved. Not one of these people would go to the authorities lest they want to reveal their shameful camgirl habit to the world.
So, I thought “tubgirl” was bad, but dealing with the shady ethics of this company was another thing all together. I lasted 6 months there. It was just too depressing once I got over the novelty of porn at work. A few years after this gig I actually started ghostwriting for adult actresses at a different company in Barcelona*. But that’s another story…
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* A big joke amongst many of the expats I knew in Barcelona was that you were either stuck 1) teaching English, or 2) working at a porn company.
