feminish

Yesterday, someone came to this blog having typed “HOW TO RAPE SOMEONE” into Google.

(Hello, whoever you were in Falmouth, Maine, USA, using Firefox 2.0 on Microsoft Windows XP. It was 11.15pm for you and your IP was: 72.224.132.# (ROADRUNNER-NYC). I’m sorry you only stayed on here for 0.0 seconds and didn’t have a chance to read the part of my post about not raping women.

If I was a Christian, I’d be praying for you. I’m a meditator, so I’ll be breathing for you instead, doing my best to understand that this kind of Google search can only really come from somebody who is already suffering themselves.)

As you can probably guess, this troubles me. It troubles me that someone is interested in finding out (though granted it could just be research for a fiction book). And it troubles me that we’ve created this thing called the Internet where interested folks can find out. It’s not exactly something they’d ask down the pub, in the Classifieds or over the water cooler at work.

I ran the same Google search myself, to see how they’d got to me. I have a porn filter on my search preferences, I was using google.com, and I was mildly relieved at the results. The first is “How to Prevent Rape”, the second a little more dodgy (I didn’t click through), then there’s “Reduce the Risk of Becoming a Victim of Drug Induced Rape”, “Punishments for rape”, a social welfare article about rape victims, “Can someone rape and not know it”, and then my very own “Flesh, cloth and rape” post, from which Google picks out the phrase: “If you break into a house and find a woman there, don’t rape her. If your friend thinks it’s okay to rape someone, tell him it’s not”.

I felt a small wave of gratitude for Google come over me, and wondered if there was greater censorship than my (self-chosen) porn filter. I was then surprised to find that the term “how to rape” figures on Google’s search trend radar - there’s a fairly vague graph you can examine here, which tells you little more than that there was a marked decrease in searches for ‘how to rape’ in January and February 2006, whatever that might mean.

I’m still troubled by what drives a human being to want to search for those things; and I’m still troubled that we humans have created this beast of the internet that can (in principle) help people find out. After all, “HOW TO RAPE SOMEONE” is a different question from the much more reasonable “WHAT IS RAPE”, and presumably it comes with the corollary “HOW TO RAPE SOMEONE WITHOUT GETTING NICKED” .

I immediately recalled the hoo-haa a few months ago after AOL inadvertently released search data which included which user (a numeric ID) had searched for what (the data was swiftly removed but had already been mirrored here). I can deconstruct my visitor in Falmouth, Maine, and reflect on the bizarre ways in which their unhappy world briefly collided with mine… but it’s altogether more telling when you can pull together a user’s search history over, say, several months. The 3-month AOL database of search terms is startling, revealing as it does users’ deepest (and darkest) queries. CNET News.com pulled together a few user profiles, assembling their queries chronologically:

Based on the number of local searches, AOL user 1515830 appears to be a resident of Ohio’s Mahoning County. On March 1, user 1515830 was trying to find the amount of calories in chai tea and bananas. But on March 9, the searches took a darker turn:

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Deep Throat
…the 1972 porn starring Linda Boreman (”My Name is not Linda Lovelace”)…

But only according to some*.

When I first heard this I was shocked and outraged at the symbolism of it. (And then further angried to learn that Linda Boreman said she was violently coerced into pornography, and frequently hit while filming Deep Throat. She later became an anti-porn campaigner.)

But I was relieved to let go of (at least some of) my strong feelings, when I read a more rigorous economic assessment by Screen Digest, reckoning Gone With the Wind and Star Wars each made well over a billion dollars (Deep Throat’s maximum estimated is only 600m).

*source: R.Randall, Freedom and Taboo (1989), and the IMDB, putting revenues at up to $600m. BUT, there is controversy over this, with recent estimates putting it at $100m.