Description

The history of technological developments has shown that porn sites have been in the vanguard of a number of interactive and sharing Internet protocols - in fact, the two, technology and pornography are highly interconnected. The ease of access, relatively low cost and good technical quality of the Internet, as well as the privacy it offers to users, make it an attractive medium for marketing pornography. The question is raised on whether pornographic material, available either through the Internet or other ICTs such as the mobile phone, contributes towards a discourse of hegemonic masculinity framed around the sexual exploitation of women - now gradually becoming available to young people as well. Concurrently, the advent of the Internet has facilitated the social acceptability and legitimization of porn, the current debate no longer being exclusively framed on how pornography degrades and debases women. Instead, porn users and participants of online porn far from being seen as victims or as ‘objects of desire’ are active agents in the construction of their identity.

This paper briefly discusses how popular perceptions of porn have changed over the past few years, resulting in arguments whereby online pornography is seen as something other than harmful, offering a position of agency for its participants. The main objective of the paper is to contextualize the previous view within contemporary readings of online pornography in the Greek press. In an overtly sexualized, in our opinion, everyday media culture, what types of framing does the press in Greece reserve for online pornography. We are particularly interested in depictions of child Internet pornography and the potential demonization of online culture in Greece especially as Greek newspapers love to cauterize children’s online ‘addiction’. The sample examined in this paper is a six months period from August 2007 to June 2008. The months chosen are August 2007, October 2007, December 2007, February 2008, April 2008 and June 2008.