Hooked On P

We are in the grip of a P epidemic here in New Zealand. It’s gotten so bad that the main conduit of the P doesn’t even acknowledge that it’s pushing the stuff.

I am talking of course, about Porn. Oh we have a small thing with methamphetamine over here too but that’s far less interesting.

Here in New Zealand we have had (until recently) only the one telecommunication provider: Telecom. For a while, the man owned Telecom and ran a small profit doing what a Telco does best. It was a small time setup for a small time country. Those of us who grew up in rural NZ got to share the one phone line with all the other houses up and down the gravel road we all lived on. It was known as a ‘party line’, because sure enough, it was shared by many parties.

Back then no one really put down the phone when they said they were going to if they picked up mid conversation – the voyeur in us all often meant you tried to listen in for as long as you could without being noticed. The seeds of the P epidemic it seems, were sown long ago.

Of course a ‘party line’ today is not what it use to be. Now you pay for the pleasure of talking to a girl who you can bet looks nothing like her picture in the back of the magazine….

Anyhoo, then the man decided to sell his Telco to a bunch of foreign suits, who, recognising the potential for a spot of national sodomy, turned the business into a licence to print money. Because there was no competition, the prices and coincidentally, the profits kept going up and up. All the while the company portrayed itself as the good guy, by rolling out years of TV advertising that took images of cute & cuddly wildlife and paired it with feel good songs from the sixties.

No one really cared that their phone rental cost so much at that point. Those animals were so damn cute and those tunes so damn catchy. "How could a company like that be anything but be genuinely wanting to do it’s best for us?" we collectively thought.

Now the man has decided to rein in the foreign suits and has passed legislation requiring Telescum to share the infrastructure and more importantly, the wealth. For regular Kiwis, that has meant broadband – which was painfully slow under the one Telco - has now started to get a bit quicker, cheaper and therefore more accessible with several Telcos offering the service (We still lag like a dial up connection in comparison to the services and pricing plans of other developed countries however.)

And so began the epidemic. Most of our communities are small and it's almost impossible to exit the segregated adult section down at the local video shop without bumping into someone you know, so anything offering relatively free T & A is too good to ignore. Hence we've turned to the internet en masse and we’re now making up for lost time. New Zealand has one of the highest (per capita) Internet usage rates in the world and I reckon most of it has to be porn. What else is there to view on the net in such large quantities?

Teachers are doing it, public servants are doing it, lawyers, librarians – we know they are because they keep getting caught with it all on their work PCs. Personally, I’ve never understood the need to keep porn. There’s so much of it on tap, why keep the images? Unless it looks like someone you know. Or fancy.

So the latest bunch of Telescum TV ads no longer feature cute animals. They’re keeping it real this time, focusing on New Zealanders using quick broadband to 'get connected'. And they're getting connected alright, to Next Door Nikki. At the end of each ad is a real surprise for the ‘unscripted’ participant – favourite singer turns up, long lost family is on hand etc - just to remind us what a good bunch of jokers Telescum are at heart.

However, not one ad has portrayed what has to be the largest demographic of Telescums broadband users, the online porners. With so many of Telescums users undoubtedly surfing the good stuff, why not represent them in an ad? The numbers involved would even make those surfing online one handed, more than those who are not. So we’re talking about a majority here – that makes it mainstream by my definition! If it's mainstream, surely it's not taboo anymore?

And the surprise at the end could be that Next Door Nikki actually meets her online voyeur, the 35 year old married white male with the online profile of the 15 year old college boy. It's going to be surprises all round if that ad ever makes it to air.

Now that would make me sit up and watch. I might even pause the porn to do so.