IF YOU HAVE A teen-age boy and you are on the Internet, he is downloading pictures of naked women. So are his friends. So are the teen-age sons of your friends.
If you are thinking, "Oh, no. Not my boy," give it up, because he is counting on that.
If you are thinking that your son is logged on and researching a term paper and that is why you can't get through when you phone home, give it up, because he is counting on that, too.
And if you are thinking that your son doesn't know how to find and download pictures of naked women because you don't even know how to do it, give that up, too, because he was born knowing how to figure this out. Or he has 17 friends who will teach him.
Believing at first that the Internet was a vast educational resource, moms and dads are walking in on their junior hacker and getting their feelings hurt.
Cautiously and in confessional tones, parents are beginning to warn each other about this, trading what they know about how the kids are running their blockades.
Even if you have restricted access to kids-only Internet sites and chat rooms, kids can still do it. Boys are trading discs with copies of the photo files. They are passing notes to each other in class with file names to call up or sites to visit. The days of $H "Sarah likes you. Do you like her? Check yes or no" and paper footballs are behind us, I fear.
Kids are e-mailing each other and attaching graphic files to the e-mail. Go into a kids-only chat room sometime and listen. "It isn't there, send it again," they tell each other. What do you think they are talking about?
If you thought your son was using the Internet for homework help or to take an online tour of the Smithsonian, get over it. If you thought you could restrict his movement on the World Wide Web, get over that, too, because he will hack his way around you. It is his job to do that.
"Puberty rules," says my neighbor Bob. "There is no more powerful force on earth."
How are we supposed to feel about this? How is this different from the tattered Playboy magazine that Eugene Fitzgibbons brought to my husband's Catholic elementary school? "It was like he found the Dead Sea scrolls," my husband recalls.
The difference between cyber porn and the dog-eared Hustler that is passed from backpack to backpack in the school cafeteria is that there is an unidentified person attached to the e-mail messages carrying those pictures. It may be another 14-year-old boy, or it may be a 14-year-old girl or it may be a sexual predator. You don't know and neither does your child.
America Online has a phalanx of parental controls that will block your kids out of everything but the encyclopedias and the homework hot line. You can restrict his e-mail, prevent downloading and keep him out of certain chat rooms, news groups and Web sites.
If you don't have a server with these kinds of controls, there is Net Nanny, a software application that bolts lots of doors for you.
"But the effectiveness of parent controls are only as great as the parents' efforts," said Tatiana Gau, vice president for integrity for AOL. "When we find kids circumventing them, we alert our members and try to get the information out as quickly as possible. We want to put as many tools as possible in parents' hands. But in the end, it is up to the parents to use these tools."
And to be parents. It is up to the parents to be parents.
The Internet is just one more damn thing we have to monitor, like television, movies, video games and caffeine. It is hard to outmaneuver an adversary who can dedicate his entire day to getting away with stuff while you are distracted by things like your job.
You can have "the talk" with your kids about how pictures of naked women are demeaning and exploitative and a violation of the sacredness of married life, and you can hope that takes.
Or you can wait until the pictures-of-naked-women phase passes, as all the other phases have done.
Or you can live without the Internet.
Decide what you want to invite into your home. If you invite the Internet in, do it knowing that teen-age boys will use it to find pictures of naked women.
Pub Date: 1/26/97
