SILICON LOUNGE: Is www.incest.com Okay?

By Donna Ladd, Village Voice. Posted August 1, 2000.

Want a shock to your sensibilities? Visit www.incest.com, the stunningly dual purpose website run by Dan Lander, a former New York nude talk-show host. This isn't just any smut site. The index page features two doors, one leading to lewd photos ostensibly of "family sex" and another to resources for incest victims. Lander insists incest.com is a force for good, offering a release of harmful fantasies and advice for those who need help. "Enjoy the Fantasy or Regret the Reality," the site advises.

The juxtaposition of the site's messages is jarring, even to those inured to taboo sexual images. "It mixes two genres -- therapeutic self-help and hand-wringing -- in its text, with carny-style porno come-ons in its graphics and headlines," says sex author Susie Bright www.susiebright.com, who wrote about incest in her recent book, Full Exposure. "It's like a serious psychiatrist hanging out a neon sign with pasties and a G-string on his front door."

Lander counters that a "well-known psychoanalyst at a prestigious New York psychological school, a high school counselor, and a rape counselor" advised him on the site's content, though he refuses to name any of them. His advisers encouraged "a place where people with desire could relieve themselves and live through the fantasy was a very healthful thing to do," he says, adding that he has a "personal interest" in incest issues, on which he would not elaborate.

Therapists have long held that using sexual images can help people defuse bad impulses without acting on them. In her work as a self-styled sexpert, Bright does believe such relief is positive, but doesn't believe incest.com really intends to support victims or stop perps, instead operating like a garden-variety porn page, charging $24.75 to view most of the pictures and stories. "This site would veer toward a satire," she says, "if it weren't so doggedly trying to get your credit-card number."

Lander says his approach to incest is anything but satirical: "This is not just prurient interest. This is a serious social issue."

Although Lander has received no serious threats of censorship yet, the threat of government censorship is serious, says American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen. Just as the First Amendment protects pictures of people committing murder or injecting drugs, Strossen says, it should safeguard an image of an adult having sex with a child. Purveyors of incest photos often use adult models dressed as children to avoid breaking the law. To the ACLU's dismay, some judges are ruling that even images in which the "kids" are played by adults violate the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act. "Courts are shockingly mixed on this," says Strossen, author of Defending Pornography.

Which leaves a guy like Lander in the gray. He says he has taken down some images that people have construed as containing minors and that he checks the driver's license and birth certificate of the subjects to ensure they're 18 or older. "We're as concerned with appearances as with the actual facts," he says.

That shows. Barry Fagin, cofounder of Families Against Internet Censorship www.netfamilies.org, says that though he sees no reason an adults-only incest site should be censored, incest.com is hardly in the business of helping victims. The page of resources is "simply there to give it an air of legitimacy, to give the proprietors some sort of plausible redeeming-social-value argument. They could not give a rat's ass about incest victims," says Fagin, an Air Force Academy professor of computer science. "Two seconds with AltaVista will give you a better list [of incest resources] than that." He also agrees with Bright that the content is geared toward men's desire. "Incest.com is obviously created by a straight man for straight men," he says.

Regardless of Lander's motives, providing even scant resources for victims could give him a legal out, Strossen says, because the law protects content with serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Although Fagin thinks incest.com is utterly useless, he doesn't believe it should be censored. "The idea that a site like this poses a legitimate threat to anyone strikes me as ridiculous. As a parent, this site provokes nothing in me, largely because it's so cheesy and stupid that no one could take it seriously," he says. He argues it's good for people to have access to sexual images, in private, on their home computers. "I hope the trend continues. That's exactly the kind of world I want to raise my children in."

Lander plans to keep filling the niche. Love, hate, or tolerate him, but customers keep paying for his wares. "We feel we're meeting the demand of the marketplace," he says.

Donna Ladd can be reached at donna@shutup101.com.

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