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From Kate Krolicki, Software Engineer:

I spent my first three months at Tripod as a Membership Intern who "monitored member pages for Terms of Service violations." Basically I was paid to surf Tripod member pages for porn twenty hours a week. I was rather amused by the whole thing at first. It seemed like a perfect part-time job for an "open-minded" recent liberal arts graduate such as myself. I had my own pet opinions about the line between art and pornography, and felt prepared to face the onslaught of smut with discerning judgement and insight. Unfortunately, the job ended up requiring little of either. Most of what I saw could be easily categorized before the page finished loading, but there were a few sites that provided welcome breaks in the routine — pages that forced the membership folk to rethink our definition of porn. Generally we used the "nipple test" — lack of clothing was tolerated until it broke general public exposure laws — and the "daytime TV test" — depictions of sex acts were tolerated if they were the sort of thing you might see on soap operas.

It sounded tidy and reasonable at first, but I discovered that there were a lot of holes. The underlying assumption was that all nudity was sexual. What do you do with nudist sites? Or perfectly innocent pictures of a little kid taking a bath? Then you have to account for intent as well. How about a site with endless pictures of small children in bathing suits posted by a self-proclaimed pedophile? How differently (if at all) should this be treated from a similar page with adult models? And if public indecency laws are the guideline for acceptable levels of clothing, what about the New York state law that made it legal for women to go publicly topless? Should different artistic media have different standards based on how realistic-looking they are? Debates over these details with Jason and Nick, philosophy graduates working in membership, kept me sane after wading through endless pictures of Pamela's implants. Needless to say, it's difficult to come up with absolute yet meaningful guidelines. We figured it out as we went along. We tried to be consistent, but we each had our own little quirks. And all of us were far more forgiving on Fridays than Mondays.

In addition to the well-known "perversities," I ran into quite a few things that I had never seen, some that I had never even considered before — fixations with long toenails, body cast and teddy bear fetishes, and what seemed to be a Japanese national fascination with young women's panties. To put this in better context, I should mention that, for the most part, Tripod doesn't have cubicles. I had to look at these pages in full view of everyone in the office. I received numerous puzzled and shocked glances from the newer Tripod employees as they passed by. I guess seeing a monitor glaringly displaying porn at your place of work has gotta be a little disconcerting, especially if you have no idea that membership's supposed to be looking at it. Whenever we get special guests, the porn surfers either take a break or hide in back and work.

After three weeks at the job, I saw my first hardcore kiddie-porn site. I turned off my computer, went home early, and tried desperately not to think about it. But as traumatic as that was, I think the most psychcologically scarring part of the job was being constantly exposed to media representations of "beautiful women." In general, I have a fairly healthy physical self-image, and I'm comfortable with my body — my primary job as a college student was being an art model. But after several months of looking at supermodel and bikini babe pages, I started to avoid looking at myself in the mirror. I didn't like what I saw anymore. I wasn't pretty enough. I wasn't skinny enough. My boobs weren't perky enough. I knew this was crap. I knew comparing myself to anorexic, surgically-altered models was stupid, but it didn't make me feel any better. I was able to shut out actively offensive images of pornography, but the assumptions that they worked from (tall, skinny, women with implants are the definition of desirable) are insidious, and creep into your brain without permission. It's impossible to be constantly on guard against them. In this regard, I think the fashion industry contributes as much to female degradation as pornography. Probably more, because of its larger reach.

I realized I wasn't going to last very long at the job without going completely batty. There's nothing quite like the incentive of potential insanity to motivate you to learn new job skills. I started staying late teaching myself programming. Nowadays I work in the tech department, and I've mostly recovered from the ill effects of my previous position. My housemate is the current porn surfer. It's been almost three months for him now, and he's starting to show it. If you so much as mention his job to him, he'll twitch and run away. Fortunately, he's leaving in a week for Hawaii. Three months seems to be as long as anyone can last at the job. I'd honestly be worried if someone wanted to stay longer.

Kate, Software Engineer (12/11/98)

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.