In which the publication Crank enlightens readers with the latest curious developments in online Nip webporn, with the added benefit of once again cracking plenty of jokes about--and pushing the envelope of--our favorite censorship bugger and official last taboo: kiddie porn.

This world is doomed. As some of you know, I'm not your typical doomsayer. I'm certainly not camping out with the religiosa, and I'm not marching in the streets with the environmentalists. But I am saying that this world is doomed, and think it's going to be one hell of a ride.

Just because the millennium came and went without comment, don't forget that worlds must end. Not just empires, nations, races and species, but entire worlds. Entire perceptions. Entire manifestations. They come, they go. Big deal. Eschatology is everything.

Given that, have you ever really thought about The End? It's haunted me since childhood. It continues to haunt me, especially as I begin to consider the manner by which my own hand will fulfill my personal eschatological quest. On those occasions when the prospect of nonexistence creeps into my brain--rather often these days--the phrase "the big one" rings over and over, an existential tinnitus I'm unable to shut out. I reply "Sure, sure: the big one. The end. Big deal. Because then..." and then the voice cuts off the pondering, asserting that with death comes oblivion, comes nonexistence, comes nothing at all. Nothing. At all.

So I wrestle with that. And when you consider my devout, unwavering, arrogant atheism, you might see my dilemma: Once you're down, you're out of the game.

Then why so suicidal? Where's the arrogance when I need it? Where's the determination to be a thorn in most of the world's side (yet a balm to soothe another, smaller portion of this world)? Since I know it's all over when I go into the dirt, why consider the ways by which I might hurry it along?

Because then I wouldn't know any better. I wouldn't be around to think about it any more.

It was hard work to stick around for the millennium. I just wanted to see something happen. I had hoped that a whole lot of crackpots would run wild in the streets, desperately trying to be the "self-" in "self-fulfilling prophecy." I'd been watching the millennium creep closer since college, when one of my religion professors, the unfortunately named James Jones, turned me on to epistemology. One of my papers compared millennial tension in year 999 to 1989. I was, by and large, really, really off-base, considering I had only used one source--which has since been discredited in various circles--but I'd had a fascination with millennial tension ever since.

Some seven years ago, a few years out of school, my pal Jeff sent me a newsletter from his then-employer, AT&T, introducing the staff to the Year 2000 Computer Bug. That clever "Y2K" thing hadn't yet been coined. (You didn't miss that one, did you? You, with your hip insider's wink-wink devotion to grad-student claptrap like Stay Free! who thinks that, just because you can identify marketing campaigns, you're better and smarter than the--gasp!--average person: You do realize that the people who popularized the "Y2K" nickname were in the business of fixing the problem, right? You didn't think that such a clever, ready-to-market catchphrase could've actually been organic, did you? Oh, tsk tsk. "Y2K" was aggressively marketed by the Y2K-fixers since 1994. It was--and remains, somehow--a huge, huge business.) When I read that AT&T was allocating Big Money to fix the problem--Before catastrophe strikes!--I knew I'd found my millennial salvation.

End of the world? You must be kidding. But think about it for a minute: There would have been a short-lived (and quickly forgotten) irony if the world had actually ended with the whole Y2K thing. It would've been quite Asimovian, I think, for the world to have collapsed under the weight of shortsighted, computerized automation when, suddenly, we were unable to operate our fucking microwaves because of two digits, and all the religious kooks would've actually been proven right! Get it? The religious, apocalyptic types would've won. They could've claimed victory. They would've been right the whole time!

It wouldn't have really mattered that they weren't, really, correct about the manner in which the world ended. They would've still claimed it as their victory. See, if the world had ended on 1/1/00, it wouldn't have really much mattered if Christ had flitted down in a golden gyrocopter or not. It wouldn't have mattered if the cause for civilization's demise was really the White Man's God bringing judgment upon the mud people. Or conversely, if it had been time for the Black God to topple the White Devils' mechanized world. Or the Aliens... Or the Luddite Lord...

Point being: god works in mysterious ways, right? So why not computers? It's not much removed from the creationists who will accept that, okay, so maybe a lightning bolt zapped a puddle of proteins and the first sparks of life were set off. But it was God's lightning bolt, got it? Okay, so there's an ass-full of evidence supporting the Big Bang, but it was the Lord's hand which wound up the cosmic clock and got things rolling. See how convenient? No matter how much explanation, quantification and categorization you throw at the devout, the most intellectually nimble will accept the data and claim it as their own.

So on Jan 1, 2000, there was a chance for the truth to be seen that the Lord's hand had caused programmers to--oops!--allow the whole millennium bug to receive its own spark of life. (Or maybe--and goddamn, wouldn't this have been a fantastic movie?--the first programmer who set up the very first mainframe with the allegedly unforeseen Millennium Bug was a fervent millennialist who, thirty years ago, did it all on purpose to usher in the end of the world?!?) You realize, right?, that if proper civilization had gone into the crapper, everyone would've written it down the way they understood it. Think about that: Which kinds of books, by and large, survive through the ages? Evangelical religious texts. As I said, right out of Asimov.

But you know what? One thousand words notwithstanding, I'm not terribly interested in writing about the accidental legitimacy of religious prophecy, even though it was never indulged in the press. I don't have time right now. I'd much rather talk about my new favorite fetish: mask girls.

So, culture is in the crapper. I'm quite comfortable with that. I think internet pornography is fantastic. The more, the better. Sure, I was a little shocked--maybe "surprised" is the better word--by how much hardcore porn is at the first-click level. And that was while visiting random commercial sites without paying for anything. Non-commercial sites are even more visually promiscuous. While I might feel different had I children, I think it's a great thing (and not because I'm starved for fresh porn).

With the prevalence of porn on the internet, the bar of perversion has been raised. Twenty years ago, so far as I know, dingy porn theaters, behind-the-counter magazines and mailorder stag flicks accounted for most of the smut available. Then, the VCR revolutionized the industry, bringing pornography home. With that, the variety of porn exploded--who thought there'd be gay porn sections in suburban, strip-mall video stores? Not to mention shelves for asian, black, anal, bondage, etc., etc....

The bar was raised.

Today, everyone's pretty much accepted porn being available next to their supermarket. No one much complains about it anymore. (Or if they do, everyone else tells them to shut their traps. Admit it or not, everyone likes porn.) And along comes the internet, pushing the limits of acceptance a little bit more. Of course, a lot of people complain. (But people also complained when the first commercials were shown before the previews at the movie theatre. Now, no one mutters a single fucking protest during those five minutes of ads. It's absorption, and I doubt there's a saturation point.) Subsequently, straight porn has become non-controversial. Tits and ass are seen on network television; the word "asshole" is now acceptable during prime time. I've heard "shit" and "fuck" on 60 Minutes. For me, it's a great time to be alive. Straight, chick-on-a-dick porn is boring. Or, at least, acceptable and mundane. Celebrity nudity is trite. Gay porn is just another lifestyle choice, and recreational S&M is a fucking fallback segment on most talk shows. So I went looking for honest-to-god samples of the next big taboo: Kiddie Porn. I wanted to know what, exactly, was out there.

To prepare, I wiped all of the Netscape preferences which contained any personal information. I carefully avoided filling out any forms and submitting any information to any site.

I don't recall where I started. Probably at one of the sites which links back to Crank. I spent a few hours, slowly and carefully sifting through the bullshit like an archeologist on a dig, avoiding the commercial crap at all costs. It was like backtracking a virus: with every fifth link, the tone of the sites mutated. So, say, I began with a nude Xuxa fan site, five or six degrees later, after passing through a few normal titty sites, I find might myself at a legitimate, Brazilian casting agent homepage which happens to feature a lot of teenage models.

It gets real creepy out there on the fringe of pedophilia. Now, I'm absolutely certain that there are thousands of unseen, unknown, membership-by-referral only webpages out there which cater to hardcore pedophiles. And I'm sure there's a serious network of peds exchanging illegal photos like baseball cards. But it's fascinating how ordinary, innocent imagery can be fetishized. Knowing the Germans, they've got a word for it. Something like gutpikturusedforvankingbypervertsker. For example, go to http://members.aol.com/Photovoyer/Links1.htm (if it's still around) and check out how many online family photo galleries, photographers' portfolios and day camp homepages are offered to, you know, admirers of the young female body. The website that your 13-year old builds for her and her friends' goofy photos is probably listed on some ped's links page. One man's little princess is another man's pedophiliac fantasy gash.

But that's just simple kiddie porning around, a perverse equivalent of snapping one off while watching Baywatch: it's side-effect eroticism. If you want real nudie pictures of young girls, go to Alessandra's Smile (http://www.alessandrasmile.com). They're listed on a lot of the ped-perv pages because they carry naturalist videos, art books and the like, all with an emphasis on naked, young boys and girls. Have a blast.

My trip was all rather ho-hum, until I started exploring the japanese sites (.jp). While very few had any English on them, the basic structure of a Japanese webpage ain't much different than those you're accustomed to: headline, graphic, subhead, a few lines of intro text and hotlinks to a few sections, the last two of which are usually an e-mail contact and a links dump. Somewhere along the way--I have no real idea where, since it was all in Japanese--a link led me to the MoRoS, a Japanese hetero version of NAMBLA (see sidebar). That site, in turn, led me to the Mask Girls.

Mask Girls. While I claim absolutely no knowledge (not even much of a familiarity) with Japanese sexuality, it seems that a fetish for adult women either donning or already wearing gauze masks isn't all that uncommon. This, I can only assume, grew naturally in a society in which wearing a mask on the street for health purposes isn't itself all that uncommon.

So I found some mask girl pages. The most, um, normal was Mask World at http://www.kt.rim.or.jp/~wakawaka/msk/mhome.shtml (again, if it's still around), which offers a small amount of English text, plus lots of photos (many of them product shots) of attractive Japanese women wearing masks. In the words of Mask World's owner (insert "[sic]" liberally):

"Imagine the figure of the lady putting on a mask! The mask is covering her nose and mouth gently and softly. (I think gauze masks can do so better.) But in other side, it seems to be closing her nose and mouth exactly and tightly. If the lady putting on a gaze mask stands in the face of me, I will see her eyes, not only the mask. The expression of her eyes is very attractive for me. It's telling me something, stuffiness and comfort.... And I think each ladies have each expressions. All of them are my favorites. I will be glad, if you can understand my feeling."

As my pal Queen Itchie remarked when I showed her some of the photos, it's no surprise that a culture which forbids pubic shots would fetishize every other part of the female form. Her example was the extreme treatment of women's breasts in mainstream Jap porn while the pubic area is blanked out.

So I looked around, checked out his links page, bookmarked it and moved on.

It's not news that the Japanese fetishize young women in school uniforms. To some extent, so do Americans, but we haven't taken it to such an extreme that it's an international joke. (We're probably mocked for the prevalence of horrid tit jobs in our porn, certainly an insult well-earned.)

So it's no surprise to find dozens and dozens of schoolgirl newsgroups, webpages and CD-ROMs (some are even available at my local Tower Video, or so I'm told). But when I found the schoolgirl fetish combined with this mask girl fetish... Well, let's just say it was a phenomenal discovery. I spent many, many, many...um, I spent an hour or two looking into this pedophiliac twist on the mask girls thing, and I couldn't find any other sites like it in the world. (The closest I came to a similar American webpage were a few commercial Sleepy Girl sites: pictures of women either drugged, dead or playing dead. It's an odd fetish, too, but still somehow ordinary.) It was too much for me to handle--I was ecstatic. Like a biologist stumbling across a new species, I wanted to share my discovery with the world!

Of course, I don't know whether or not the mask girls are a real fetish, or just some subgenius-type gag intended for hip Jap intellectuals sharing a good porn joke. I just don't know. I don't think it's a joke, though. At least I hope not. I really, truly hope that there are thousands and thousands of Japanese men who masturbate while looking at pictures of 10-year old girls wearing surgical masks to protect their tiny, pink lungs from all the pollutants and contaminants. I can't explain why, but I really, really, really do. Anything less would be a disappointment.

So, without further ado, please enjoy these, my favorite mask girls.