Hans van der Kamp

Twenty years ago I was sent to a training for managers. There is little left of that five day event but a vague idea how sociopaths and misanthropists can function relatively well in a management by directive environment.
There was one rule however that I never forgot and I still try to live by that rule;

“It is better to have a manager who makes bad decisions than a manager who makes no decisions at all.”

I am at a point where my position as the website’s administrator demands a decision to be made on The Hidden Archives, my least successful AmeaNet site.

It is all my responsibility. I made the same mistake I made in 1996 when I started a discussion board for Dutch literature; I tend to alienate people with my responses to their posts. I remember one occasion in particular where I explained to a female poet that poetry is more than the shortest line width in MS Word. She was obviously hurt by that remark and announced her suicide in her reply to my comment. Well, I know poets are most sensitive beings but I really was not prepared for a remark like that. So from that day on I referred to my interventions on discussion boards as ‘clubbing baby seals’.

I have clubbed a lot of baby seals in The Hidden Archives over the last two years.

As a man who has a background in publishing magazines I believe in concepts and erotic art was supposed to be the main dish at the Hidden Archives. When people started posting pictures that had little to do with erotic art, I would flame them instead of just removing their posts, thinking that others could learn from that thread. Now, that was arrogant to say the least and soon I became a very unpopular admin for a crowd that was hungry for entertainment.

Then of course there were all these differences in culture between Americans, French, Russians and all the other nationalities. It does not matter how many nationalities you have on a board, the Americans will always take over, even if they are in the minority. As a habit they speak only one language and they tend to put little effort into trying to understand people from other countries. So, before you know it; you end up with Americans only and usually they go for quantity more than quality. I know I am generalizing here - some of the best posters were Americans too.

My discussion board soon degraded to the Mc Donalds of erotic art. I could have left it at that, thinking that the site was at least covering costs, but I couldn’t. Instead I started a one man’s guerrilla against a mob that had really no idea what I was talking about. Well, they knew that I was not a Patriot and they kept telling me that, but how can I be a patriot of a country I do not live in?

There was a fight every other day. Some objected to depictions of nuns and monks in erotic art because of their religious beliefs, others objected to sexual role patterns in 18th Century illustrations because of feminist points of view. The list of things they objected to was endless. The only thing they did not object to was crappy art. At least, so it seemed to me.

In the end I gave up on them and simply left them to themselves. I saw most other nationalities leave and the site started crumbling under the tremendous weight of entertaining pseudo-art.

The site is almost dead now, it needs a coup de grace, if you ask me, but I have a hard time making that decision. Every one I turn to for advice, tells me to leave the site as it is. Even my son of 21, who is an artist and a web designer, tells me to keep the site up. He is amongst the very few people I take seriously in matters like these.

So, I am heading for one last desperate attempt to bring the board back to its original concept..

The Internet has more rules and regulations than real life and I can see why. Our own sites have to deal with a hack attempt of one form or another every other day. Since we do not store credit card information on our server, there is little to be found here from a criminal point of view.
Most of these hacking attempts are quite harmless. They help me detect security flaws to effectively patch them.

It is the Wild West out there; the chances to be caught while injecting malicious code into a high traffic server are small, so I can see why most Internet service providers have strict rules. If one would remove all the Disclaimers and User Policies on web sites the Internet would shrink with one third, I guess.

The last few years the scare of terrorism has reached levels that have no connection whatsoever with the actual danger of getting hit by a bomb. Still the hype is resulting in more rules and regulations.
The official reason: It is better to be safe than sorry. I can see that.

At the same time however rules and regulations are expanding in areas that have nothing to do with terrorism. The list of forbidden content on websites used to be a short list: No child pornography, no bestiality, no selling of human organs or controlled substances.

Child pornography really stirs the masses. A friend of mine who is no great admirer of digital publishing once asked me after a few beers if things were really that bad with child pornography on the web and I tried to come up with a solid answer, but I just couldn’t. In ten years of using the Internet for information and entertainment I have ran into child pornography twice. Once in 1996 on Usenet and two years ago on my own site. I had a lengthy discussion with the visitors about these 400 year old pictures that came from Chinese bridal books. These were illustrations of a married couple having sex, while the children were in the room. I would hardly call that child pornography since the Chinese had other habits back then, but for your average Joe in the US that is cp. What puzzled me was that this particular series drew so many extra visitors. Traffic to that page increased with 800%.

My friend commented that he could imagine a lot of things, but he found it hard to understand what was so interesting about child pornography. Like me he preferred maturity. I had no clue either but after my fourth beer I suggested that it might have something to do with ‘the youth cult’ that our society has been promoting since the 1950s. Women are told to look young and buy the products designed to prevent normal skin decay and are even urged to engage in plastic surgery to live up to our ideal of youth. Men are not spared from this either.

We went on about this, as people tend to do on certain subjects while consuming alcohol. I desperately wanted to give him an answer. ‘Could it be so,’ I suggested, ‘that in this society parents have to be more focused on their jobs and have little time to spend with their children; forcing them to put their loved ones in the care of others who are mostly unknown to them? That must create a sense of danger and most of all guilt.’ I was thinking about all these stories on TV about children who were sent to these nice older men for weekend trips to return sexually molested, while their parents finally enjoyed that long awaited ‘free’ weekend.
He did not answer but ordered two more beers.

In my view child pornography equals sexual abuse. To supply paedophiles with photos or videos, children are being conned or forced into situations that will damage their lives forever. Being an old man who was sexually abused for a longer period of time between age 11 and 13 - not by my parents or their friends, but by people of the medical profession during a stay in a orthopaedic clinic - I am very much aware of the damage done to the abilities to accept intimacy; even of those you love dearly, forget about the recurring nightmares for a moment which tend to get worse once you grow older.

So, it seemed a logical thought to me that highly realistic 3D animated movies and pictures would be a solution. The demand is there. Very few people have the strength to change their sexual preferences, so let us give them what they want and spare the children their nightmares - hoping that it would help paedophiles to resist the urge, like prostitution under specific circumstances can reduce chances of women being raped.

The first time a childless, female judge in the Netherlands was confronted with digitally mastered ‘child pornography’ — meaning that the pictures involved no participation of actual children — she sentenced the distributor as though he had distributed the real thing. What a pity. Child pornography is so interesting to distribute for criminals because of its high market value. Producing synthesized cp would really make those prices drop, resulting in less interest to produce that kind of material.

My friend was very enthusiastic about my theory and went home to a town not far away from Amsterdam and tested this theory in his neighbourhood café. Two days later he was almost tarred and feathered for being the town paedophile. In a phone call he assured me that he would no longer air my theories in his own surroundings.

This morning I received a newsletter from an interesting 3D site renderotica.com informing us that they were being blackmailed by one of their service providers over content. To avoid confusion: these people have refused cp and bestiality from the start just like 99.0 % of all erotic art content providers have done.

From this day on, they are not allowed to show the following:
BDSM (sadism, masochism and bondage), urination, defecation or menstruation.

All of the above can be shown on any other (access restricted) medium, whether it is your cup of tea or not.

If it wasn’t so sad for these people who pioneer in an erotic art form that seems to belong to the future, I would have choked laughing. Menstruation forbidden! Now, where does that come from?

I know most desert people, like Muslims and Jews, had good reasons to have strict rules about menstruation that became part of their religion. Where there is little water around these rules make sense. The same goes for circumcision of males.

No, what we are probably dealing with here (again) are corporate maggots who want all sex off the web because it competes with their sales of products which are also available in the shop around the corner - at a lower price. (Instead of being billed for shipping costs you get a nice breath of fresh air as a bonus.)

One good thing though, if we go on like this with our rules and regulations we might eventually live up to the high moral and religious standards of Muslim extremists and by doing so end a war that has been going on for ages.

For access restricted AmeaNet sites we use external payment processors so that we do not have to store credit card data on our own server. We are no security experts. I will not to go into detail about our experiences with payment processors in general. Let’s just say that I have lost a considerable amount of money over the years selecting companies to handle our payments without ever receiving the money of those transactions. The strategy is simple; most payment processors handling payments for adult sites are in the US. They look at Ameanet.org as a porn site - or a high-risk site. I do not agree with that, but I am dealing with account managers here, who think that a copy of Leda and the Swan by Michelangelo should be filed under ‘bestiality’ often spelled by them as ‘beastiality’. Freezing our account and taking our funds does not bother them too much, since they know we have no real options to fight this kind of fraud. A few phone calls to an international law firm would drain our funds more than just cutting our losses.

At one point I just picked the biggest mom and dad payment system there is. I knew they did not handle adult sites at all, but I figured they were too busy money laundering and calculating their kick-backs to check our sites for content. That worked very well for two years. When this same payment processor opened a UK branch, our content was in fact checked and the Brits saw no real conflicts with existing User Policies.

Some time ago the same payment processor opened a Dutch branch. Well, at least that is what they claim it to be. There is no office here, just a p.o. box and a Dutch BV (Inc.) for tax reasons, I assume. A call to their Dutch telephone number gets diverted to the UK or US offices.

A few weeks ago payments almost completely stopped coming in. We figured it was the holiday season. After a week however, a Dutchman subscribed to one of our sites and that is always a noteworthy event. It happened five times over the last few years. We checked the site and saw that the language of the external signup pages was changed to Dutch. No problem, we adjusted the settings in our profile and the problem was solved. The next day the page was changed back to Dutch again. This went on and on for quite some time. We kept calling them and they kept apologising.

Yesterday we have spent 6 hours on the phone to solve these problems and in the end they sent us a hefty manual on how to change language settings. It was a two-hour read because the search option of the digital document did not work too well, but when we finally found the option to change the language; it turned out to be the same option we had used from the start.

We do not give up that easy so we changed the language setting once more, but now the pull-down menu had lost all functionality. I switched to US English a dozen times, but the signup page stayed Dutch. So if you are checking this blog to find out what the hell is happening at AmeaNet, you will know that we are not trying to chase anybody away. We have just dived into another Ultimate American Loophole, as one of our visitors described it.

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My hard drive is cluttered with video rushes. Shot for no other reason than that there was a video camera present. Home movies, mostly. This one is special, although the camera work and the lighting are not too brilliant. I wanted to do some editing on it, but decided to leave the clip for what it was.

I did not even take the time to edit out the pink-wigged witch. The clip shows jazz musician Boris van der Lek warming up on his saxophone and testing the acoustics of my previous studio. [2003]

What seemed to be a casual moment became a historic video document.

Portrait of Boris van der Lek