Jeff rightfully pointed out that porn, while supposedly the seedy underbelly (there's a bad pun in there somewhere, I just know it) of this interweb thingy, is also quite possibly one of the most [only?] profitable sectors.

We were driving back from Rick's on one of those zero-traffic nights where the space between your friend's house and your own gives you more time to converse than is probably good for you. We'd spent part of the night's socialization talking about various spam-stopping methods, which of course led to the discussions of the worst/most disturbing spams we've each received.

Granted, I have a nice little antispam program that munges any and all HTML in emails it thinks are spam; therefore, I can open such spams as catch my eye and look at them without worry of being tracked, logged, bugged, spied upon, or just generally bothered.

Me, I get a weird sort of jolly out of trying to figure out what other people are getting their weird little jollies off of.I get a lot of spam. I expect that. I have a public email address, which gets inundated (then washed clean by my antispam program), and another, more private, address whose total meat by-product content is less than 5%.

Granted, most spam is worthless, useless, and an utter waste of bandwidth and eye time, but if you see enough of it go by, it's almost like a nightmarish vision of a) what our friends and neighbors think is lacking in their lives or b) what extremely specific arrangements of flesh and bone humans find worthy of a good fleshy slap and tickle.

Judging from the spam I get, we apparently hate ourselves because we can't rip our girlfriends apart with our monster cocks, or because we can't entice men to love us because we don't have D cups. (This is somewhat schizophrenic in the same person, I might add.) We want to see pictures of the housewife down the street naked, and we want to pay for it with the platinum card that someone wants to give us. We need our mortgages refinanced, and we're willing to pay for it by prostituting our opinions for small quantities of cash. We think the hottest thing in the world is a twenty-three-year-old bottle blond masquerading as someone who just yesterday celebrated her eighteenth birthday in a hot tub with her "eighteen-year-old" friends and just happened to bring a video camera along.

Ah, yes, sexual foibles, the part b) of spam. In the middle of the same conversation, Jeff mentioned something that I hadn't thought about before. Online porn is capable of doing something that no print mag could ever do, he said - and after a moment of thinking I realized it was true. A website could reach all (five?) of this world's lovers of lesbian goat pr0n, and market new content to them far more cheaply than could ever be done via print mags.

I see a lot of that type of spam in my spambox. Most of it centers around the pseudo-eighteens, or lesbians, or dorm room webcams, or some sort of odd combination of the three. I've seen so much of it now that I find it funny.

Every now and then, though, an email hits my spambox and causes me to blurt, "Someone gets off on that?"

My previous record for serious porn niche marketing was an email advertising midget-on-midget action (which, alas, I did not keep). I never thought I'd see a porn spam title that went lower than that, but on February 27th, it happened.

The email's subject read Anorexic Chicks Getting Plowed ...!! Yes. Read that again: Anorexic Chicks Getting Plowed ...!!

I have only one question: someone gets off on this? For lack of a more erudite statement, "eww?" For the lack of a better pun, that's a real slim customer demographic they've got going there.

Heck, I wasn't even aware that men found anorexic chicks attractive Scratch that, I've seen The Devil's Advocate, in which the supposedly extremely-desirable women had ribs so clearly defined I wanted to buy them all cheeseburgers out of pity. Still, I think I liked my previous state of innocence, in which there were no half-naked men sitting in front of their computers late at night and typing in phrases like "anorexic chicks getting it on" into Google.

There's a market for this. Jeez.

With that bit of shuddering over, it's time for a cup of tea and a good book. The rest of the planet may resume disturbing and terrifying me in the morning.