MAGAZINES (15 june 2004)
As young boys, my brothers and I were regularly sent to the barber's shop.
Although I normally hate waiting, I didn't mind doing so at the barber's. That's because the barber had a table loaded with magazines. But these were not just any magazines. Their titles were De Lach ('the smile') and Piccolo.
Harmless titles, you may think. But De Lach and Piccolo had two important ingredients which were missing in other magazines. The first was naughty cartoon jokes. I guess I was too young to understand even half of them.
The second attraction was formed by photos of girls in bikinis and other revealing outfits.
In hindsight, I wonder what these girls did to me. After all, I was nine or ten years old and I doubt whether my glands had already started secreting as powerfully as they would later in life .
I don't know if my parents found out about this special attraction the barber's shop had on me. But after some time my dad started cutting our hair. My younger brother was his first victim. Several times my father tried to correct the assymmetry alternately trimming hair from one side and from the other. The result was horrendous.
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These days, I get tons of spam. Most of it is filtered by my Internet provider and goes straight into my spam account.
When I see these filtered messages, it strikes me how different today's porn is from the stuff the magazines on the barber's table had to offer half a century ago.
Today's spam advertizes for weird things like sex with transvestites and activities that involve animals. That this kind of spam is sent to me is annoying. But I can have it.
But it can seriously be questioned if young people, many of whom have email addresses, should be exposed to this kind of filth.
What I don't understand is why governments don't take harsher measures against spam. At the moment, Holland has some tentative legislation against unwanted email.
But it's so utterly ineffective that I doubt if there's anyone in the Netherlands who knows how to report spam to the authorities.
