I know it's the last refuge of the scoundrel, but may I say a few words about spam? I read an excellent article on the subject of junk email in the New Yorker in August, and it put the whole subject into neat perspective. (It's available to read here.) I learned that nearly two million emails are dispatched every second, 171 billion messages a day. As Michael Specter wrote, "Most of those messages have something to sell. Even the most foolish and unsavory advertisements can earn money - in part because the economic bar for success is so low. If somebody wants to send you junk mail the old-fashioned way, through the Postal Service, he has to pay for it; the more he sends, the greater the expense. With electronic junk mail, the opposite is true: it costs a pittance to send a million messages - or even a billion - and recipients almost always spend more than the sender." Some good facts: In 2001, spam accounted for about 5% of traffic on the Internet; by 2004, it was over 70%. In some places, it's now up to 90%.

I usually get around 100 in my junk inbox between when I leave my office at 6pm and log on again the next morning at around 9am (that's when the bulk of it comes, obviously, as it's not coming from the UK, is it?) - I only go through it because certain emails I actually want slip through the net, and I have to check. You get used to deleting spam - don't recognise the name of the sender, it's in Chinese, it's an image of a woman with no top on, the subject line includes the words "penis" or "dick" subtly disguised to sidestep filters ("d!ck" or "dik" or "pen/is"). In among the endless ads for replica watches and stock options, I find the ads for penis enlargement devices/potions insultingly crude on the whole, as I whizz past them at record speed, and it does offend the prude in me that topless women can appear in my inbox uninvited. You probably get exactly the same spam as I do. It's like a plague. That said, beyond transient offence, they do no actual harm, and should I ever actually want some herbal Viagra, I know where to get it.

Of late though, I've been collecting some of the charming subject lines for penile dysfunction aids, which, one must assume, are designed to attract potential customers. I think they tell us something worrying about male sexuality in the 21st century. Here are some that recur currently:

[Warning! Some of the following are quite explicity rude]

Enter the New Year with a bigger pen!s!
Make your willy bigger and harder in just a few weeks!
Kindle a passion in her heart with your magic stick
Re:You wondered how to obtain true masculinity. Here is the answer:
The volume of your male meat is absolutely essential!
Beat her womb with your new big rod, so that she knew who wears the pants!
does she like cum in her face? bust out massive amounts of semen so she can slurp it up
Re:Make your tiny lace a true symbol of your power
Please your wife with a big hard shaft!
If you treat your filly as a goddess, why not become a God in her bedroom?
Have a great night with your girlfriend!
Create a furore in her bedroom on New Year!

In some ways, they're quite sweet, going on about the New Year and kindling passion and pleasing your wife or filly or girlfriend. I'm taken by the idea of someone wishing to "create a furore in her bedroom". That's just so vague isn't it? You could do that by letting a moth in. But the euphemisms for the male member do tend towards the aggressively macho - big hard shaft and male meat and new big rod and symbol of power (the one mentioning a "willy" seems a bit comical in the company of these pounding metaphors). Is it any wonder masculinity is in crisis? Pharmaceutical companies needs us to be ill, and if we're not ill, we're no good to them, and if their last lot of pills cured us of something, they need to invent something else, and quick! I'm not suggesting sexual dysfunction isn't a real problem - clearly, it can be, and with unhappy knock-on effects - but surely it's not as rife as this daily avalanche of ads subtly suggests? Why must men aspire to having a "magic stick"? Since when did we have to do conjuring tricks with it, too? And can one not "become a God" without a tape measure? By all means, "have a great night with your girlfriend" - it's a lovely idea. But might that great night not also include a nice meal, or a film? Must it hinge on the girth and consitency of a part of the body? Since 99% of these ads are aimed explicitly at heterosexual men, does this mean that homosexual men have no problems in this area? Does my Mac filter out gay spam? Or is it that gay people don't respond well to this kind of sell and there isn't much call for it? And if you were the kind of man who felt that "beating her womb" to prove your masculinity was a good idea and was prepared to click on a dodgy link and part with money to assist in that mission, wouldn't you also be exactly the kind of man who probably doesn't have a wife or girlfriend? (I often get an email advertising a realistic rubber lady's vagina, too. Now that seems well-marketed.)

All potent questions, I think. Keep your comments clean.

Labels: internet, sex, sexual dysfunction, spam