Pornography on the Internet, like pornography anywhere else, starts out with marks against it. And you don’t have to experiment much to discover that some of it is appalling.

Voyeurweb.com, however, is different. It is much more in the spirit of the poet e.e. cummings’s immortal couplet: “a pretty girl who naked is / is worth a million statues.”

Some people will never like poetry, or e.e. cummings. And there will always be those who say that the only good pornographer is a dead pornographer (or at least one securely in jail).

But there at least has to be an exception for the “Igor&Gang” who started “The original free Voyeurweb” in 1997 – and nowadays still preside over “the most frequented erotic amateur photo site on planet earth … Free Amateur Photos for Free Surfers! Updated every friggin’ day (but on Sunday) … More than 1.8 MILLION daily unique visitors can’t be wrong.”

A few further observations …

The e.e. cummings poem says “a pretty girl” not boy “who naked is.” In the more recent past Voyeurweb has taken to including a few men in its photos here and there. Yet the vast majority of the photos are still of women.

It also seems fair enough to characterize the photos as “amateur.” The women you will see on Voyeurweb for the most part do not look like professional porn stars (of the sort you can nowadays see easily enough in movies on cable TV, late at night).

At the same time, Voyeurweb does offer the amateurs who submit their photos to the site the chance to win monthly cash prizes. Along with its generous selection of free photos, it includes a paid subscription service that offers more “explicit” material. Some of the amateurs who appear there have their own commercial websites.

There is also some overlap between contributors to the site’s free and paid subscription sections. And even if you stick to the free sections, you will see what amount to Voyeurweb stars (a phenomenon encouraged by the site user’s ability to vote on the best photo selections, submitted by all the varieties of amateur contributors).

You might say as well that there are several different physiological classes of women who contribute to Voyeurweb.com. Some are extremely pretty girls – the kind of stunningly beautiful women to whom most men (or women for that matter) will never have any serious access in the flesh.

Others are just attractive as opposed to stunningly beautiful. Still others are compelling on certain skewed principles of taste. (Some men prefer unusually overweight, or underweight, women. Even some younger men prefer older women, and so forth.)

In any case, it is part of the general human attractiveness of Voyeurweb.com that it is open to and regularly displays amateur contributions from all shapes, sizes, and ages of women.

The site is similarly based in the United States, and sometimes has US cultural overtones – girls wearing only American flags for the 4th of July, e.g. But as you might expect from managers called “Igor&Company,” Voyeurweb regularly presents contributions from many different parts of the world today (including Mediterranean and eastern Europe: and as a bow to the rising new North America, there is also recurrent Canadian and Mexican content).

Probably the majority of women on the site could be broadly described as racially Caucasian. Yet this appears related to just who submits contributions. Women of all racial backgrounds regularly appear as well – all varieties of Asian, African, Native American, South American, and so forth. (And then you can wonder about just what the exact classifications are. Is a “Latina Princess,” e.g., also a Caucasian? And what are Hawaiians?)

In some cases the amateurs who appear in photo selections are submitting their photographs themselves. (Some women have even taken their own pictures, using mirrors.) In others it is men who are submitting pictures of their wives or girlfriends or other female acquaintances – or, a recurrently popular category: ex-wives or ex-girlfriends, etc.

In some of these cases too women have obviously only agreed to have their photos submitted if their faces are blurred or blocked-out – or sometimes just not fully shown, in the way the photos have been shot. There are as well photos of wives and girlfriends who apparently have agreed to have their pictures taken as … well … merciful favours to their husbands or boyfriends. And you can see this on their faces, when their faces do appear, sometimes in amusing ways.

Summing up …

The very best photos on Voyeurweb.com have an artistic quality that rises above ordinary experience. Some women have a remarkable ability to project their sexuality in ways that are both provocative and authentically artful. Who knows or even wants to inquire into just what unique psychology (or sociology or even anthropology) lies behind such talents? This kind of art is just meant to be enjoyed, and not analyzed too much.

No doubt, pornography is almost by definition sleazy, and the pornography on Voyeurweb is no exception.

Yet often enough some photo on the site will make you stop briefly, to think just how right e.e. cummings was when he said “a pretty girl who naked is / is worth a million statues.” In the end this is what redeems the accompanying inevitable sleaze. (And anyone whose life is without some intermittent sleaze can cast the first stone.)

In the end as well legal pornography by and for consenting adults is itself going to be inevitable in any authentically free and democratic society, as we understand the term today.

Theocratic clerics of all organized religions will protest this proposition. But if we listen too much to them we will not have free and democratic societies in other more important ways. (Democracy, as George Orwell once said, implies a certain tolerance for dirt.) And if we are going to have to have pornography on the Internet, for those who do want it, Igor&Gang at Voyeurweb.com have at least come up with one good way of getting the job done.

The site has its attractive civic-minded sides as well. On their home page Igor&Gang say “Voyeurweb is a proud member of F.S.C.” This is the US adult entertainment industry’s “Free Speech Coalition,” which, among other things “offers a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of persons creating or trafficking in child pornography.” (And the other things include “Contact Congress” and “Register to Vote.”)

You can say this is a scam too, and maybe in some degree it is. (Note, e.g.: “The Free Speech Coalition … is pleased to announce that it will hold a special membership meeting and legal seminar during the International Lingerie Show, on Monday, October 10, 2005, at the Rio in the Lambada Room in Las Vegas.”)

Yet if you follow the adventures of Igor&Gang for any length of time, it is hard not to believe that their political project also flows from some degree of authentic attachment to the values of freedom and democracy, that President George W. Bush keeps saying he is trying to promote around the world.

The great spirit above us in the sky, as others among the president’s friends would say, works in mysterious ways – and must somehow have some similar interest in human sexuality. Otherwise we humans would not be here, on planet earth.

(Oh and finally, for those congenital puritans who continue to believe in fidelity in their sexual relationships – as surveys suggest the great majority in North America still say they do – there is the old adage from the streets: “It doesn’t matter where you get your appetite, so long as you eat at home.”)

NB: Voyeurweb.com offers the following “legal advice” on its site: “The photos below may only be downloaded for your private pleasure. You may not republish them at another web site or anywhere else.” And the photos that appear in this article above are not taken from Voyeurweb.com for this reason. Some links in the article will take readers direct to photos on the Voyeurweb site – which would seem to fit the principles of the Free Speech Coalition.

CWEditor’s Note: In June 2007 Citizen X updated his report on Voyeurweb.com in a counterweights article called “NICE INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY REVISITED .. Britt Peterson, sexsomnia, Rachel Marsden (?), and on and on.” CLICK HERE if you want to look at this article too.