The New Porn: Facebook

[Porn Mickey]

By Ryan Tate, www.gawker.com.

Good news for women who hate internet porn: Men are increasingly bored with the genre's fake female characters and implausible situations. The bad news: Men are increasingly getting off to actual females they know, via Facebook pictures.

All this according to an informal survey by the Daily Beast's Amanda Marcotte. True, Marcotte's evidence is thin and she might have been trying to gin up a trend story. But the idea that men get off on women to whom they "have a real-life attraction," as one man tells Marcotte, is basically the founding idea behind the social network. "It wasn't just that Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook founder] had put up pictures of hot girls ," writes Ben Mezrich in his book about the company's origins, "but [he] offered up pictures of girls whom the kids at Harvard knew, sometimes personally."

This sort of thing, which is just a variation on men ogling photographs, or holding on to old memories, is only creepy if you are made aware of it. Which is why it's great that Facebook has such an awesome handle on privacy. Ahem.