This kind of image is so common in the newgroups (and in realcore websites) that I’ll devote a chapter to it in my book. The top left image belongs to the “recontextualized images” family; it obviously comes from an hardware website. Among the most popular involuntary porno sources online there are clothing catalogs, celebrity forums and of course school pages. The image below could either have been made for the website (probably an older men pictures forum), or stolen from someone’s page (“my grandpa, the very best in the world!”). I found it in the oldermen Usenet NG; differently from the pornography the world has seen so far, this genre isn’t obviously sexual. It’s porn in the eye of the beholder. And it implies an interesting idea: that no one is out of the loop, and most people have a sexy side to them – wether they realize it or not.
So, next time someone takes a picture of you (or stares on the bus), make a mental note of the position of your belly, your shoe type or the amount of hair on your forearms. Any of these details, meaningless to most, can be irresistible to some.
