Sex sells. Sex confuses. Sex is the thread that keeps our lives together. If information needs to be free, or if information will set you free, then why isn't sex free. If it is truly the one thing that everyone has in common, then why are we treated as addicts? Each time we need a fix we have to shell out a few more bucks. Sex sells.

I searched the web for sites where sex, or the virtual version remains free. It cost me $9.95.

Adult Sights, Porno Pass and Validate are a few of the companies to come out of the alleged Internet Indecency Act. For a minimal fee you register at these sites for unlimited access to thousands of sites. According to the disclaimers at a few of the sites I visited these adult verification sites are there to protect everyone. While I am not endorsing allowing minors access to adult sites I find this practice disturbing. Not for its job of screening, but for the precedent it is setting. The future of web commerce lies this way. Like video before, pornography will lead the web down the thorny path of pay-as-you-go. It can not be too far off when you have to register with Netscape or Microsoft, pay their annual fee so that you can access sites that once were free. Viacom is already attempting to do that. It wants ISPs to pay it a minimal fee per subscriber. Viacom feels that its sites MTV is a premium web site. The reasoning goes that if you want it you will pay for it. If you don't you will be stuck with amateur sites.

There are no truly free adult sites on the web. Most of the sites that were registered with Adult Sights merely provided a few free preview photos. To see more you have to become a member of that site as well. There are a few sites that offer exclusively free photos. One free site is a section of a commercial site with links to celeb photos.

If you really want to masturbate then you are better off renting a video. Most of the sites are so packed with agonizingly huge files on their home pages that I was loathe to continue searching through the site. At Sexxpics, however, the JPEG files came up on screen fairly quickly. Even at 25K some servers appeared so backlogged that I was crawling at 16 bytes a second. I might as well have been downloading files from Moldavia.