Ah, what a strange and irritating journey it has been. I was wondering how long the folks at craigslist were going to do the Internet equivalent of sitting in the corner and pouting. Those of you who frequent the site might have noticed that, at least on United States pages, the highly contentious Adult Services section was blocked out with a big, old-fashioned CENSORED label. As of today, that item is gone and it seems to have taken AS with it.

I've been a pretty vocal opponent of the existence of Adult Services/Erotic Services for a while now. This hasn't been out of some puritanical hatred of sex, though. I just didn't like the precedent it set. While I think the extent to which law can be reasonably applied to things on the Internet is still very much up for debate, there was no ambiguity about how ES/AS was breaking the law. It was a page that consisted of little else than ads for prostitutes. Just like craigslist shouldn't have pages dedicated to assassins, smugglers, thieves and fake ID producers, it shouldn't have a page reserved for those who exchange sex for money. Even if the prohibition of prostitution in most of America comes with its own set of problems and really ought to be reevaluated, the law is still the law. The Internet ought not to be the medium leading the charge on that debate.

In retrospect, I feel a little bad for Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster in regard to how the AS thing played out. Like so many things on craigslist, that particular section was perverted by its users away from its original purpose. There are plenty of law-abiding services that could be classified as "Erotic" or "Adult", like stripping, belly dancing and sex workshop classes. Perhaps those were the things originally intended to appear in the ES section before the ugliness of anonymous people on the Internet took over. Newmark and Buckmaster tried. I genuinely believe they tried. They just have a little too much faith in those who use their website.

I can't help but feel like the CENSORED thing was some kind of impotent protest. They could have been so much more mature and respectable about the end of AS in America. It was, after all, still an executive decision to close the page, not a governmental order. The letter sent to craigslist by those 18 Attorneys General was a request and nothing more. The site wasn't being threatened, it was being coaxed into doing the socially responsible thing. It remains to be seen whether or not Jim Buckmaster will write another long, quasi-academic essay about the state of craigslist, one that will possibly explain why he and Newmark came to the decision to close AS. For now, the only communique we have is the memory a cartoonish label that was probably supposed to serve as some kind of cutting satirical commentary.

In the end, craigslist won't be changing that much. There are still plenty of ways for people to get involved in ill-advised sexual encounters there. Like the ultimate dive bar, the Personals pages still wave in the wind, banners of human loneliness in the great, desolate expanse of the Internet. It's still legal in America to have disgusting, humiliating, dangerous sex with strangers. May this remain forever true.