Wow, what a terrible article. The disingenuity is astounding.
>Pornography is fake.
True, but that's not why the analogy is used. Pornography is a visual media that conveys some of the pleasure of an act without the viewer actually going through the effort of doing it.
>Pornography's aim is to sexually excite the viewer. Are geeks sexually excited by the eBay data?…
>pleasure comes from many things that are non-sexual such as eating…
>So let's swap 'geek porn' for a 'geek feast'.
But why isn't "feast" defined symmetrically? A feast's aim is to gastronomically excite the user. Are geeks gastronomically excited by the eBay data?
The whole rant is semantic nonsense, defining words in a way that begs the question. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good rant. I just like my rants to make sense.
The real reason not to use the Porn Analogy is stuffed in the last paragraph: "Many people are uncomfortable with pornography and don't want pornography analogies in professional work."
It wasn't my intention when writing it to be disingenuous, but I do think there's validity in his/her criticism of the article. Not my finest blog post.
