2007 - year of porn.

2007 was, for me, the year I discovered internet porn. Well, I’d obviously seen some of the stuff before, but I had never actually, well, examined it. But I thought the time had definitely come, if you’ll excuse the pun, because my children are now at the age where they are becoming hardcore internet users. I want to see what they’re going to see before they do.

Be in no doubt: your children will see internet pornography. No filter in the world is going to stop young people looking at this stuff, and the more parents try to lock it off, the more attractive it will become to them. I can recall myself as a fourteen year old, with an insatiable appetite for anything that parents didn’t want me to see. There was simply no way that I would have been stopped.

The internet is saturated with pornography, and it’s estimated that four million people in Britain alone are addicted to it. I’m not sure how they define addiction, and I’m not sure how they calculate the numbers. But it has always been known in computer circles that the growth of the internet has largely been driven by pornography. It is everywhere. The sexual habits of professional footballers - with their roastings and bukkake (don’t ask) - have been conditioned by internet pornography.

Which means this: that our children are going to be taught about human sexual relationships by some very dodgy teachers - like Ass Traffic and Penisbot. I urge everyone to look at these sites without delay. For you will find something that I found incredible. That pornography on the internet is now largely free. There are credit card sites of course, and some where you can pay through your phone bill, but it doesn’t take much dexterity with a mouse to find loads of stuff that doesn’t cost anything at all. Mostly it is in the form of edited highlights of longer films. Bit like Match of the Day, where you see all the goals but none of the foreplay.

This means that internet porn is quite brutally graphic and obscene in a way you could not possibly believe unless you go and look at it. I’m not going to describe the activities, but gang bangs and anal sex seem to be regarded as the norm. The men are hugely muscled and improbably well endowed, while the women - increasingly - seem to be slim and small breasted. The days when pornography meant huge breasts appear to be long gone, like my youth.

Now, accepting that our children are all going to see this stuff, should we be concerned? Are we happy for children to think that it’s normal to ejaculate in a woman’s face? I am no prude, and I don’t believe in censorship. But this is a problem which has to be discussed.

I can’t understand why there isn’t more discussion of this issue. I suspect that parents are all in denial because there is no excuse for not knowing what is out there. Schools should start introducing sex education much earlier than at present, and it should be set in a context of ubiquitous pornography. Something has to be done to persuade children that this is not how adults are supposed to behave. And that mechanical sex is ultimately self-defeating.