Porn panic!

Fear over online pornography is leading anti-porn campaigners into irrational, knee-jerk responses. Are we hurtling toward a future where the only thing left to masturbate to is the Daily Mail?

Breasts were invented in 1994, as part of an early online advertising campaign for Viagra. Since then their popularity has exploded, and now breasts – or ‘boobs’ as our drug-addled youth have taken to calling them – inhabit almost every corner of the interwebs. But breasts are dangerous: they can lead to suffocation or blindness. Are there too many breasts on the internet, and what disturbing effects can breasts have on young children?

As an infant, I was exposed to breasts almost every single day. Thirty years later, breasts have taken over my life. Not a day goes by without some stray breast seeping into my consciousness. Occasionally I catch myself glancing at the breasts of my female friends, and I habitually pour milk all over my cornflakes. Worse, breasts have served as a gateway drug for vaginas.

I used to think I was alone, but extensive new research in the form of almost three anecdotes published by the Daily Mail – a seedy gossip website specializing in celebrity erotica, catering to men too old to buy Nuts and too married to run up hard-to-explain credit card charges on proper porn – has revealed the devastating impact that breasts have been having on other young children.

Each tragic case of boob trauma follows the same remarkable pattern. An ordinary little boy approaching his teenage years suddenly starts to change his behaviour: becoming withdrawn and moody and mysteriously growing about six inches in height. Detailed investigation of the child’s browser history reveals that the cause is not the rough patch the parents have been going through, a recent change of schools, or puberty; but an addiction to online porn.

The statistics are shocking. According to the Mail, “four out of five 16-year-old boys and girls regularly view pornography.” People who are only just old enough to consent to actual sex are allowed to watch it on screen. Parents are helpless to prevent their children viewing pornography on the computers they allow them to keep in their bedrooms at night. It’s the kind of massive and complex problem that only a newspaper campaign can tackle.

Snarking aside, the sheer volume of sexual content we’re exposed to is something we should be aware of, and its affect on children – and society in general – is worth investigating. The problem with the Mail’s campaign is that it is built on a combination of pig-headed ignorance and breath-taking hypocrisy.

The Daily Mail makes money from posting pictures of scantily-clad women on the internet. Sometimes these women are topless. Sometimes they are completely naked. Often the images are captioned with breathy descriptions of ‘cleavage’, ‘dangerous curves’, ‘thigh-skimming’ dresses. Sometimes the images are of disturbingly young girls, accompanied with phrases like the infamous “all grown up.”

If Paul Dacre were serious about tackling smut on the internet, he would start by firing his online editor and leading a clean-up of his own ‘smut’-laden website. The fact that he doesn’t speaks volumes about the campaign’s sincerity.

Leaving all that aside for the moment, would blocking online porn work? The idea relies on three assumptions: that we can define porn, that we can block it, and that doing so would somehow save children from harm. Three simple threads, tangled in a knotty mess.

ISPs are defending consumers when they oppose the government regulation of internet content. The Daily Mail’s suggestion that 66% of the public back their campaign for a system “under which access is blocked unless adults specifically say they want to see sexual content” is, to use the statistical term, bullshit. In the YouGov poll cited, only 36% of people backed the Mail’s notion that “people’s internet service should be filtered unless they ask for it not to be.” (The 66% figure actually just refers to the number of people who think ISPs should provide an option to people who want to block porn.)

As a customer I can think of at least five major problems with the scheme: I’d like to be able to view porn without having to sign up to a register of porn users; I don’t really believe that it’s the state’s job to decide which sexual practices are moral or immoral; internet filters inevitably block other sites too; and I don’t want to pay the higher charges that would be needed to pay for any decent filtering. I’m not willing to sacrifice this for a system that would take the average teen about ten seconds to circumvent, especially when simple solutions for parents – FamilyShield for example – already exist.

What are we trying to stop anyway, and why? The American judge, Potter Stewart, famously remarked of porn, “I know it when I see it.” Fair enough, but do children know when they see it? The Daily Mail might reasonably argue that the topless shots of Madonna they published are art rather than pornography, but does that make any difference to a child? Do the boobs do the damage, or are children more or less affected by boobs in certain contexts?

What about vaginas, or penises? Teenage children have these things so presumably aren’t particularly traumatized by just seeing them. Is it the insertion of the penis into the vagina that causes the harm, or is it the love and care with which the insertion occurs? What about sexualization in wider society – are children harmed by an image of a glamour model showing her cleavage, or are they harmed by the lack of diversity of images, in a mainstream media which relentlessly bombards young girls with a particular idea of what a woman should grow up to be? Can porn even do good?

Plain ‘vanilla’ sex has always seemed pretty boring to me: a man getting on top of a woman, poking his blood-engorged penis into the acidic environment of her vagina, and then moving his hips up and down. “Ooh,” says the woman, “ahh,” says the man; and they repeat, “ooh,” “ahh,” “ooh,” “ahh,” until one of them utters a blasphemy and the other one ejaculates the biological equivalent of a time bomb and falls asleep.

Sex remained like this for billions of years, until Meg Ryan invented the orgasm; a simple scoring system for unimaginative dullards which was swiftly adopted by the mainstream media as the ISO metric for sexual prowess. Now, sexual pleasure can be measured mathematically, as a function of the quantity of orgasms delivered and received. Because orgasms are the only point of sex, in much the same way that check-mating your opponent is the only point of playing chess.

Then the internet happened. The availability, cheapness and ease-of-use of modern video cameras, editing systems and online distribution systems has led to something like the Cambrian Explosion in porn. Amateur clip sites list categories from adult diaper to zit squeezing via niches such as belly punching, crutches, doll fetish, ear fetish, futanari, giantess, human ashtray, inflatables, jumping, knee-jobs, leg-jobs, machinima, nylon encasement, one shoe hopping, prostate-massage, robot porn, spitting, trampling, underwater, vintage, wax play, and yawning. If you can imagine it, someone has made a porn video about it; and I can think of no more glorious demonstration of human creativity.

I have a healthy range of fetishes, one of which is so unusual that I’ve never met anyone in ‘real life’ who shares it. Growing up with that sort of ‘dirty secret’ can be a lonely experience; but finding a whole sub-community of dedicated porn-makers who not only shared my kink, but actively celebrated it and acted out the same fantasies, helped me to realize I wasn’t some twisted freak. At least not for that reason. If porn can help kids realize that their urges are natural and healthy, that’s not a bad thing in my book.

The diversity of adult entertainment is so great that just talking about ‘porn’ as if it’s one big pink throbbing homogeneous mass is profoundly ignorant, whether its the subject of a campaign or a research question. For example, A paper by Michael Flood suggests “exposure to pornography helps to sustain young people’s adherence to sexist and unhealthy notions of sex and relationships,” but would we see the same impact from Maggie Mayhem’s feminist porn that we would from Playboy?

Lumping the two together is like trying ask, “do video games make people violent,” without bothering to differentiate between the Grand Theft Auto series and Pacman. It undermines research, but more seriously it can lead people to tackle the wrong problem. It could well be true, for example, that the majority of porn reinforces misogynistic attitudes, and that this could damage young children as a result; but if that’s the case then the problem is misogyny, not pornography, and it needs to be tackled wherever it appears, not just in the adult entertainment industry.

Are all degrading depictions of women a problem, or just the ones where they’re naked? Are kids more damaged by women who appear as little more than sex objects in porn films, or by the obsession newspapers and magazines have with bullying celebrities over minute changes in their weight? Is sex the only problem, or should we be equally concerned about violence, or newspapers gratuitously publishing pictures of dead bodies?

Thank God we don’t need to tackle these difficult research questions. Thank God we can just impose a simple brute-force solution on one arbitrary subsection of the media that we don’t like, and pretend the problems have all gone away. Thank God for the state’s wisdom in matters of obscenity. Thank God for our moral guardians. And thank God for the Daily Mail; in the future, it could be all that’s left to masturbate to.

The Gaurdian