The scourge of porn
A judge friend of mine tells me the bar is awash with stuff about the Bulger murderer Jon Venables. The ‘stuff’ relates to what has been alleged in the Sun newspaper – that the re-identified Venables is back in jail for accessing level four child pornography.
The suggestion that this may be the case – on a day when a known sex registered paedophile is revealed to have groomed and lured a teenaged girl to an encounter which he ended with her murder – is a desperate development.
Child porn has never been more widely available. The internet is riddled with it, not least because the leads from adult hard porn run, even with complexity, to those dark corners of cyber space where this stuff resides. Still one of the most successfully monetised elements of the net remains porn. It has proved a more than a by-product of the web – according to Scotland Yard, it is a major driver of its development.
The question therefore is what effect this mass spillage of porn, soft, hard, child and even bestial, is having upon the development of humankind.
When I was a teenager in the late 1960’s the only access to what we then thought of as porn was Playboy Magazine. Today mere nudity would never make the grade in such classification. Yet I well remember the thrill we got from ‘accessing’ Playboy’s centrefold.
The thought that I might ever, at that age, have been so easily able to download far more explicit material worries the hell out of me – and I regard myself as someone who grew up in relatively balanced and secure circumstance.
The thought of what effect hard porn, let alone child porn (which I am told you can still access relatively easily provided you have a strong enough drive to do so), fills me with genuine dread.
Imagine then if you are a reconstructed individual who murdered a child when a child himself. Whatever, therapy, guidance, even punishment, you have been exposed to, it would seem to me that you would be vulnerable to this sort of internet ‘opportunity’.
Worse still, for so much money to have been made on the web world-wide, so many stills, videos and the rest to have been downloaded – millions and millions of hours – there surely must be a reality that otherwise mainstream individuals who fifty years ago would never have seen such stuff are now doing so.
That means parents, teachers, journalists, even lawyers (by the very law of averages) in some percentage, will have been exposed to hard porn at points in their lives.
What does it do to their judgement, their behaviour even? Is it injurious?
If it is, and I believe it is, what is it doing to society world-wide?
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There are 30 comments on this post
Using your argument Jon , the sex that goes on between consenting adults could also be injurious to the human mind.For some such sex could be classed as porn .Is it only injurious if published and seen by a wider audience? Does it make men (in particular) become predators and females to a lesser degree.Can therefore adultery be classed as porn?.What is clearly a danger to the mind and society is certain individuals obsession with child sex and bestiality.Is not the human mind capable of differentiating from right or wrong.You yourself admit to reporting on several war zones .Has that affected you to becoming a killer?
If as reported Venables has committed sexual offences he has waived his rights to anominity.If he hasn’t where is the right to name alleged rapists before they are found guilty? Where is the right to keep DNA of an innocent person ?Shouldn’t DNA only be taken after conviction?
I think porn, as strange as it sounds, can be a learning device if accessed at the right age. In your mid teens when you’re of the maturity that you can think for yourself you can realise the wrongs that porn promotes and learn from it. I don’t know a guy who hasn’t watched porn, yet we’re all right minded people.
It’s when seeing porn at too early an age that a child/youth is likely to see such acts as acceptable, and it’s this that needs to be addressed.
The big problem is how to stop porn. Censorship defeats the ideal of the web being a place of unparalleled freedoms.
It falls on the parents to educate their child about sex early on and beat the taboo aspect of it. If they can do that then when it comes to later discussions about porn, or sex, the child is in a position of trusting parental advice.
This is what the internet is; a freedom never before known, and we can’t handle it yet. We’ll get there, but if it’s not quick we’ll just see more cases of social network related abuse or murder and cases of child porn. We must adapt.
I share your concern, on several levels. People can almost accidentally access things that 20 years ago would have required significant risk and “contacts”. People who may never have discovered a fascination for the extremes of porn. Which then leads to a spiralling of supply and demand, with more and more victims. But also – the law is criminalising more and more individuals on the basis of possession – with no real acknowledgement that there are more reasons why people look at things than being irreversably perverted. People rubber-necking at car crashes, the historic craze for freak shows, Kids turning to swear words and sexual words in foreign dictionaries. The modern equivalent is looking for the disgusting and freakish on the internet. And suddenly people are branded, on the sex offenders register, and given no chance of clearing their name and living a normal life despite never doing wrong again. License conditions are perverse and sometimes harder to not break than to break. And in the middle the real criminals are hidden and still abusing children but insufficient resources are put into catching them.
To me pornography and the internet are natural bed fellows because they can be disconnects from human interaction and empathy. People feel able to be abusive, whether it is ranting blogs at its mildest to looking at hard core porn at its worst, without seeing the victim as real.
At school the young (particularly males) need educating on the background and abuse the people in these images have often suffered. Hopefully then a natural decency takes over before it warps their sexuality and humanity for life.l
A senior marketing executive at a very large IT firm once told me that they had developed DVD technology as a direct response to pornography market – users didn’t want to ruin their tapes with freezeframe
Today its a fact that many of the world’s most visited websites are aggregators of pornographic video content, who make moneyby pubicising specialised content on other sites and garnering subs sales. In the normal world its called affiliate marketing.
A whole generation has grown up accessing this free content under their unknowing parents noses; many are taking their cues on sexual relationships from video showing sex as either a submissive or an adversarial act. Femininst it is not.
Does this impact on our culture? At the risk of being called a typical British prude, I’d say yes, and to our detriment.
The most damaging effect of porno material is that people will tend to have unsatisfying _acutal_sex lives due to expectations (re-enforce in there early teens years in bedrooms). Prono actors and films are generally a disservice to women and men alike, but is no more harmful than all the over hyper-real portrayals of peoples lives that everyone sees in films/tv. For example, ‘State of Play’ will have been a big influence on a generation of teenagers watching in the mid 90s, and many maybe disappointed that _actual_ print journalism fails to meet expectations.
Of course human sexuality is a powerful drive and is not something to meddle with casually, but thankfully the adult population is getting more comfortable with talking about the (often humorous) reality. As Liam mentioned, education on what sex and sexuality is really about is the only way to ensure healthy and well adjusted adults.
Blocking porno doesn’t work so well online and certainly won’t stop any bootlegging. Besides, pornography provides a legal alternative for lonely business travelers on the road from those the love.
War on pornography?
It’s funny how many wars there actually are..
There is the war on terror, on drugs, on crime plus at least a few other’s that don’t spring to mind. The funny thing is, that I know for a fact that there are no wars being fought against famine, against thirst, against lack of mediacal care, against homelessness.. why? no profit!
I am all for a strong opposition against pornograpghy which would lead to tackling other grotesque crimes which go hand in hand…
adzmundo CND
adzmundo CND
I totally agree with you. Porn is almost forced onto people who use the web. On twitter there were two followers, who I had by no means allowed to access my twitter site but nevertheless, I found had designated themselves as my followers. It was difficult to eradicate them and in fact, I had to tweet them to let the site know that I detested porn and they were not welcome.
Whilst this young man ,who I feel so sorry for, is being investigated surely the public must leave him alone. Jurisprudence has it that a person is innocent until found guilty.
It doesn’t detract from the severity of his initial crime which he committed when young, with who knows what influences and if I was James Bulgers relative I would want to wipe him off the face of the earth myself. But that is what the law is for; so that revenge isn’t wreaked from the heightened emotion one must feel when such dreadful and tragic occurences dislocate family bonds in such a cruel and mencaing way.
I would have thought that one of the easiest ways to stem the access to Internet porn would be to give adult sites their own dominion name. Surely that makes it easier for parental controls to block? But for some reason, that has never been adequately explained, this was blocked years ago. Although they do seem to be looking at it again.
One other issue that seems to be raised, particularly since the tragic murder of the young girl who’s murderer was using a false ID on face book, is the monitoring of social networking sites. The point that keeps being raised is that a lot of children, not only have computers in their bedrooms but have Internet access. And that parents just don’t know what their children are up to online. Not just as victims but also as perpetrators of things like cyber-bulling. Sorry, but that’s ridiculous. It’s on par to the parents who don’t know what their children are up to when they’re out at 1am engaging in various anti-social activities and is another example of parents refusing to take responsiblity for what their children are doing.
You’re right about the specific porn domain – it would do a huge amount to help parents control access. If this sort of content were all in one ‘place’, ISPs and router manufacturers would be able to offer blocking. Alternatively a list of sites the home internet has accessed in the last month would make a fantastic addition to my bill.
Thi suggests porn may reduce sex crimes
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/
Thats an interesting article – hopefully was read by all . I thought this bit highly significant ” What does correlate highly with sex offense is a strict, repressive religious upbringing.”. Until 1169 in Ireland anyway the priests and nuns could marry . The son of the priest would be the next priest very often , son of the blacksmith the next blacksmit – thats how society worked a great deal back then .- Then along came our Norman frinds – with a ” Bull” from the Pope – and one of their aims was to put a stop to all this – which they did . Now here where I live and in ROI in genral we have virtually innumerable cases of child sexual abuse by the clergy – and often as not they get away scot free- with an apology . The final insult came last week – when the locall bishop asked the people to PAY for any damages the ctholic church might have to cough up id some of these cases went to court . Some neck . Even the local paper took him to task . Re the question in genral . It is unnatural 2 subjugate ones normal sex drive
The Scientist: Porn: Good for us? – The Scientist – Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/#ixzz0hnTcvmT1
I think there should be a distinction between child porn , bestiality etc – and ordinary hard core porn – which was not made in the title to the blog .I agre that there should be some means of control for parents etc for U18s .Before I retired – I used be at an agric. collegege for meetings etc – and when we switched on our comouters for the day – we found that the students [ over 18s ] had made many porn sites their favs . Also some /many of staff of one of reserch stations spent much time watching porn- so Mangement did at least one good thing – they put a filetr to stop all that . I have visted Holland many times as student and as a worker – I dont see any great negative effect on the population in that country where porn is readily avaailble . What I would like to do is – Go up to Dublin – set up a large screen in OConnell St – and for say an hour show war atrocities , famine , etc – then after 1 hour switch to showing sex films with over 18 actors etc . Bet I would not be at that too long B4 the ”moral ” crowd said I was corrupting people – but there would be IMO no problem from them re the war atrocity films .
To continue if I may – waht is about sex that drives the hypocrites nuts – its ok to bomb , kill , etc – Few real complits are heard – but the mentions of sex – especilly Porn drives many religous berserk . some say it is degrading to women etc – why – there are male actors as well , and if its as degrading than waht some workers have to put up with from their bosses then it would be bad . I think the problem lies in sex education – and we saw what happened the bill re that a few weeks ago . Can u imagine the type of sex education a Roman catholic school would give – they are even against contrception . I am sick of the double standard once again – war atrocities by whoever are ok – but sex films are not ??. Sex is there to be enjoyed – porn serves a purpose – but yes – obviuosly there should be some rules about it .
What a bizarre argument! Porn must be good because it drives religious people berserk! If you’re not in favour of porn, you’re secretly in favour of war atrocities!
I did not say that porn must be good becuse it very often drives the ” moral ” religous berserk . i merely stated that it does[ bring them out in ''moral ''indignation] – how u came to your conclusions is beyond me .
That ‘porn’ is the primary driver of the internet’s growth is merely repeating history. Much classical art was nothing more than the pornography of its era and, later, the rapid development of printing-presses, whilst publicly reported as being for religious tracts, was in fact based on far more salacious material.
And do you really think all those local camera clubs, churning our 8mm home movies were motivated by anything other than their ability to create the cheeky ?
More recently, the take-off of domestic VHS video-players back in the 1970s owed its speed of adoption to the in-house porn-swaps which grew up in virtually every workplace – in fact, VHS defeated the Betamax format mainly due to the greater range of porn available on the former.
Because pornogaphy, however we choose to define it at the time, will always enjoy an enthusiastic audience and, rather like the Disney film scheduling, it refreshes itself with each succeeding generation, every new form of media will continue to owe its baseload usage to those consumers of the less-delicate material.
This is not a defence of pornography but a simple recognition of the way the world works. Get over it.
Let’s get real here. ‘Sex sells’ is the old adage. It’s true, it does..unfortunately. The sad fact is that, human nature has, within its ranks, a seedy side of perverted people. These people are everywhere. From government Ministers, the Judiciary, to school teachers and relatives.
The best advice that I’d give anyone with children is: ‘DO NOT TRUST ANYONE’. My sister worked on child protection for a number of years and, she advised me to always keep a very very close eye on people perving on my daughters. She was absolutely right with this advice too. One of my 2 daughters is fortunate to be very pretty. Believe me, when I took her out even at the age of 11, she was looked at in sexual ways by many men of all ages.
She’s now 21 and still gets the same perverted eyes but, has been getting the sly touchings of her bottom & breast rub-pasts, etc.
My advice to deal with those dishing out porn to under 16s is: ‘give ‘em a public flogging’ and a chemical castration.
One element of these tragic cases is loneliness. I believe that a young person must be very lonely to want to go out to meet a stranger, or even to spend hours on internet sites. It was two neglected and lonely boys who got involved with James Bulger; nobody cared that they weren’t in school and the video shows that after they had spoken to James, they turned away from him and he ran after them. Poor little bewildered toddler, left to stand by himself by his, now so vengeful, mother. It is hard to know the truth of what has happened to Jon Venables, but the rumours imply loneliness, fixation on the internet, and employment in an entirely unsuitable job. Giving away information about his own crime, to me, suggests despair and self-disgust. I refuse to see this troubled man as evil.
Regarding the influence of porn on young people, I feel sure that it is pernicious. I’ve read that young men now find pubic hair unacceptable in their girlfriends, yet to remove pubic hair from a developed body immediately makes it look childlike. There is no doubt that constant exposure to certain types of image has a desensitising effect, whether it is violence or explicit sex. Unfortunately, the rise of celebrity raunch culture, as imaged by people like Jordan, and its representation as a form of feminine power, has encouraged the normalisation of pornographic imagery so that we hear that teenage girls now think it appropriate to send sexual images of themselves to their boyfriends and even to represent themselves casually as sex objects. I think it’s rotten for the boys, as well as the girls. They are missing so much that is tender and beautiful in life.
I have to disagree. I believe that the more moderate kind of porn is a healthy and positive thing. I have worked on the fringes of (mainly) the gay adult industry for years and the uncomfortable truth is that some of the people involved (both male and female) are some of the nicest I’ve met.
As with any sector there are ugly extremes and illegal operations. However there is a huge core of adult businesses which do everything they can to operate within the law and the last thing they want is under 18s looking at their content. Some are parents themselves. But often the entire adult industry is demonised because it suits political purposes.
Don’t believe the hype. What with rampant illegal filesharing, decline of DVD sales and ten years of punitive legislation from the Bush administration (almost never used and effectively just an attack on the most law-abiding businesses) and now the economic situation, many of the more responsible companies are facing difficulties.
Incidentally, adult companies nearly always pay promptly and on time. Late payment and being ripped off was a major issue when I worked in mainstream publishing and a major reason for me giving up on it.
In a free market delusion of civilized intentions the market is really a slave contractually defined system of limited opportunities to the civilized foundations of human autonomy. Ownership as been stolen and confined to a coffin we all share.
The centre of all things equal is the whole; the deformation of the whole is a broken mirror. The reflection in the mirror is just a fraction of an image we cannot penetrate the significance of, since the reflection is just a mask.
We all wear masks in an endless graveyard seeking truth.
If we share the mirror of reason the whole mirror will become transparent to future relativity in human concepts of equality and sustain life to a higher evolution of civilized credibility.
Significance is not defined within the reflection of your own mirror, but, within the quality in equality of the whole, since, the whole is a reflection of self.
The visible and invisible qualities of order are what distinguish the quality of existence as a common known quality to the meaning of equality in life.
Wealth is a contrived meaning that disrupts the social translation of transparency, eliminating responsibility for ownership.
The bright side may be that, whereas in the ‘old days’ peasant and court communities may have accepted things as ‘just the way it is’ (apparently it was quite routine for widowers to etc with daughters and we all know of kings who married 13-year olds) society is nowhere near as tolerant of this sort of thing.
As for adult-with-adult porn, you only have to go to Pompeii to see all-sorts-of-Antiquarian-hardcore being sold as souvenirs next to rosaries.
Question: is pornography fantasy or is it a fantastically-abstracted condensing of what actually happens among everyday people in everyday life, and if so, is criticism appropriate? It’s a puzzler unless, of course, any coercion was involved – that’s a total tut-tut.
if coercion is involved its more than a tut – tut [ how very PITA ] – its a matter for the law to step in . Tut – tut my a##.
It was too facetious. Apologies to everyone.
To those people who think porn having its own domain (possibly .xxx) is a good idea…
Who will decide what is ‘adult’ bearing in mind that some Americans think a bare breast is ‘obscene’? Will companies be forced to use this special domain? If not then why would any company give up perhaps 15 years of building up a certain .com domain name which will be listed on all its products? If they will be forced, will there be compensation for companies that have paid a million Dollars for a great .com? How many legal cases will there be? How will this be enforced seeing as the US and Britain don’t control the whole of the internet? What will happen to all the pre-existing porn-related domain names – who will own them and renew them each year? What about countries that say no as some surely will? In which case porn will still be available on say .co.uk and numerous others, defeating the whole point.
In fact this whole suggestion is nothing more than commercial opportunism that is designed to fleece adult companies a lot of money (.xxx won’t cost $9 like a .com) and it will only be those that are the most law-abiding already that will sign up to it.
By the bare breast, I assume you are referring to the Janet Jackson ‘wardrobe malfunction’? The US has a clear definition of adult content, as do we, in the R18 certificate. Yes, porn would be forced onto an XXX domain, but this won’t be disruptive because a URL redirect is technically very simple and does not involve cost. Also, online porn sales are based on a subscription model using monthly credit card payments (of the sort that Pete Townshend denied making). Porn companies would not lose business, though they might lose a few future customers currently too young to have a credit card who stumble across their content. Is that what building up a brand for 15 years means?
As for fleecing adult companies, I don’t think so, and as another poster has already pointed out, these companies are already facing a very uncertain future: porno DVD sales have been hit by the same things that are damaging music sales. Indeed we should worry about them being driven to extremes of specialist content to stay profitable. Even more reason for them to be on .xxx and easily blocked by non tech-savvy parents. That isn’t an attempt to end free speech on the net. Its just common sense.
Tom as I mentioned plenty of porn would still be available on various country-specific domains in places that didn’t sign up to this. So the whole exercise would be pointless. On the subject of cost, I saw a figure for how much a .xxx domain would cost and it was much more than a standard .com. Some companies own hundreds of domain names. As I said, this is a money-making exercise for the people behind .xxx.
Subscription is just one technique used. There are also free to access sites and YouTube clones which make money promoting products to buy, video on demand services and yes membership sites elsewhere.
Already responsible adult sites put the meta name=”RATING” tag in the header of their pages which means they are blocked to anyone who has chosen to do so. The fact is most people don’t bother. So why would they chose to block a .xxx domain? In other words already there is a perfectly good system for blocking.
Maybe when people sign up for broadband they should be asked if they would like pages that have this tag to be blocked by the ISP? The option could be ticked already. Let’s see how many parents untick that option because they want to surf porn!
I think they’re some really good points. Unfortunately I don’t see the internet losing pornography any time soon, if ever – how could it if it’s the true superpower is it?
I think the point we’re coming back to time and time again is education; schools and parents teaching their children the rights, wrongs and (almost literal) in’s and out’s.
It’s not just children though. The earlier mention of pervy older men iterates the point that they need education too. It’s not right that their conduct should be how it is, but they weren’t privvy to the same education the recent generations have had.
If we know the problem we should find a solution.
the (pro-)creative urge is by definition the driver of all civilisation, so it is an empty question to ask what exposure to and expression of this instinct will do to individuals and society – it is only a means for diverting attention from ones own predelictions and failures, not any way to find resolution and no proper basis on which to formulate policy!
far more effective is to ask why individuals in any case are accessing particular types of dissociating material and dig down to the root of the identified problem.
In this case possession of level 4 pornography by a notorious murderer may be abhorrent, but it is another symptom of similar unresolved issues – the chain of events clearly indicate it wasn’t the cause.
Just trust professional journalists to perpetuate a navel-gazing industry on gossipy questions which lead only to self-righteous moral judgement!
This post is connect-the-dots sensationalism – I can’t believe you’re considered serious!