We need to talk about porn

Idon’t envy those of you raising teenagers. What a complex world of sexual liberation, stuffiness, rampant sexualisation and new boundaries being drawn every day that you have to guide them through. I can see why plenty of teenagers are opting out of sex altogether.

This week we had a report – NZ Youth and Porn – from the Office of Film and Literature Classification, which surveyed more than 2000 teens aged between 14 and 17.

The report said more than two-thirds had been exposed to pornography. This doesn’t surprise me and if you’d asked teenage boys the same question back when I was in knee-high socks I’d have expected a greater proportion.

What I think is different is the type of pornography itself – it’s hardcore. And there it is in the report: of those who accessed porn, more than 70 per cent saw things that made them uncomfortable.

Now, having had no experience living as a teenage girl I can’t possible comment on these creatures. But I did spend a few years as a teenage boy and I like to think I understand the mind of these greasy, hormonal creatures.

At my high school there was a guy known as P.K. (the Porn King), who ran a pornography racket, trading magazines and dubbed videos for all sorts of wonderful treasures that other boys were willing to steal from their parents in order to get a tatty old stick mag.

Looking back – and this isn’t so long ago – the pornography was positively genteel. These days all you need to do is Google ‘‘porn’’ and you’ll be bombarded.

At least in the olden days, boys had access to porn limited by the potentially mortifying experience of having to buy a magazine from the dairy.

Nowadays everyone seems to be looking at the stuff. It’s not just dirty old men in raincoats with pockets full of sweeties. It’s me. It’s you. It’s your friend and their dad and the guy from the shops.

Pornography will continue to be a part of young people’s sex lives. And if all we do is ignore the topic and pretend it’s not influencing our sex lives then we’re as deluded as the people that dream up porn’s fantastical plot lines.

My generation had Penthouse. Those before had Playboy. Before that, those blurry porno postcards of the Victorian era. ‘‘Show me those ankles baby.’’

Before that, pervy old artists were painting women in the nude for toffs to get their jollies to.

And way back when Adam was a cowboy, the dirty old Greeks were making some seriously homoerotic statues which must have been the pornography of the day.

I don’t doubt that after a hand, some humans and a woolly mammoth, the next thing a caveman scratched on the walls of his cave was a smutty picture of cave people engaged in coitus.

It’s always been there. Now it’s just more explicit.

We’re just not talking about it. Stop selfrighteously lecturing kids that porn equals misogyny and include some real discussion about healthy use of the stuff.

We need to explain that porn isn’t real, that it represents real sex about as much as video games represent real-life combat.

But if so many people are accessing porn and society hasn’t collapsed, then perhaps we need to be more open about our use. Or are there a bunch of journos still pretending to their partners that they don’t partake?

Kids, it’s normal. It can be perfectly healthy. It can even be part of a balanced sex life. Mistaking porn for reality, and not porn itself, is the problem.

For discussion . . .