Now men watch porn on the bus, can we sink any lower?
Acolleague of mine was travelling back from abroad a few weeks ago and no sooner had the plane touched down than the man in front of him powered up his mobile phone, connected to the internet and started to watch pornography.
My colleague was horrified — but it’s far from an isolated incident. I have since heard similar tales from women on buses, trains, the underground . . . you name it.
The very fact that more and more men feel no shame about viewing porn in public tells you all you need to know about how serious this issue has become.
The sad truth is that, for a certain group of men, viewing images and videos of a highly explicit adult nature is now so normal, so utterly unremarkable, that they feel they can do it wherever and whenever they please, without the slightest sense of embarrassment.
What used to be — quite rightly — an intensely private area of adult life is now just another form of entertainment. Bored with the BBc News website? let’s see what’s going on over on the pornoweb.
This week, a Parliamentary committee concluded that the problem is so widespread, it’s as much of a threat to public health as cigarettes. They’re wrong. It’s a worse threat.
cigarettes can cause cancer among those who choose to smoke. Porn has stunted the emotional and intellectual wellbeing of an entire generation.
Smoking can be anti-social. Porn has removed all established norms of sexual boundaries.
The evidence is all around us . . . the teenagers who think it’s normal to share sex texts; the young women who believe that any bodily hair is unnatural because it doesn’t exist in pornworld; the soaring number of men so desensitised to hardcore images that they cannot perform in the real world.
even Sainsbury’s this week announced the launch of a new line of budget sex toys.
When supermarkets are selling vibrators alongside the broccoli spears, it makes you almost nostalgic for the days of Playboy on the top shelf. Such innocence seems almost touching now.
The consequences are tragic. The
FORMER Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown warns that Nick Clegg is ‘risking his reputation’ by taking a job with Facebook. What reputation?
world of pornography is not, as many of its supporters attest, one in which women are free to explore their sexual fantasies, but overwhelmingly one where men indulge in the kind of behaviour most would find at best shocking and at worst criminal.
little wonder, then, that reports of sexual harassment are on the rise. For many young men, it is simply learned behaviour.
The time to act was more than a decade ago. as with all things concerning the internet — fake news, hate propaganda, data breaches — we have left it too late for the millions of people whose lives will be forever poisoned by the effluent that pours forth from their devices. THIS week’s committee report at least recognises the scale of the problem. But, in truth, there is a limit to what individual governments can do. The internet has no clear jurisdiction. even if MPs did vote to impose censorship, it would be almost impossible to enforce, since most of the material is streamed from abroad.
The only hope is that powerful organisations such as google, the social media giants and telecoms providers finally wake up to their responsibilities and simply refuse to help propagate the stuff — at least, not on mobile devices.
as with so much of modern life, it seems we are at their mercy.
I won’t hold my breath.