Emma: How porn is harming the young
DAME Emma Thompson has claimed young people have expectations of sex which ‘can be very disturbing indeed’.
The actress, 63, was speaking ahead of the premiere of her new film Good Luck To You, Leo Grande in London last night.
She plays a widowed teacher who hires a male escort in the hope of experiencing sexual fulfilment that was missing from her marriage.
The oscar-winning actress beamed as wore a smart white suit to the premiere.
Earlier, she spoke about ‘easy access to porn’ and pressure on girls. Dame Emma said: ‘I think some things are worse [than they used to be] when I hear stories in schools about boys and what they expect from girls – and I mean... the easy access to porn.
‘If you talk to young people about their sexual knowledge and what they expect and what they think sex is, it can be very disturbing indeed. I think it can interfere with their sexual development because it’s all been taken away, industrialised and fed back to them in a completely indigestible form.’
The star also said she thinks the sexual revolution is a ‘very complex issue’. She told Sky News: ‘It’s not like we had that and then everything was better.
‘It’s never like that in human experience. We take a step forward and then we tie ourselves into weird knots because the fact of the matter is we have no respect at all for our sexual desires.
‘We ridicule them. We make them the butt of our jokes. We don’t respect what our desires are. and... when they’re odd – which they often are – we find them shameful and ridiculous.’
In the new film the character played by Dame Emma, who won a best actress oscar for 1992 movie Howards End, stands naked in front of a mirror – but she previously admitted it was not something she could do herself. She said she had an ‘utter incapacity to accept my body as it is’.