Porn inflation - symptom of a society in decline

First appeared in the Evening Star, Ipswich, February 14, 2008

I'M hardly of the Taliban or Christian fundamentalist persuasions, but sometimes I can't help sharing their disgust at Western society.

I'm all for freedom and tolerance. But freedom, it seems to me, has to be enjoyed responsibly.

And I sometimes can't escape the sinking feeling that our society is rapidly declining into terminal decadence.

The common obsessions with trivia, shallow celebrity and consumer junk are all symptoms of this decline. The booming of credit and its inevitable consequence, mass debt, are others.

And then there is the galloping inflation of pornography.

Back in the supposedly permissive, swinging Sixties, people were arrested and jailed for dealing in images scarcely more offensive or revealing than you now see daily in several national newspapers.

When I was a teenager, the most fleeting glimpse of a woman's breast on television was an event to remember. How quaint that innocence seems now.

I'm not saying it would be a good thing to return to Victorian, or 1960s, values.

I'm not advocating driving porn back underground into the seedy dives of old Soho or persecuting sad old men in dirty raincoats.

But I would like to walk into my corner store without being assailed by glossy pics of young women flaunting their curves, by magazine covers promising some starlet's "sexiest photo-shoot yet".

And I would like to open up my email inbox one day and not be offered Viagra, a far-Eastern bride or a bodily enlargement.

After a while you get inured to this sort of thing, the routine click of the "delete" button quite automatic. But is it right that we should shrug it off so easily?

It is far, far too easy these days to stray online into areas of human contact much more intense than anything offered in the high street lads' mags.

The advice not to provide a credit-card number to any website offering sexy pics is still sound. But it will no longer protect you from graphic film of a kind that not too long ago would have been considered hard-core.

Recently a woman columnist on a respected national paper - the kind where page 3 is devoted to foreign or economic news - was enthusing about net porn.

In particular, she was keen to promote a site on which supposedly ordinary people post video of themselves engaged in various sexual activities.

This, she reckoned, was a good thing because it would show curious teenagers that sex can be enjoyed between people who don't have perfect, airbrushed bodies.

The argument is fair enough as far as it goes, I suppose. But it is not the whole story.

A few minutes on the site was enough to convince me not everyone shown was a willing participant. Some appear to be victims not just of coercion, but in some cases possibly of serious exploitation.

That I found far more disgusting than the endlessly repeated close-ups of squelchy bits, which is mostly merely tedious.

At least, that's how I found it. There has been some talk this week of the dangers of addiction to such viewing.

I don't doubt it can be habit-forming. Or that anyone with such a habit may end up wrecking their real-life relationships.

Possibly, in extreme cases, it may develop or encourage a twisted, voyeuristic view of humanity that makes them dangerous to others.

But to call the habit an addiction seems to me to be dangerous too. Because it implies something the user is suffering from, a habit they literally cannot break.

And that reveals another symptom - maybe the central symptom - of our society's decline.

The refusal to take responsibility for one's own actions.

"It's not my fault I smoke - it's an addiction." "It's not my fault I get violently drunk - it's an addiction." "It's not my fault I spend half my life gawping at porn - it's an addiction."

And as another slob's handy excuse is conveniently provided - "It's not my fault I'm fat, it's in my genes."

To all of which pathetic modern whines I'm inclined to answer with a couple of old-fashioned responses.

Grow up. Pull yourself together. Oh, and while you're at it - get a life.