Pornography used to be a private vice but now is brazenly watched in public with 92billion views on Pornhub — so why don’t we do something?
With 12.5 videos for everyone on Earth, the internet has stopped pornography from being a private vice
PORNOGRAPHY used to be a private vice.
It was something that belonged to seedy cinema screens, the top shelves of newsagents and giggling, guilty schoolboys.
Now, thanks to the internet, it is all around us.
No longer a secret source of shame, pornographic imagery is brazenly viewed in public, even on buses and trains.
And its growing presence is already having dire consequences for our society.
Fuelled by online and mobile technology, the explosion in porn over recent years has been phenomenal.
According to a recent study, up to 70 per cent of British men and between 30 and 40 per cent of women view such material at least once a year, while 13 per cent of men admit to looking at porn two or three times a week.
In 2016, the analytics of a report of just one website, Pornhub, revealed that it had no fewer than 64million daily visitors and its videos were watched an incredible 92billion times in the previous year.
That works out at 12.5 videos for every person on the planet.
Given such popularity, it is little wonder that the online porn sector is estimated to be worth £11.5billion globally.
But the accelerating normalisation of pornography should be a cause for alarm, as some of our MPs have recognised.
This week the Commons Select Committee on Women and Equalities, chaired by former Cabinet Minister Maria Miller, issued a damning report which argued that pornography should be treated as a serious health problem, like smoking or reckless driving.
Pointing to the role that porn plays in the degradation and harassment of women, the Committee called for new restrictions on its availability in public places, particularly transport.
The Committee is right.
The tide has to be reversed and replaced by a new spirit of respect for others.
Of course, in an open, modern, liberal society, pornography neither can nor should be outlawed.
Indeed, such imagery has always existed since the dawn of mankind, as shown by early cave paintings and primitive sculptures.
The Victorians were shocked at the discovery of explicit sexual depictions in the ruins of Pompeii when it was excavated in the 1860s.
Yet that does not mean we should now remain passive in the face of the increasingly violent and degrading porn which is now sweeping across Britain.
You don’t have to be a puritan to be concerned about the hyper-sexualised anarchy that now prevails in cyberspace, allowing anyone, no matter what their age or vulnerability, to view stuff that would once have led to arrests by the Obscene Publications Squad.
The current lack of online controls makes a mockery of the laws, like age limits for films, that are supposed to shield immature youngsters.
No such censorship exists on the web, so hardcore porn is easily accessible to children.
One survey by the NSPCC found that 53 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds in Britain have seen explicit adult material.
Just as shockingly, the average age at which a child first sees porn online is only 11.
What makes such findings so worrying is that pornography leads to an empty, mechanical view of sex, where genuine intimacy is lost and instant physical gratification is all that matters.
In a world of ubiquitous porn, this mix of absurd fantasies, selfish expectations and lack of romantic exchange is a prime reason why modern relationships have become so difficult to maintain, with the result that mental health problems are soaring.
Just as disquieting is the misogynistic outlook that pornography encourages among men.
When everything is viewed through the prism of sex, women become brutally objectified, rated on nothing more than their appearance or attractiveness.
All too aware of the male gaze, many women now feel forced into colluding with pornographic stereotypes.
Yet, like alcoholism and drugs, pornography never satisfies. Instead, addicts crave ever more extreme imagery, ever more lurid fetishes.
That partly explains the rising incidence of harassment and sex crimes, as users translate their depravities from the screen to the real world, sometimes with lethal results.
That grim reality is illustrated by the case of Nathan Matthews, who was found guilty in 2015 of murdering his 16-year-old step-sister Becky Watts in a sexually motivated kidnap from her home in Bristol.
During the investigation into this crime, police discovered 236 images and 21 films of violent porn on his laptop, including 17 minutes of footage which showed a victim being beaten up on her bed.
Pornography cannot be treated as simply a fashionable leisure activity.
We all need to start taking its wider effects seriously.
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Part of that drive has to include a public awareness campaign, so users are made aware of the destructive impact of their habits.
Equally important are measures that the Committee report outlined this week, including demanding more responsibility from the tech giants and greater controls on internet access in the public sphere.
If a commuter cannot get through a journey without a dose of porn, then he doesn’t deserve a place on the train.
- Leo McKinstry is a journalist and author.