Alex Phillips: Porn poses existential threat to social standards

If you saw a woman being brutalised in the street, being raped, exploited or abused, being made to perform acts most women would never countenance, would you walk on by? Would you stop and watch? Would you take pleasure in it?

I would hope most people watching would answer No, No, NO! to all of those. Yet add a laptop or phone screen and a veil of anonymity, and suddenly reality changes, even though most people choose not to admit it, even to themselves.

Porn has fundamentally changed our society. Today, it is everywhere you look. It curates music videos, it encourages teen girls to buy hyper-sexualised outfits and pout and pose like a Kardashian for strangers on social media. It sees prime time telly getting young wannabes with airbrushed bodies to compete to have sex for our entertainment. It is so normalised, very few people now question it, or stop to wonder how it might be affecting their lives, their relationships, and society at large.

Look, personally I doubt many women featuring in porn have stable lives or happy mindsets. I'd be shocked if any of my friends chose to make adult content. In fact, I would worry they were going through a breakdown or were in desperate financial need and probably required serious intervention. If you found out your daughter, sister, mother or friend was making porn, I expect you too would be concerned. So how come this massive unregulated industry is growing so fast, and influencing so much?

Let’s look at the damage that has been done since porn came down from magazines on the top shelves of newsagents, leapt out from still photography and cheesy cassette tapes sold in shops with curtains behind doors and into thumbnails of escalating clickbait, since it stopped being a cliche with a washing machine repairman and became a limitless supply of exploitation, violation, perversion, dehumanisation and extreme instant gratification.

Let’s look at some heartbreaking stats. More than HALF of under 17 year old girls polled in a survey for the Daily Mail said they have received anal sex. 85% of teen girls have given oral sex! - with more than a THIRD of those girls not even 16. One third of teenage girls who have taken part in sexual activity haven’t even had their first kiss. It breaks my heart.

Little girls, before they are even fully developed are ending up in hospital with tears to intimate body parts. The incidence of children sexually assaulting other children has exploded. Rape culture in schools has reached such horrifying levels that a website where school children can share their experiences of rape and assault, now has over 50,000 testimonies. This is an epidemic of physical, psychological, sexual and social harm on an industrial scale.

If you are a regular user of porn, the truth is you are not just passively observing systemic and wilful abuse of women, in my opinion, you are enabling it. You are part of it. Every view and every click feeds a dehumanised system destroying lives.

Tell the woman who has had an ex boyfriend record intimate activity and threaten to post it online, that unregulated porn is fine. Tell the woman that has been violently raped, choked, hurt and shamed, that unregulated porn is fine. Tell the woman who has been bombarded with explicit pictures and vile verbal abuse that unregulated porn is fine. Because she works in your office. She lives on your street. She is watching this programme. She is presenting this programme.

But it’s not just about women. What are we doing to boys? To men? Rendering them into primitive beasts in need of constant stimulation, stripping them of their humanity and emotion by telling them it’s fine to be nothing more than a phallus. We are bringing up a generation whose innocence has been slaughtered at the altar of boundless adult perversion.

Today’s question is - Should Porn Be Behind A Paywall?

Well, if you would be worried about putting your bank details into a porn site, questioning whether they would be safe, what does that say about having confidence that the people in the videos you are watching aren’t trafficked, blackmailed or extremely vulnerable? Because if you are so worried about the safety of the site that you wouldn’t be willing to part with the 16 digits of your account to access it, then you are admitting you could well be enabling exploitation orchestrated by unsavoury characters. You are content with the idea that little tots who should be playing with dollies and action figures can unwittingly access harmful images that will warp their undeveloped minds and leave them vulnerable to the worst forms of abuse.

I am not a prude. Far from it. But having spent two decades dating, I can tell you attitudes have changed to a frightening, untested and unprecedented level. Modern porn is not benign, harmless fun. It poses the greatest existential threat to cultural mores and social standards hewn over centuries that have allowed man to separate itself from beast, that elevated humans from prehistoric brutes to moral members of a functioning society.

This is why WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT PORN.