I take you back to SoupDragon's point. Girls and boys are our children - they are children. Society is splitting the male and female gender for purposes of commercial exploitation. Women are packaged on TV as sex objects - even on shows that should know better - and men are packaged as figures of fun or gladiatorial meat that must be slaughtered in some bloody scene.
These two basic, stereotypical animalistic depictions of humans are degrading and are being acted out now in our homes and streets. Aggression is rife, including sexual aggression inflicted on women and sexually targeted stimulus aimed at men. We do have to look at attitudes in a school society, but as long as we have a media that continues to pump rancid bilge into the wider society, like some filthy sewage pipe on a beach - then we are not dealing with one major source of our contorted values.
Where internet porn is concerned, I can only describe what has evolved as heartbreaking. Where once we had laws that prevented certain material getting into anyone's hands, let along children, now we have this PC in the corner of a room, in which material can be watched showing anything imaginable (and worse) in the field of human degeneration. It is almost unfair for a government to allow such access, and then to wonder why people look at it. We don't keep nuclear waste in our home, so why this potentially toxic machine! The horror is that young people who simply try and access an image of a glamorous idol for example, can unwittingly be exposed to illegal and foul material.
Meanwhile the internet service supplier makes money out of the 'supply' on this content. In days of old, I understand that shops were raided for supplying such things. How come Talk Talk, BT and others do not spend a proportion of their massive income in filtering out and blocking sites that challenge every known human value? Each time we read of a sex offender collecting child porn, the news sources should also be made to report which household provider supplied the internet feed!
The internet is not the only problem. The advertising and entertainment industries have one target and one only - money! I would be proud to support Mumsnet and it's members, if we were to take an active stance against any advertiser who depicts girls OR boys, women OR men as trash, dimwits, sexual objects or any representation that significantly sets out to dehumanise and demean us. It?s no good bringing up our girls in a world that protected them but had failed to protect the people they may have as a partner or their eventual children!
I have seen adverts where a woman gets hit in the face by an object or by a man, and naturally complaints followed. How come we see adverts where men are being hit and this is broadly acceptable? What happened to our disgust? Why in the cinema will women cheer when a woman slaps a man, but there is a stoned silence when a man slaps a woman? We really need to look at our values too! We can't provide emotional justice for our own gender but neglect the emotional needs of the males in our lives, can we?
I detect that young people who fail to appreciate the feelings of others, are often from homes where their own feelings are frequently brushed aside.