It’s time Britain had the porn conversation

[flashharriet]

Article here

Have to say this article puts into words my growing sense of disquiet as my kids approach their teenage years...

Indeed. The lack of parental control isn't always parents' fault, either. Well not exactly. I mean, it's all well and good not allowing unsupervised Internet access but by their early teens most dcs have mobiles, and even if they don't, their friends do. I think mobile Internet access, picture messaging etc has caught us off guard and is a far cry from rifling through an uncovered stash of Razzles in the park.

It's not just the porn though is it, it's the whole cultural trickle-down effect.

I'm always slightly dubious about the X-Factor, mainstream family viewing on a Saturday night with dancers dressed as hookers being sold as family entertainment. (I'm still not quite sure how I should talk to my DC's 10 and 7 about this, any tips would be welcome...)

Also saw a short clip of a Take That concert on TV recently, choreography included lapdancers and spanking - this is a mainstream, quite bland pop group marketed at all demographics from kids to grannies, not some kind of kinky fetishist underground band. It's all so bloody normalised.

Normalised is the thing HerBeatitude - somewhere along the line that has to have an effect. I would love MN to take this up as a battle rather than sparkly bra tops tbh, although I can follow the logic that that's where it starts.

It's extreme and it's the crossover into pretty much everthing. Music in particular. That I worry about - images, lyrics the lot. My ds will pick all this up and it will surely inform his views on girls.

No, I think that's where it has ended Harriet. I think it's the trickle down effect, where we now live in a hyper sexualized society - and the sparkly tops are as and how it arrives in the mainstream.

I think I agree with that article that it should be in the brown paper bags of yesteryear. Though god knows how you stop it, I don't suppose you can - it's the internet innit. And so everyone picks it up as it arrives in the mainstream - Nuts, kitten heels for kids, pole dancing hen parties etc

Porn must be a massively lucrative business I guess.

FlashHarriet, the reason people haven't responded on this thread is not because they don't care but because there is a thread (now up to 992 posts) on the problem of porn running in AIBU at the moment. So people probably thought there was no point posting their opinion for a second time on this thread.

And that thread is primarily about porn directed at adults - not so much about how it's trickled down into mainstream society and how it affects children.

There's so many angles, room for more than one thread at once...

But it's a hard issue to campaign on as it's everywhere - fashion, music the works and on top of that peer pressure.

I found that article extremely annoying. Why is it a bad thing to be concerned about pornish clothes for young girls (which last time I looked, were not in the least rare and marginal, but mainstream and in your face), and why on earth would that mean someone was not also concerned about the effect of porn on slightly older children? These are two facets of the same thing - ie over sexualisation of everything (aka normalization as others have said). There is no dichotomy in my mind, I find both very concerning.

But then I also slightly wonder at the age of the writer - I have no intention of having a "squirm making sitdown" conversation with my children as teenagers - that's the sort of thing my parents might have done (well actually they didn't but their contemporaries did) and they are in their 70's. I have already had many conversations with my children about sex, relationships, treating other people with respect etc etc. I don't understand why you would need a script to talk about porn either - I have talked to my children about being careful what you look for on the net, as has their school, and they are nine and ten. I have no expectation that the government (or even Google, Microsoft or Apple) can or even should protect my children, and I also know enough about the internet to know that unless we want to have severely limited access like China then it is probably not possible to turn any switch off.

In any case the forefront of porn in the mainstream to me was always the Sun's page three girl, and that has been around for a hell of a longer time than the internet. Cheap holidays (sun and sex) and cheap booze are also as much of an issue with young people behaving irresponsibly, and the rates of teenage pregnancy (whilst still far too high) are coming down not up, plus in other countries with exactly the same internet access to porn have much lower rates.

Some of the other things in this article I do agree with, but it's just too hysterically shouty for me.

Finally are young men so influenced by porn (which they must understand is hardly real - the young people I know are very media savvy) that they totally ignore all the girls they have grown up with who are as real and human as they have ever been? That would make me worry that we aren't bringing our children up very well.

Another article about this, deeply depressing.

OK it's the Daily Mail, but still...