Yes I do mean that we need the government involved. I think DeviTheGaelet is absolutely right that the public health angle is our only hope. There are people who are ready to lead a big campaign - they just need us to get behind them. Gail Dines and Robert Jensen are IMO the ones who could do it. They have both done masses of research on the subject, both have books published and they have already worked together. Gail Dines is already leading a one woman campaign.
We need the search engines on board and it needs to be something that makes them look good and let's face it the rad fem women's rights angle that I have posted here is not going to be it. A campaign about child protection and health is.
So concerned parents need to organize and campaign. I think the first problem is a lack of awareness. I remember seeing a documentary once about parents and pornography (it might have been Dines' work, can't remember but she often starts her talk with this point) and the parents didn't think their children were accessing hard-core internet pornography and they also didn't really know what that pornography consists off (perhaps some of the dads did but the late 30s early 40s and older mothers certainly didn't). The parents agreed to watch some mainstream porn and they were APPALLED by it. Not in a prudish pearl clutching way but in a humane way of people who recognize contempt, abuse, violence, body punishing hard-core acts and profound sexism when they see it. The general reaction was "that's not sex it's sexualized violence" they were also shocked by the titles of videos and the deeply sexist and racist language plus the evident predatory element and rapey element (teens, "simulated" rape, incest themes, rapey "group" sex, choking, double penetration, etc).
We need an awareness campaign that lets parents know what their kids are being exposed to and how it is impacting on them. No decent parent wants their son to have been socially conditioned to growing up with messed up ideas about relationships with girls and none want their son acting like a sex pest in school. Same goes for girls - we don't want them being pressured into porn sex rather than the sex they want and we don't want them being sexually harassed by their male peers in school and in life in general.
As Dines and Jensen say, the porn industry has hijacked our children's (and many adults') sexuality. The porn industry is a parasite. They want young boys exposed to pornography because it has an addictive element (the orgasm is an extremely powerful social conditioning tool) and they want their sexuality to be fucked up to the point that porn is the thing that gets them off. It works just like cigarettes, the younger the exposure the better. Porn has got more and more hard-core in order to feed the addiction of adult men - that's what young boys are being exposed to. To continue the (bad) cigarette analogy, when my generation were young our first act of rebellion was a puff of a fag, for today's kids it's smoking crack. (The analogy is bad because drugs are things and the women in porn are people but I hope you get the point about how the ante has been upped).
Coming back to what PinkisRad said here:
Young boys need to be taught that what they see in porn, is not how they can treat women
So why is it ok for women to be treated like that in porn? They are women, real women. There aren't 2 kinds of women; ones you can treat badly and ones you can't. That's a terrible message to give boys and it is an endorsement to treat some girls and women badly. How the boys are expected to treat girls and women right if they are being taught that it's sometimes ok to treat us like meat, like sex objects, like fuck holes who are there to be treated with contempt and sexualized violence I don't know. And they don't - we can see that from what Spartacus said here about what is happening in her DD's school.
So, yes, I do think the way forward is the public health angle. But that angle isn't and cannot be only about boys and their erectile function. It is also about girls and women and our right to be treated like humans, not body parts and holes to be penetrated. The dots need to be joined up. Why is porn bad for boys - because it is sending a powerful message to them about the worth of girls and women and about what we are for (consumption amongst other things). It's bad for boys because it tells them that abuse is sexy, that girls like sexualized violence, that brutal female body punishing (dangerous) sex acts are what sexual relationships are about.
Pornography is bad for boys because it is profoundly misogynistic but it is being promoted as fun, as entertainment, as sexy. And it is being promoted as normal due to its proliferation and messages like "all men watch porn" "boys will be boys" etc plus the porny element that has entered popular culture. Much of popular culture nowadays is "soft" porn. Practicality naked women simulating sex and men singing about rape is what our kids see in music videos. The next step is redtube and as qwerty says, before they know it they're masturbating to all manner of sick shit.
The porn industry has been harming women for decades with its message about women. That harm is the same as it's ever been. The situation now is that due to the internet and the power of the moving image to influence human thoughts and behaviour, things have got so bad that we are clearly in the realms of child abuse. The porn industry is grooming and abusing children by exposing them to explicit hard-core material that if it were portraying the abuse of any minority group other than women would have seen the industry shut down a long time ago.
Apologies for length of post. I have strong feelings on the subject