One of the things I most enjoy about reading you is the tension I feel at times between my extremely liberal instincts (and historical political stances) and the nascent personal conservatism that has arisen since I saw through the Great Awokening. Your writing is important in this shift, being as I am increasingly convinced by your arguments about the role of the state.
What's interesting sometimes is when I balk. As I have done at this piece. I'm still mentally processing why, but it seems to me that almost all talk of pornography as a 'moral' issue is misplaced. It seems to me that the principle reason that pornography exists is because people are scared to have the sex they want with the appropriate partners. I cannot bring myself to see it as a moral issue at all (unless laws are broken in some way). My intuition is that porn serves as a substitute for full sexual intimacy (in all its mad iterations) because actually achieving it is risky and takes 'balls'. If everyone was having enough fun 'in the bedroom' porn would have much less appeal. I know this from personal experience - I have only ever used porn when my own sex life was either absent or disappointing. Isn't it just another market signal for something?
Good question. I don't want to be misunderstood as saying that I think pornography as such should be banned. Rather, I mean we ought to take more of an interest in what it depicts and whether certain categories that are currently legal should not be.
No doubt you're right that porn scratches an itch, so to speak, so you're correct as to why it exists from the demand side. The moral issue is really I suppose to do with whether one believes people have souls. Is it corrupting to display oneself in a sex act to strangers who are not participating? Is it corrupting for those strangers to watch the display? I suppose it depends on whether one thinks it's possible to 'corrupt' oneself morally at all. I think it is. But I've never had a problem believing that people have souls and that something is at stake in the souls of people when they have sex with each other. Whether they like it or not!
Thanks - some perspectives I've never really considered, especially the nature of something 'corrupting'. The tricky issue with trying to categorise certain sexual practices as permissible for public consumption is that sex itself is tricky (at least personally) to grasp as anything other than a shared intimacy, free of judgement. I always think this when there's talk of 'degrading' behaviour, given the propensity of so many healthy, we'll-adjusted women to enjoy at least momentarily being objectified in ways that would doubtless horrify friends and neighbours. Given that 'submission' & 'exhibitionism' are particularly common fantasies for women it seems difficult to me to distinguish what is degrading from what is merely transgressive from a daily persona. I've never broadcast my own sex life, but reflecting on the idea of it does trigger a sense of something that might be diluted or de-sanctified in the sharing. As an old-fashioned kind of guy, this feely stuff does seem to matter. It's a tough topic, that's for sure.
The nitty-gritty of the issue is tough - no doubt the issue you raise is real. So the question then becomes: which is more important? We have to make a trade-off between perfectly satisfied adult desire and the negative consequences of the visual expression of those desires (e.g. to children, to adolescent boys vulnerable to addiction, to families, to participants who may have been coerced or abused....). At the moment we prioritise the former. Is that really leading to wonderful outcomes? But in any case we certainly agree the 'feely stuff' does matter! ;)
"Freedom of speech" etc. has become misconstrued. It is one thing for speech as written down, in words, to be free, or the spoken word itself, to be uncensored. Images are a whole different matter, and especially moving images, and images in full colour.
"Erotic" novels, including those by a de Sade or a Georges Bataille, are not in the same category as extreme internet porn, even if what they suggest is scarcely less extreme. The reading experience is indeed wholly different, since imagination is needed to reproduce (depict) in the mind what has been described in words.
A painted image, as displayed uniquely in an art gallery, is not the same a a filmed sequence.
There is another protection which might be used, tho less effective or promising: It is to forbid any money to be made from the display of sexual activity.
Yes, the debate often feels like it’s taken a life of its own in this respect. James Madison was most certainly not thinking about porn when he wrote the First Amendment!
Many thanks for this engagement with Fish, David - much appreciated!
Moorcock was always resolutely against pornography, having worked in a store that sold it (I assume in the 60s or 70s), yet conversely staunchly defended a book press against moral turpitude accusations that were levelled against it in court on grounds quite close to the usual outrage stoked against pornography. The tension between free speech and public moralism tips too easily towards the latter if we are not able to defend our freedom of thought resolutely.
However, there cannot be a 'right to pornography' in the sense of the Enlightenment rightful condition, if there is any class of people whose equal liberty is infringed by the production or consumption of pornography. This, in a messier form, was the feminist argument against pornography before feminism split into rival camps during the ongoing Rainbow Civil War between the lesbian feminists and the trans activitists.
But I personally do not see how the question of restricting access to pornography could be addressed without setting up international political and systematic machinery that could be all too easily usurped to enforce other kinds of censorship, and that makes me very nervous about trying to go down this legal path at all.
My overriding impression, which may be naïve, is that the problem that pornography represents in terms of the degradation of the relationship between men and women (and perhaps is coupled with the degradation of the *concept* of men and women...) might be the wrong pressure point to work upon. I view pornography, like so many addictions, as a crutch to fill a gap. That gap - the social space of everyday encounter, where quaint activities like dating used to thrive - has been accidentally foreclosed by the shift of consciousness into the ever-online world.
As such, I favour encouraging the physical social fabric by positive actions - by membership of communities, such as churches, associations, and pubs, for instance - and leaving the law out of this issue entirely. I just cannot see any way to move on these issues that does not carry with it enormous risks of unleashing greater problems further down the line.
However, practicalities matter as much as principles when it comes to law.
How do you propose to control access to pornography? You can pass any law you like to ban access to pornographic websites. Any teenager will get around it in 30 seconds with a VPN.
I suppose you could ban VPN's. You could physically disconnect the country from the rest of the world's internet. You could impose digital id requirements on web access itself. By turning Britain into a totalitarian nightmare perhaps you could stop most of it. Is that a price worth paying?
The power to protect children, and indeed society, from this has to lie with parents. The State is a clumsy and untrustworthy actor to be asked to usurp parental responsibilities.
Parents need to stop demanding that the State protects their children online, and take responsibility for it themselves. Today's parents are not comfortable doing this, because they grew up in a pre-internet world. That will not be true of the next generation, and we have to hope that they will step up accordingly with their own children.
Parents have to stop being lazy about this as well. They need to understand that putting a child on a computer is not the same as sitting them in front of CBeebies for entertainment.
Parents need to talk to their children about what they see on the internet. They need to talk even before they let them loose on it. Children need to be "inoculated" by serious discussions about the horrors they are likely to encounter and what they should do about it, before they are set loose on a computer.
Obviously this won't work all the time. But we have let the genie out of the bottle already. There is no turning the clock back to a pre-internet world.
I broadly agree with that - but the practicalities are mostly to do with definition. Impose fines and criminal liability on ISPs if they carry particular categories of porn and you will soon see it disappear. Of course that won’t solve the problem entirely - nothing ever does in human affairs, just as the prohibition of murder doesn’t eliminate the practice.
The main disagreement I have is that this is all something parents can do on their own. I can have all the conversations I want with my children about the subject - it doesn’t change what other people’s children show them on their phones and it doesn’t change what their boyfriends, male friends, men they encounter in their daily lives watch each night. This is a collective action problem of the classic type.
No, really, David. ISP's literally cannot stop it. If you use a VPN, then your ISP only knows that you are accessing the VPN provider. They cannot see what you are looking at. It is encrypted, just like your bank account details when you look at them online. Do you think your ISP can see your bank account details?
I know it is frustrating, but fining ISP's or even sending their directors to jail for this would be utterly unjust, as well as completely ineffective. In that world, the ISP's would probably decide their business model was unsustainable and withdraw from the market. Congratulations, you have shut down the internet.
The VPN problem is here now. We can’t easily stop people sharing the types of image that are already illegal - child sex abuse images - through encrypted methods. So should we therefore legalise it?
You can't ban it. You can require an account to access a VPN, which costs money. That makes it a lot harder for a teenager to access it because the presence of a "porn VPN account" on a phone is trackable
Fair enough. I suppose you could ban pornography completely in the same way. You have to be aware though that you would be banning something that a huge chunk of the population indulge in. Wouldn't you would end up with something like Prohibition in America?
The other alternative, I suppose, would be something like the Chinese firewall, with licensing for all websites and banning of VPN's. I'm not sure the British are ready to tolerate CCP style social control.
This is not an easy issue at all. I fear that your immediate reaction ("Impose fines and criminal liability on ISPs if they carry particular categories of porn and you will soon see it disappear") is the exact same response that we saw in Ministers in the last government, that led to the Online Safety Act.
This is the issue - I’m not talking about banning pornography completely. The issue is certain types of pornography. We already ban some types - such as images of child sex abuse. So why are we squeamish about banning images of the abuse of women?
We could ban the abuse of women in the same way as child sex abuse is banned, but it would probably be more a matter of society through law expressing disapproval rather than an effective closure of the activity.
The ban on depictions of child sex abuse may reduce its consumption (we don’t know), but we know that it doesn’t work; plenty of people are prosecuted (but rarely it seems punished) for having illegal images of children downloaded on their hard drives, but they are presumably just the idiots who download it. For every one such idiot there must be plenty more who satisfy their perversion by using a VPN and viewing without downloading. They are never going to be discovered.
And while it is easy to define child sex abuse since anything sexual with a minor is by definition abuse, drawing the legal line for adult females between abuse and their voluntary provision of the pornography you think should be permitted is going to be fiendishly difficult.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your view that the ban should be more widely drawn than just “child sex abuse” for all the sound reasons you cite, but I fear that it will be performative rather than effective law. I know that performative law is very much in fashion these days but I’m not sure that is really a good thing.
"serious discussion needs to take place about not rights, but values"
That is the issue in a nutshell. We shouldn't be swerved by others trying to muddy our morality pool by lobbing in various political hobbyhorses, especially those based on 'The Science'.
We all know what can really be described as 'moral' behaviour (even those who indulge in immoral behaviour), and it produces a very short list of prohibitions for a moral society - one of which should be pornography.
Behind this unique pandemic are some of the most intractable dilemmas known to man. There are too many necessary perspectives to be treated in a substack. The common approach among those who are appalled is to call for a return to supposedly traditional values, traditional takes whose spiritual and moral superficiality has led to the present impasse.
A starting point is to challenge the conceptualisation of sexuality in terms of transgression, rather than as not just belonging but being mandated to certain times and places. A deep state Christianity which preaches the seventh commandment “Do not commit adultery” and therefore strict monogamy is so extreme as to provoke rejection and dissonance. Puritanism, abundant also in Catholicism, leads to dishonesty and hypocrisy about matters sexual.
The way back, if any, will be arduous. At http://www.thinking-for-clarity.de/personhood.html (also published in a Philosophy Now magazine) I proposed, decades ago, a different way of conceptualising in a spiritual way what happens as we move towards real rather than imagined sex.
Sexuality reminds us that we are members of a species. Eroticism involves a movement from awareness of unique individuality into a kind of anonymity. (Think of recourse to the language of “darling” and similar epithets, rather than names.)
"Marriage" is not the cure, but the straitjacket that leads to the discontent. See elsewhere on the quoted website.
These comments have necessarily barely touched the surface.
What’s the option for ‘no, but any measures remotely capable of cracking down on it would eviscerate online freedom of speech and anonymity so we should act as though there was?’
Pornography is a weapon of mass destruction. And those who use it know very well what they're doing.
Of course, everyone is free to make their own choices, but, as in everything else, our choices are limited by the freedom of others. To put it another way: first and foremost, there's the respect we owe to ourselves and, by extension, to our fellow man.
A very androcentric vision of reality - not to say that that is bad, because if you are a man, this is all you can do.
But women don't need to be protected as much as you seem to think, with laws or statutes or rules and regulations; and especially not by busybodies whose fundamental desire is always to tell others what is best for them - let them decide that for themselves - and in any case, their approach to sex is oftentimes diametrically opposed to how men think they think.
They enjoy sex as much as men do, and frequently, with a wish to be dominated and according to the writer therefore, exploited.
Fifty Shades of Grey was a massive hit with them, because it spoke directly to their fantasies.
But they generally see sex not so much as an end in itself, as men do, but as a means to an end, ie,. to earn money a la Only Fans.
Sex is a central obsession with the majority of the post pubescent, whether male or female, and if access to its online version is enjoyable, then it will be sought out irrespective of what the aforementioned busybodies decide, and if sought out, then it will be provided by somebody.
As far as children go; again, these individuals are protected from the implications of what they see if they are hormonally unready for it, and sexual acts or nudity don't really impact them as much as adults seem to think.
As Adam says, the input of parents is crucial in this pre pubescent period; and as much as is possible, they should insulate their children from exposure to it, although as I said, even if they see it, they won't be overly affected by it one way or the other, and will rather choose to go outside and play with their friends in the park instead.
Like it or not, we live in a seething sea of all kinds of things some might rather we didn't see; but we will see them anyway.
The parent should be around to talk to their children if they want to talk about the things they will inevitably see, and perhaps to suggest to them that matters pertaining to sexuality and its expression are only one part, although a significant part, of what we are as men, women - and to some extent, children too.
It's important, and frequently ignored by those who know what they want more than they do.
A telling comment I saw recently was about how the majority of those who support unrestricted immigrant access - which mostly involves unaccompanied males of breeding age - are females of the left wing persuasion, who should know of all people how sexually violent these individuals frequently turn out to be.
These are uncomfortable truths, and so will invariably be ignored by the chattering classes.
One of the things I most enjoy about reading you is the tension I feel at times between my extremely liberal instincts (and historical political stances) and the nascent personal conservatism that has arisen since I saw through the Great Awokening. Your writing is important in this shift, being as I am increasingly convinced by your arguments about the role of the state.
What's interesting sometimes is when I balk. As I have done at this piece. I'm still mentally processing why, but it seems to me that almost all talk of pornography as a 'moral' issue is misplaced. It seems to me that the principle reason that pornography exists is because people are scared to have the sex they want with the appropriate partners. I cannot bring myself to see it as a moral issue at all (unless laws are broken in some way). My intuition is that porn serves as a substitute for full sexual intimacy (in all its mad iterations) because actually achieving it is risky and takes 'balls'. If everyone was having enough fun 'in the bedroom' porn would have much less appeal. I know this from personal experience - I have only ever used porn when my own sex life was either absent or disappointing. Isn't it just another market signal for something?
Good question. I don't want to be misunderstood as saying that I think pornography as such should be banned. Rather, I mean we ought to take more of an interest in what it depicts and whether certain categories that are currently legal should not be.
No doubt you're right that porn scratches an itch, so to speak, so you're correct as to why it exists from the demand side. The moral issue is really I suppose to do with whether one believes people have souls. Is it corrupting to display oneself in a sex act to strangers who are not participating? Is it corrupting for those strangers to watch the display? I suppose it depends on whether one thinks it's possible to 'corrupt' oneself morally at all. I think it is. But I've never had a problem believing that people have souls and that something is at stake in the souls of people when they have sex with each other. Whether they like it or not!
Thanks - some perspectives I've never really considered, especially the nature of something 'corrupting'. The tricky issue with trying to categorise certain sexual practices as permissible for public consumption is that sex itself is tricky (at least personally) to grasp as anything other than a shared intimacy, free of judgement. I always think this when there's talk of 'degrading' behaviour, given the propensity of so many healthy, we'll-adjusted women to enjoy at least momentarily being objectified in ways that would doubtless horrify friends and neighbours. Given that 'submission' & 'exhibitionism' are particularly common fantasies for women it seems difficult to me to distinguish what is degrading from what is merely transgressive from a daily persona. I've never broadcast my own sex life, but reflecting on the idea of it does trigger a sense of something that might be diluted or de-sanctified in the sharing. As an old-fashioned kind of guy, this feely stuff does seem to matter. It's a tough topic, that's for sure.
The nitty-gritty of the issue is tough - no doubt the issue you raise is real. So the question then becomes: which is more important? We have to make a trade-off between perfectly satisfied adult desire and the negative consequences of the visual expression of those desires (e.g. to children, to adolescent boys vulnerable to addiction, to families, to participants who may have been coerced or abused....). At the moment we prioritise the former. Is that really leading to wonderful outcomes? But in any case we certainly agree the 'feely stuff' does matter! ;)
"Freedom of speech" etc. has become misconstrued. It is one thing for speech as written down, in words, to be free, or the spoken word itself, to be uncensored. Images are a whole different matter, and especially moving images, and images in full colour.
"Erotic" novels, including those by a de Sade or a Georges Bataille, are not in the same category as extreme internet porn, even if what they suggest is scarcely less extreme. The reading experience is indeed wholly different, since imagination is needed to reproduce (depict) in the mind what has been described in words.
A painted image, as displayed uniquely in an art gallery, is not the same a a filmed sequence.
There is another protection which might be used, tho less effective or promising: It is to forbid any money to be made from the display of sexual activity.
Yes, the debate often feels like it’s taken a life of its own in this respect. James Madison was most certainly not thinking about porn when he wrote the First Amendment!
Many thanks for this engagement with Fish, David - much appreciated!
Moorcock was always resolutely against pornography, having worked in a store that sold it (I assume in the 60s or 70s), yet conversely staunchly defended a book press against moral turpitude accusations that were levelled against it in court on grounds quite close to the usual outrage stoked against pornography. The tension between free speech and public moralism tips too easily towards the latter if we are not able to defend our freedom of thought resolutely.
However, there cannot be a 'right to pornography' in the sense of the Enlightenment rightful condition, if there is any class of people whose equal liberty is infringed by the production or consumption of pornography. This, in a messier form, was the feminist argument against pornography before feminism split into rival camps during the ongoing Rainbow Civil War between the lesbian feminists and the trans activitists.
But I personally do not see how the question of restricting access to pornography could be addressed without setting up international political and systematic machinery that could be all too easily usurped to enforce other kinds of censorship, and that makes me very nervous about trying to go down this legal path at all.
My overriding impression, which may be naïve, is that the problem that pornography represents in terms of the degradation of the relationship between men and women (and perhaps is coupled with the degradation of the *concept* of men and women...) might be the wrong pressure point to work upon. I view pornography, like so many addictions, as a crutch to fill a gap. That gap - the social space of everyday encounter, where quaint activities like dating used to thrive - has been accidentally foreclosed by the shift of consciousness into the ever-online world.
As such, I favour encouraging the physical social fabric by positive actions - by membership of communities, such as churches, associations, and pubs, for instance - and leaving the law out of this issue entirely. I just cannot see any way to move on these issues that does not carry with it enormous risks of unleashing greater problems further down the line.
Thanks for another stimulating essay!
Chris.
I agree with all of this, David. All of it.
However, practicalities matter as much as principles when it comes to law.
How do you propose to control access to pornography? You can pass any law you like to ban access to pornographic websites. Any teenager will get around it in 30 seconds with a VPN.
I suppose you could ban VPN's. You could physically disconnect the country from the rest of the world's internet. You could impose digital id requirements on web access itself. By turning Britain into a totalitarian nightmare perhaps you could stop most of it. Is that a price worth paying?
The power to protect children, and indeed society, from this has to lie with parents. The State is a clumsy and untrustworthy actor to be asked to usurp parental responsibilities.
Parents need to stop demanding that the State protects their children online, and take responsibility for it themselves. Today's parents are not comfortable doing this, because they grew up in a pre-internet world. That will not be true of the next generation, and we have to hope that they will step up accordingly with their own children.
Parents have to stop being lazy about this as well. They need to understand that putting a child on a computer is not the same as sitting them in front of CBeebies for entertainment.
Parents need to talk to their children about what they see on the internet. They need to talk even before they let them loose on it. Children need to be "inoculated" by serious discussions about the horrors they are likely to encounter and what they should do about it, before they are set loose on a computer.
Obviously this won't work all the time. But we have let the genie out of the bottle already. There is no turning the clock back to a pre-internet world.
I broadly agree with that - but the practicalities are mostly to do with definition. Impose fines and criminal liability on ISPs if they carry particular categories of porn and you will soon see it disappear. Of course that won’t solve the problem entirely - nothing ever does in human affairs, just as the prohibition of murder doesn’t eliminate the practice.
The main disagreement I have is that this is all something parents can do on their own. I can have all the conversations I want with my children about the subject - it doesn’t change what other people’s children show them on their phones and it doesn’t change what their boyfriends, male friends, men they encounter in their daily lives watch each night. This is a collective action problem of the classic type.
No, really, David. ISP's literally cannot stop it. If you use a VPN, then your ISP only knows that you are accessing the VPN provider. They cannot see what you are looking at. It is encrypted, just like your bank account details when you look at them online. Do you think your ISP can see your bank account details?
I know it is frustrating, but fining ISP's or even sending their directors to jail for this would be utterly unjust, as well as completely ineffective. In that world, the ISP's would probably decide their business model was unsustainable and withdraw from the market. Congratulations, you have shut down the internet.
The VPN problem is here now. We can’t easily stop people sharing the types of image that are already illegal - child sex abuse images - through encrypted methods. So should we therefore legalise it?
You can't ban it. You can require an account to access a VPN, which costs money. That makes it a lot harder for a teenager to access it because the presence of a "porn VPN account" on a phone is trackable
Fair enough. I suppose you could ban pornography completely in the same way. You have to be aware though that you would be banning something that a huge chunk of the population indulge in. Wouldn't you would end up with something like Prohibition in America?
The other alternative, I suppose, would be something like the Chinese firewall, with licensing for all websites and banning of VPN's. I'm not sure the British are ready to tolerate CCP style social control.
This is not an easy issue at all. I fear that your immediate reaction ("Impose fines and criminal liability on ISPs if they carry particular categories of porn and you will soon see it disappear") is the exact same response that we saw in Ministers in the last government, that led to the Online Safety Act.
This is the issue - I’m not talking about banning pornography completely. The issue is certain types of pornography. We already ban some types - such as images of child sex abuse. So why are we squeamish about banning images of the abuse of women?
We could ban the abuse of women in the same way as child sex abuse is banned, but it would probably be more a matter of society through law expressing disapproval rather than an effective closure of the activity.
The ban on depictions of child sex abuse may reduce its consumption (we don’t know), but we know that it doesn’t work; plenty of people are prosecuted (but rarely it seems punished) for having illegal images of children downloaded on their hard drives, but they are presumably just the idiots who download it. For every one such idiot there must be plenty more who satisfy their perversion by using a VPN and viewing without downloading. They are never going to be discovered.
And while it is easy to define child sex abuse since anything sexual with a minor is by definition abuse, drawing the legal line for adult females between abuse and their voluntary provision of the pornography you think should be permitted is going to be fiendishly difficult.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your view that the ban should be more widely drawn than just “child sex abuse” for all the sound reasons you cite, but I fear that it will be performative rather than effective law. I know that performative law is very much in fashion these days but I’m not sure that is really a good thing.
"serious discussion needs to take place about not rights, but values"
That is the issue in a nutshell. We shouldn't be swerved by others trying to muddy our morality pool by lobbing in various political hobbyhorses, especially those based on 'The Science'.
We all know what can really be described as 'moral' behaviour (even those who indulge in immoral behaviour), and it produces a very short list of prohibitions for a moral society - one of which should be pornography.
Behind this unique pandemic are some of the most intractable dilemmas known to man. There are too many necessary perspectives to be treated in a substack. The common approach among those who are appalled is to call for a return to supposedly traditional values, traditional takes whose spiritual and moral superficiality has led to the present impasse.
A starting point is to challenge the conceptualisation of sexuality in terms of transgression, rather than as not just belonging but being mandated to certain times and places. A deep state Christianity which preaches the seventh commandment “Do not commit adultery” and therefore strict monogamy is so extreme as to provoke rejection and dissonance. Puritanism, abundant also in Catholicism, leads to dishonesty and hypocrisy about matters sexual.
The way back, if any, will be arduous. At http://www.thinking-for-clarity.de/personhood.html (also published in a Philosophy Now magazine) I proposed, decades ago, a different way of conceptualising in a spiritual way what happens as we move towards real rather than imagined sex.
Sexuality reminds us that we are members of a species. Eroticism involves a movement from awareness of unique individuality into a kind of anonymity. (Think of recourse to the language of “darling” and similar epithets, rather than names.)
"Marriage" is not the cure, but the straitjacket that leads to the discontent. See elsewhere on the quoted website.
These comments have necessarily barely touched the surface.
What’s the option for ‘no, but any measures remotely capable of cracking down on it would eviscerate online freedom of speech and anonymity so we should act as though there was?’
Pornography is a weapon of mass destruction. And those who use it know very well what they're doing.
Of course, everyone is free to make their own choices, but, as in everything else, our choices are limited by the freedom of others. To put it another way: first and foremost, there's the respect we owe to ourselves and, by extension, to our fellow man.
Pornography kills all that.
Digital ID is the answer of course!
A very androcentric vision of reality - not to say that that is bad, because if you are a man, this is all you can do.
But women don't need to be protected as much as you seem to think, with laws or statutes or rules and regulations; and especially not by busybodies whose fundamental desire is always to tell others what is best for them - let them decide that for themselves - and in any case, their approach to sex is oftentimes diametrically opposed to how men think they think.
They enjoy sex as much as men do, and frequently, with a wish to be dominated and according to the writer therefore, exploited.
Fifty Shades of Grey was a massive hit with them, because it spoke directly to their fantasies.
But they generally see sex not so much as an end in itself, as men do, but as a means to an end, ie,. to earn money a la Only Fans.
Sex is a central obsession with the majority of the post pubescent, whether male or female, and if access to its online version is enjoyable, then it will be sought out irrespective of what the aforementioned busybodies decide, and if sought out, then it will be provided by somebody.
As far as children go; again, these individuals are protected from the implications of what they see if they are hormonally unready for it, and sexual acts or nudity don't really impact them as much as adults seem to think.
As Adam says, the input of parents is crucial in this pre pubescent period; and as much as is possible, they should insulate their children from exposure to it, although as I said, even if they see it, they won't be overly affected by it one way or the other, and will rather choose to go outside and play with their friends in the park instead.
Like it or not, we live in a seething sea of all kinds of things some might rather we didn't see; but we will see them anyway.
The parent should be around to talk to their children if they want to talk about the things they will inevitably see, and perhaps to suggest to them that matters pertaining to sexuality and its expression are only one part, although a significant part, of what we are as men, women - and to some extent, children too.
I’m glad you’re here to give us the female view of reality, Tim.
It's important, and frequently ignored by those who know what they want more than they do.
A telling comment I saw recently was about how the majority of those who support unrestricted immigrant access - which mostly involves unaccompanied males of breeding age - are females of the left wing persuasion, who should know of all people how sexually violent these individuals frequently turn out to be.
These are uncomfortable truths, and so will invariably be ignored by the chattering classes.