Porn is no substitute for good sex education - LOUISE MCCUDDEN

Accessed 5^th September 2013

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/porn-is-no-substitute-for-good-sex-education-8799429.html

LOUISE MCCUDDEN

Thursday 5 September 2013

Porn is no substitute for good sex education

Girls are learning their sexuality is something they perform for
others, instead of something they own

A study by the NSPCC has found that porn is negatively impacting young people – especially girls.

The study found that nearly a third of pupils (aged 11-18) surveyed said porn “dictates how people should behave in a relationship,” and 32 per cent said it “affects how they act” with their partner.  But the most troublesome finding is summarised by the NSPCC’s Claire Lilley, who warns porn is teaching “boys that girls are for sexual gratification, whilst girls feel they have to look and perform like ‘porn stars’ to be liked and valued by boys.”  

As people react to the study, the focus, as usual, ends up being on porn itself (“Can porn be feminist?” “Why are we so squeamish about porn?” “I like pornand I’m a good person!”), but the porn debate isn’t the point. The point, according to this study, is that because of whatever porn they are watching, too many girls are learning sex is about impressing boys – as opposed to, say, having a good orgasm. Girls are learning their sexuality is something they perform for others, instead of something they own. They are learning that sex is about being an object, not an agent.

Feminists get asked about objectification a lot. Or to put it more accurately, we get a lot of sneering assertions that objectification doesn’t exist, usually in the same breath as unashamed ignorance about what the word actually means.

Porn isn’t new but young people having this level of access to it is, and the line between porn and other media has become so blurred it isn’t always clear to adults, let alone kids, which is which. Porn and the pornified entertainment industry are taking the place of informed sex and relationship education.

The NSPCC survey found young people are three times more likely to seek out their sexual education online than to ask questions of their teachers, parents, or carers. How curious that the people who call us prudes or sex-haters for questioning whether a sex education that consists of face-spunking and songs about bubble butts really gives the healthiest understanding of sexual consent are so often the same people to reach for the smelling salts when we suggest the radical idea that parents make sure they discuss sex properly with their own kids. 

Of course, not all parents will, which is why all this needs to be part of the school curriculum, too. And by “all this” I mean SRE that includes not just saying yes and saying no, but also hearing and accepting both yes and no, without judgment. SRE that includes enthusiastic consent, pleasure, and the importance of the clitoris. Again, there may or may not be porn like that. But that’s not what young people are watching, and it’s not the message they’re taking from what they do watch.

This survey by NSPCC – a children’s charity, by the way, with no particular axe to grind against porn in general - shows that young people are learning objectification. Objectification isn’t about sex or nudity. The difference between being an object and an agent is the difference between Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines video and the Ask First (Consent is Sexy) riposte.  Objectification isn’t actually a tough concept. You know what an object is. Perhaps you are one of these people who thinks it’s about wanting women to be chaste or cover up? That inability to distinguish between a culture that nearly always shows women posing for you to look at, and a culture that embraces women expressing our own sexualities perfectly exemplifies the mess we’re in.

Before you leap into the “porn debate” to talk about how the only alternative to mainstream, repeated conflation of sex with objectification is covering women from head to toe and calling us sluts, remember that the NSPCC didn’t find girls are becoming more sexually liberated, or enjoying more sexual pleasure. They didn’t find that girls are no longer shamed as “sluts” because porn broadens everyone’s minds.

They found that girls “feel they have to look and act like porn stars”, for the pleasure of boys. In fact, if anything, the consumers of porn, lads’ mags and strip clubs are often the worst offenders for calling women “sluts” and “whores”. If that surprises you, it shouldn’t –after all, “slut” is just the other side of the same sexist coin that calls women “frigid” or “prude”. And if young people pick up the message that there’s an automatic correlation between consuming porn and taking a progressive attitude to sex, if young people get the impression that sexism and objectification are an essential, normal part of sex, that’s not surprising either. They’re getting those ideas directly from us. 

The truth about pornography: It's time for a rude awakening - ARCHIE BLAND

Accessed 4^th September 2013

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-truth-about-pornography-its-time-for-a-rude-awakening-8735043.html

 

The truth about pornography: It's time for a rude awakening

Not everyone who is interested in sexual images wants to see violence. But, since that's now the norm, how can we shame ourselves out of this?

ARCHIE BLAND 

SUNDAY 28 JULY 2013

This is a piece about how pornography is like a plastic bag. It is also a piece about the fact that I watch pornography. The first of these statements may seem surprising. The second absolutely should not.

More precisely: to make the second statement may be relatively unusual. But if I gave you my particulars – 29 years old, male, with a reliable internet connection and a working knowledge, gleaned as a teenager, of my browser's "delete history" facility – you could have guessed the underlying detail with a high degree of confidence. I suppose it's possible that I'm an outlier, exposing myself as a total creep by saying this, but I don't think so.

We know that men watching pornography at least occasionally is an absolute given among my peers, who are, I like to think, at the relatively well-adjusted end of the spectrum. In the course of writing this piece I've checked with at least 10 of them, and they all agreed that the same could be said about their friends outside of my own circle. (Sorry, guys.) A Twitter and Facebook trawl of about 45,000 people also turned up a vanishingly small number of men – six – who never watched porn. The tone of several exchanges I had on the subject made it clear that those few conceived of their habits as being in sharp opposition to the mainstream.

These are frustratingly unscientific methods of assessment, partly enforced by the relative paucity of data on the subject, itself the consequence of our embarrassment. Still, there are some pointers available. On Friday, a traffic analysis found that British people click on porn sites more than they do on social networks. A 2008 study found that 86 per cent of young adult men watch porn, 69 per cent at least once a month. And when, a year later, the University of Montreal tried to conduct a study into the views of men who never watched porn, it failed to find a single candidate.

The truth is, even the necessity of doing this sort of groundwork feels a little ridiculous. It seems to me uncontroversial to say, as an absolute minimum, that it is not unusual for men to watch porn. If you were feeling just a little bolder you could surmise that, in fact, a significant majority of men watch porn; that quite a lot of women do, too; and that, among young adults, exposure is nearly universal.

Now the Government is trying to catch up. Last week, David Cameron announced that the major internet service providers had agreed to the introduction of "default-on" porn filters. The months-long debate leading up to that step has felt like a significant moment in the collective understanding of how profoundly our relationship with pornography has changed since high-speed internet became the norm. Apparently, a lot of people who grew up having no option but grot mags at the newsagent have had a nasty shock. They are only now discovering, mostly second-hand or by searching for "sex video internet" on Google, just how accessible, varied and repugnant this stuff can be.

And yet, many speeches and gallons of ink later, we don't seem to have got very much further than the principles that children shouldn't see pornography, and no one should see images of child abuse. We can't even agree on whose responsibility it is to enforce these axioms, on whether it's technically possible, or on whether The Sun should be subjected to the same rules as YouPorn. We certainly haven't managed a mature conversation about what sort of moral framework we want to apply to pornography. To me, the explanation for this seems obvious. Everyone is willing to say: pornography is everywhere. Almost no one is willing to say: and I have seen some of it.

So, um, yes. I have seen some of it. I don't say so with any sense of pride. Also, in the interests of preserving at least a wisp of dignity, I should like to add that it's not, y'know, a hobby. Even so, I guess I know more about it than most of the wide-eyed ingénues who have formed such strong opinions about its impact of late. This is why it seems worth mentioning. In most areas of controversy, the views of the ignorant are at least occasionally balanced by plaintive corrections from the better-informed; in this one, the ignorant, or pseudo-ignorant, have the field almost unopposed. With a very few exceptions (such as the New Statesman's Laurie Penny), no one says, well, you haven't got that quite right, because to do so reveals greater familiarity than we are generally willing to admit.

That squeamishness about detail isn't merely a matter of sociological interest. It has real consequences. It means that the argument about pornography becomes binary: on or off, consensual or exploitative, arousing or repellent. And then, because most of us are instinctively opposed to censorship, we sigh that it's a fact of life, and we just have to put up with all of it. Consider Cameron's speech last week, which featured, among the easy (and, it turned out, ill-considered) applause lines about child protection, only one moment of engagement with the granular detail of porn, in his vow that depictions of rape would be banned – as if there were anything bold or controversial about the idea that videos which normalise so reprehensible a crime should be beyond the pale.

Because he is a politician, and has therefore never seen any pornography ever at all ever, that's about as far as Cameron can go. Probably that's for the best: the really important debates about pornography should not be about legal principles, but ethical ones. Here's where my – oh, God, there's no other word for it – expertise comes in. I can tell you, for example, that if you're interested in watching two people having sex (and see no moral problem in that interest) but not so interested in watching women being treated badly, your options are pretty limited. I can tell you that it is quite common to have 18-year-old girls dressed up in school uniform and filmed in a classroom. I can tell you that condoms are rarely sighted, and that performers in the US – who will simply not get work if they insist on them being used – have contracted serious illnesses as a result.

There is lots more of this detail, but it only gets more specific, and you probably don't want to read about it over your breakfast. Still, it's enormously important. A few years ago, I interviewed The Sun's agony aunt Deidre Sanders, who told me that the biggest change in the make-up of her postbag since she took up the role in 1980 was the precipitous growth in letters from men and women whose relationships had been affected by pornography. I feel pretty confident that I have always been able to keep fantasy and reality distinct, but there will certainly be some people for whom that is not true, and, even if these default-on porn filters delay children's exposure a little, there will certainly be more of them in future. One study found that 90 per cent of content on the most popular porn sites featured physical or verbal abuse against women, and you don't have to be Mary Whitehouse to find that concerning. We need to do something about it, and since we are not going to outlaw pornography altogether, we need to figure out what that might be.

Here's one suggestion. In my own consumption of porn, I have always tried to avoid those tropes that I find unsettling. But in the writing of this piece, I have realised that I am not careful enough. I avoid the misogynist video, but I may be careless about avoiding the site that hosts it; I feel bad about the unprotected sex, but I don't bother going to the great lengths it would require to find the alternative. I am really ashamed about this, and I'm going to take a great deal more care in future. The source of my shame, straightforwardly enough, is not some new-found moral clarity, but the fact that you are now reading this, and so my behaviour has been exposed. For me, at least, the use of pornography has become a semi-public fact.

In isolation, this doesn't mean very much, except that everyone I know is going to laugh at me for a while. More widely, it might mean quite a lot. What if we ditched the stigma carried by pornography in general, and instead attached it, loudly, to the pornography that we consider to be unacceptable? We have seen this principle applied in so many other areas. People are, basically, too lazy to make ethical choices. The only way to get us to do so is to incentivise us with a little bit of shame.

Think of battery farms, of sweat-shop clothes, of – yes – the fight against plastic bags. Pornography is not immune from the behavioural economics that shifted all those battles. If enough people said they sometimes watched porn, and also said that they hated the misogyny that accompanies it, some entrepreneurial spirit would surely intervene. And if there was a porn site that promised me I could surf it without any risk of coming across anything I needed to worry about (there are some out there, but none has reached critical mass), I would visit it exclusively, with enormous gratitude to its creators for taking the effort out of doing the right thing.

It is, I suppose, a call for a wanker's code: a contention that being interested in sex is not the same thing as being interested in violent misogyny, and an appeal for a proper conversation about splitting the one off from the other. Because, yes, we are wankers. But that doesn't mean we have to be shitheads.

Tits, out - The Economist

Accessed 27^th August 2013

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21583661-what-row-about-tabloid-nudity-says-about-sex-and-society-tits-out

Bagehot

Tits, out

What a row about tabloid nudity says about sex and society

Aug 17th 2013 |From the print edition

AN ENGLISHMAN likes a routine: Marmite on his toast, warm beer in his glass, bad teeth in his mouth and, for a couple of million readers of the Sun, a squint at Kelly from Daventry’s boobs on Page 3. Such is the claim made by Britain’s biggest-selling tabloid: that since its topless photos were introduced in 1970 under the new proprietor of the day, Rupert Murdoch, they have become a harmless fixture of national life. Yet, cheekily venerable though it may be, Page 3’s days could be numbered. Its fate casts light on evolving attitudes to sex, feminism and the media; on what has changed in Britain since 1970, and what hasn’t.

People have always complained that Page 3 demeans and objectifies women. But the impetus for a rethink now is new. A year ago Lucy-Anne Holmes, an actor and writer, began an online campaign, No More Page 3, and a petition that has since attracted 114,000 signatures. Her success is salutary. Death threats made recently against female MPs and journalists highlighted the use that deranged misogynists make of Twitter and Facebook; Ms Holmes’s efforts demonstrate how valuable the internet has been for feminists, too. Suddenly women and girls no longer feel like the only person in the office or classroom who cares.

Previous opponents of Page 3 have been dismissed as puritanical killjoys. With the especial venom the tabloids reserve for those who threaten their own interests, the Sunlabelled Clare Short, a former Labour minister who advocated a ban, “fat”, “ugly” and “jealous”. Wisely, today’s campaign is not calling for legislation, nor even for the Sun’s banishment to the top shelf or a minimum age for buyers (the print equivalents of a television watershed). It is politely requesting that Page 3 be discontinued. The Irish version of the Sunrecently did just that. The word is that a revamp may be coming in the British paper, too.

But meanwhile fans of Page 3 are marshalling their arguments, as familiar as the new activism is nimble. One is that critics’ real concern is not sex but class: that the underlying anxiety is not for the women on the page but the (largely) working-class men who ogle them. The snooty prosecutor at the obscenity trial of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”—who asked if the jury would want their servants to read the book—sometimes gets a look in. This defence is itself a form of snobbery—as if Sun readers would not cope without a daily dose of nipples, or are irredeemably sexist.

Then there is the lazy appeal to the sovereignty of the market. That is the line taken by David Cameron and other senior politicians (though 138 other MPs support Ms Holmes). This is a matter for consumers, they say, sometimes proceeding to reject the idea of a ban, even though no one is proposing one. Like most papers, the Sun’s circulation has declined; it has been tarnished by a scandal over phone-hacking and the bribery of public officials, in which dozens of journalists have been arrested. Evidently, however, bigwigs still prefer not to alienate it, or Mr Murdoch. The prime minister’s blasé approach sits uncomfortably with his alarm at the spread of salacious images online.

That is something that definitely has changed. These days, raunch is everywhere—not only on the internet and television, but on advertising hoardings and the sides of buses. Another online campaign is aimed at sanitising the covers of sub-pornographic “lads’ mags”. In this context, Page 3 can scarcely be titillating for anyone over the age of 13. Like the saucy “Carry On” films of the 1960s-70s, or Benny Hill’s puerile comedy sketches, it is more cartoonish than erotic. Britons seem to have an enduring taste for coy, almost evasive smut.

Which is not to say that it is harmless. As with much nastier material, only more so, linking Page 3 to violence is highly speculative. But, given its brand and (despite the falling circulation) its ubiquity, it is silly to deny that the Sun plays a role in shaping views on women. In particular, the attitudes of boys to girls and girls to their own bodies: Page 3 supplies invidious comparators and narrow, retrograde stereotypes.

The paper itself seems to understand that tits are not for kids, and drops them in its family-friendly weekend editions. But children pick up the Sun at bus stops or kitchen tables during the week. In a way, the new, hypersexual environment strengthens the case against Page 3. In the emerging, rough-and-ready rules of the pornofied world, adults can look at what they choose, but children should be shielded where possible.

Turn the page

Besides the issue of whether Page 3 should be scrapped (it should, but voluntarily), there is the question why, in this age of wall-to-wall filth, readers might remain attached to it. Here the fallback plea of the Sun’s editors—that the boobs have become a tradition—may be helpful. Page 3 has been going about as long as the Super Bowl in America: not very, but long enough to become a staple for a couple of generations of men. It has spanned decades in which much of British life has been transformed, not least in off-the-page relations between men and women.

Tough. Traditions can die, and many are unlamented when they do. The time-honoured tradition of displaying girlie calendars in motor garages and other workplaces is now defunct. Even Page 3 itself is not immutable. It ditched surgically enhanced breasts and swore off girls younger than 18; ironic jokes at the models’ expense have gone the way of all flesh. Too prim to arouse yet too lewd for a modern newspaper, the flesh itself is a throwback to a cruder, simpler past.

Encouragingly, in February Mr Murdoch hinted in a tweet that the topless shots might be replaced by pictures of “glamorous fashionistas”. On occasion he has seemed ruthlessly aware that institutions have a half-life. The phone-hacking furore began in 2011 when theNews of the World, the Sun’s much older Sunday complement, was accused of raiding the messages of a murdered schoolgirl. Mr Murdoch closed the paper in a heartbeat.

Why are Women Devouring Fifty Shades of Grey? - by GAIL DINES

Accessed 18th August 2013 
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/27/why-are-women-devouring-fifty-shades-of-grey/

WEEKEND EDITION JULY 27-29, 2012

Sadistic Romance

Why are Women Devouring Fifty Shades of Grey?

by GAIL DINES

The porn industry must be throwing a fit right now. The adult book Fifty Shades of Grey has sold over twenty million copies in record time, and sales are still going strong. How did E.L. James, a first-time author who was a television executive, manage to pull off a feat that has eluded the porn industry—getting women to see sexual cruelty as hot sex? In my interviews with them, porn producers regularly bemoan the fact that they just can’t seem to make porn that appeals to the majority of women.

I can’t say I am surprised that the normally business-savvy porn industry has been bested by a novice, given the somewhat ridiculous advice Adult Video News (the porn industry’s premier trade) journal offered to pornographers interested in attracting more women to their websites. Arguing that only 15% of Internet porn consumers are women,AVN suggests that to attract women, “adult Webmasters need to create sites where the primary elements are interaction and education.” And what would these sites look like? “Such sites would allow women to obtain advice, perhaps during teleconferences with experts, have elements of cybersex, and should play into women’s relationship fantasies” (http://business.avn.com/articles/16315.html).

I can’t imagine women flocking to websites where they can get handy hints from experts mid-arousal. But The AVN article did get something right: women are flocking to a book that plays into, and exploits, “women’s relationship fantasies.” The fantasy they recommended, “a story of how a woman got a rich and powerful boyfriend” because she is good in bed, is very close to the formula James followed. But this story line alone isn’t going to sell to women, as the porn industry knows only too well.

While much of the sex in Fifty Shades is as cruel and sadistic as in mainstream porn, it is expertly packaged for women who want a “fairy tale” ending. In male-targeted porn, the woman is interesting only for as long as the sex lasts. Once done with her, the man is onto the next, and the next, and the next.… She is disposable, interchangeable, and easily replaced. No happy ending here for women.

In Fifty Shades, however, the naïve, immature, bland Anastasia is, for some unfathomable reason, the most compelling woman our rich, sadistic, narcissistic hero has ever met, and he not only kisses her during sex (something you rarely see in Internet hardcore porn) but he doesn’t move on to the next conquest once he has had his wicked way with her.  In fact, he actually marries her and confesses undying love. As one of the female fans I interviewed said, this is like Pretty Woman all over again.

Indeed, Fifty Shades is about as realistic as Pretty Woman. How many prostitutes do you know who end up living in marital bliss with a former john? I would guess about the same number of women who live happily ever after with a man who dictates, in a written contract, what to eat and wear, and when to exercise, wax, and sleep. In my work,
I meet many women who started out like our heroine, only to end up, a few years later, not in luxury homes, but running for their lives to a battered women’s shelter with a couple of equally terrified kids in tow. No happy ending here, either.

In his book on batterers, Lundy Bancroft provides a list of potentially dangerous signs to watch out for from boyfriends. Needless to say, Mr. Grey is the poster boy of the list, not only with his jealous, controlling, stalking, sexually sadistic behavior, but his hypersensitivity to what he perceives as any slight against him, his whirlwind romancing of a younger, less powerful woman, and his Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings.  Any one of these is potentially dangerous, but a man who exhibits them all is lethal.

And yet women of all ages are swooning over this guy and misreading his obsessive, cruel behavior as evidence of love and romance.  Part of the reason for this is that his wealth acts as a kind of up-market cleansing cream for his abuse, and his pathological attachment to Anastasia is reframed as devotion, since he showers luxury items on her. This is a very retrograde and dangerous world for our daughters to buy into, and speaks to the appalling lack of any public consciousness as to the reality of violence against women.

Fifty Shades also reveals just how pornographic our culture has become over the last decade or so. While the old Harlequin romance novels had narcissistic heroes who toyed, sexually and psychologically, with their much younger prey, however remote and emotionally challenged he was, the hero did not have a torture chamber tucked away in his basement.Fifty Shades of Grey is Harlequin on steroids, a kind of romance novel for the porn age in which overt sexual sadism masquerades as adoration and love. New as this is, the ending remains depressingly the same for real women who end up falling for the Mr. Greys of the world.

GAIL DINES is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. Her latest book is Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality (Beacon Press). She a founding member of Stop Porn Culture (stoppornculture.org).

Online porn boom: Liberating minds or damaging brains? by Paul Mason (Economics editor, Newsnight)

Accessed 16^th August 2013http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23700395 

Online porn boom: Liberating minds or damaging brains?

Paul Mason (Economics editor, Newsnight) examines how pornography has changed both in content and availability and whether changing pornography content is affecting how we behave

It's a small industrial unit outside Birmingham and the man in the overalls, conversing casually with me about our respective jobs, is doing a particular kind of manual labour. The kind you need to do if you are a porn actor between takes.

Outside, Laura Macrow, one of Britain's most successful adult movie directors, is getting ready to shoot a car wash scene which all concerned admit is on the traditional side of things. Man plus woman plus sponge… the rest you can do with your imagination.

This shoot will end up on the website of the actress, who charges a subscription to view it. But the big change in online porn - and what's driving the political debate - concerns the rise, over the past five years, of free sites.

Modelled on YouTube, though they of course have nothing to do with it, the free porn sites, which are mostly owned by one private Luxembourg-based company called Manwin, work to a different business model.

Peter Johnson, who runs the Authority for Television On Demand, which regulates on-demand porn in the UK, says: "The change in the business model has meant there is an enormous amount of viewing of porn around the world and particularly in the UK. On some of the free sites statistics suggest the UK accounts for 5% of global traffic flowing to the sites."

Mr Johnson believes there may be as many as 66m visits from the UK, per month, to just one of these sites.

Changing content

On sites like xHamster, also owned by Manwin, you can click straight through - with no splash screen asking your age - to porn that would have been seized and prosecuted in the 1970s, but which is now ubiquitous.

Mr Johnson, who was formerly head of policy at the British Board of Film Classification, says: "I think over the past 15 years there has been a marked change in the nature of pornography being offered. We're talking about a subtext of violence, hair pulling, slapping, spitting, abusive language during sex - the very extreme gender power relationships in which the man is all powerful and the woman is submissive."

And it is an issue of demand as well as supply. Once you got masses of free porn, unregulated in Britain, what happened is what always happens with e-commerce - the providers could see what the users were clicking on most, and the content changed accordingly.

"Over the years I've been involved in regulating this sector, porn producers have started off with ethos of, 'We're not going to go down abusive route we're going to make nice pornography' and have tended to move towards stronger and more abusive material," Mr Johnson says. "That's where the market drives them. That's where customers appear to want more extreme content."

For Laura Macrow, who shoots for regulated TV and mainstream distributors in the United States, it has had the opposite effect. She's had to tone things down:

"We've had to tame things down slightly. We've had to change because of broadcast rules, regulation rules, we have to abide by them and follow what the regulators set us," she says.

Does she worry about the prevalence of coercive imagery in "normal" porn?

"I'm not worried about that. In a movie if a girl asks for that, that's a consensual act which she's wanting, she's asked for it. If it's given to her when she's not, then obviously we'd have to take it away in the edit. I shoot for everything on a platform and fulfil that guideline as I don't want to overstep that mark."

Meanwhile the broadband internet has changed porn in another significant way: interaction.

'Free to be different'

Victoria, a student, works as a webcam performer from her bedroom in England's Midlands. Among her specialisms is sado-masochism and her clients - men and women - pay by the minute to interact with her. She says porn plays a useful social function.

"I think what I do, and what pornographers do, is so powerful and beautiful and positive: we help people realise it is OK if you don't want to be heterosexual. It's ok if you don't want to have the same kind of sex with the same person for the rest of your life. It's ok if you want to buy certain props or do things that are not openly discussed. It doesn't make you a bad person and it does not mean these things are bad things."

She rejects the idea that porn "objectifies" women, per se, and though she's worried about the prevalence of coercive imagery, she says it's a question of education and parental responsibility, not censorship:

"I don't ever claim that I help women in what I do but I think it's wrong to perpetuate a myth that it is helping men treat women badly. Lots of young boys do have access to porn that is damaging to women - and all I have to say to that is someone is not teaching these young boys that this is not real."

There are more than 3,000 women doing webcam work on one big site alone, in Britain, so it's almost impossible to even know what's in the content, let alone to police it. The fact remains that in the space of a decade, the computer screen has become a window into a wide range of sexual activity, with a greater emphasis on coercive imagery. So what's it doing to people?

Cindy Gallop set up the website Make Love Not Porn because of a change in behaviour which she attributes to porn.

"Because we have no socially acceptable language of sex in the real world, the language of porn has rushed in to fill that gap," she says. "When people are engaging in sex, men will feel an imperative to use modes of address to the partners which they hear in porn, which are not necessarily the way you would like to use to talk to someone they want to have great sex with."

Feigning pleasure

Gail Dines, professor of sociology at Wheelock College, Boston, says women report peer pressure to take part in activities, sometimes early in a relationship, that were not seen as mainstream a generation ago, but which are performed in pornography without any prior negotiation:

"It's having a profound impact. These young men who have been brought up on porn sex are expecting girlfriends to perform porn sex and these women feel often overwhelmed," she says. "When I go across the US and the UK, the women talk to me about being overwhelmed at having to perform certain types of acts, of having to pretend to like certain acts, look a certain way, moan a certain way."

She cites the changing content of porn, and its widespread availability, as the source of the behaviour change:

"Years ago when a boy, hormones raging, would find his father's Playboy he kind of got glimpses into a world of coy smiles, women bent over in a corn field. Today when he gets into the internet - via a smartphone, computer - he is catapulted into a world of sexual cruelty. There is very little soft-core porn on the internet - it has been wiped away by the industry. It is reshaping their sexuality, their sexual template and their sexual identities."

So does violent porn cause violent behaviour? It's hard to find conclusive evidence in clinical research. What is clearer is the relationship between escalating extremity of the images, and addiction.

Paula Hall is a psychologist who treats people for sex and porn addiction. She has seen demand for therapy take off.

"Some of the clients I've worked with who are addicted to porn have experienced really significant consequences as a result. Fifty per cent have lost a relationship because of it, 20% have suffered from mental health issues, 25% have sexual dysfunctions but critically about 20% have experienced a serious desire to want to commit suicide."

She is particularly worried about adolescent males. "There is more and more research suggesting porn is having a direct impact on the brain. Particularly on the adolescent brain," she says. "We know our brains thrive on novelty. What pornography is doing is giving us super normal stimuli, it's exaggerating what is a natural and instinctive desire to seek out attractive natural partners, but it is exaggerating that - the brain is becoming more wired towards those pornographic images than it is towards partnered sex."

Victoria, the webcam performer, says she can see signs of addiction among her clients, who are typically married men.

"It is addictive, it has the potential to be addictive, it's easy, it's friendly and it's warm and a lot of these clients know when they log on, I have a rapport and relationship with them. I think they forget how much money they spend and how much time they spend on me as well. Do I think it's damaging? Yes, but I don't think it's my place to tell them to stop."

Opt in plan

The government has signalled it will require internet service providers to filter out porn, unless users specifically opt in. Within the industry, views on this are mixed.

Laura Macrow thinks ISP opt-in and filtering is a good thing:

"I'm not scared by it. I shoot movies for all over the world. If people want to watch porn they should opt into it. I don't think it will have an effect on us. You will still have the people that are inquisitive these days and want to watch it. You tell someone not to do something anyway they will go ahead and try it."

Victoria, who makes a living performing via webcam, objects to the crackdown. "Porn has always found a way around this. David Cameron needs to stop trying to control people under a banner of protecting them. It's protecting nobody. It makes our jobs harder. It perpetuates the idea that what is not normal is damaging."

But the current debate on opting in or out of filters may miss the point. Never before have so many men had so much access to imagery of feigned violence, coercion and verbal abuse aimed at women, for free.

The absence of any firm evidence as to its effects so far is not necessarily reassuring. For the same language and verbal imagery is already there in the male-teen culture of computer gaming, and - as we've seen in recent high-profile trolling cases - has spilled over into the social media spectacularly.