Porn is available everywhere, not only on TV
Posted: Friday, December 09, 2011
by Tharuna Devchand
There's only one thing that I like about porn, it has an incredible ability to make people uncomfortable just by the mention of it. You have to be a different kind of person to chat to the person in the bank queue about your porn fetishes. Sick, perhaps.
With Top TV’s fingers caught in the porn cookie jar, the debate for and against porn has been buzzing in the media and, for some reason, the public really wants to be heard on this one.
Sex sells. While Top TV advocates a strict restriction policy and limited access, life doesn’t. Music videos, advertisements, song lyrics, magazines, films, sitcoms, even cartoons are saturated with sexual references, allusions to sex and sex. In fact, sex has become so popular that teenage shows deal largely with the idea of it and the importance of relationships. It’s sad.
When I was a child, the last thing on my mind was a relationship. I remember obsessively watching films like Pollyanna, Annie, Tom Thumb and Hans Christian Anderson. From what I remember, relationships in films were always for older people, they were something you did after you befriended a dog, broke your leg while climbing a tree and left a frog in your governess’s dress pocket.
More recently The Twilight Saga, Harry Potter and the Narnia series have all been aimed at the younger audience, despite the older fans, and all have a strong focus on young love. Thanks to the resulting peer pressure, kids are getting their hearts broken at ages as young as eight and are likely to grow up with wounded self-esteems and warped perceptions of their image.
Eight-year-old kids don’t understand the complexities of love or being in a relationship but, I assume from what they see and hear, it all seems to tell them that love is about being physical in some way. According to them, an on-the-lips kiss is the start to a magical romance. The more physically explicit the content they are exposed to, the more sexually fuelled they will expect love to be.
The issue is not porn. It’s a capitalist society’s exploitation of sex because it sells so damn well. The monetary gain overrode the moral stand and considered consequential effects years ago, and now the situation, like most global crises that we face, has spun out of control.
With the increased access to information and the inability to control the colossal realm of the Internet, anyone can get hold of anything. Porn can be downloaded and viewed while sitting at the dinner table having a family meal — for free.
Porn begets porn. It spreads faster than a Cell C’s high-speed network and whoooshes through schools, homes, offices, libraries and parks. The offending article is no longer something tangible that needs to be hidden or that will only be shared between friends. It’s now a file that can be ripped and copied and transferred invisibly. As the demand increases, the industry increases, people become intrigued and try their own DIY videos and others are lured into it professionally by the profits.
On campus, male friends would brag about their porn collections, share free access porn websites, copy DVDs of porn for each other and even give me details about their self-satisfying sessions. Whenever I seemed fazed by their confessions they would mock me and say that it’s normal and that everybody does it. In fact, I was even recommended to watch porn so that “I would know what to do" when the time came.
Maybe that’s where a solution lies. There’s an increased expectancy on performance with the media oozing sex 24/7, but the channels for healthy education are limited. Going back to the basics with how-to lessons and one-on-ones with kids may help curb the problem, not shutting down secure porn channels on a satellite TV network.
Just saying.
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Top-level comments on this article: (4 total)nice postthanks
It's a great opening sentence, I love it. I love reading your articles, they're entertaining and they always make me think. Porn bothers me because of the exploitation, but I agree, censorship isn't going to change anything. It's funny that when a problem gets really out of control like this the options for solution get narrower and narrower - until there's only one thing left that can actually work, which is real connection, one on one, as you say.Ta Jen:)
Interesting take on the matter[--good article!!!
SteveThank you Steve
Passionate, enraged, indignant, smart, insightful and not only all of that, you are a great writer.Wow... I'm gobsmacked! Thanks:)I used lots of words, but you used ONE that I have not heard of. I love the sound of it.Its like flabbergasted... Speechless :)
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