“I just don’t see any reason to be a
feminist,” the young woman walking behind me declares to her male companion.
“Not in today’s world”.
She
obviously hasn’t heard that the average salary gap between male and female
graduates doing similar jobs increased to fifty per cent last year. She’s also
obviously never clicked on one of those pop-up porn ads on the internet.
The
nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries were defined by the inability of our moral
and ethical maturity to keep pace with our intellectual curiosity and
technological innovation. In the nineteenth, machines and engineering were
going to make everybody’s lives better; we promptly began sending children to
work in factories and down coal mines, while we got a head-start on polluting
our environment.
Then
came the twentieth. No sooner had Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, et al revealed
the beauty of sub-atomic science, than we used their discoveries to create the
most terrible weapons ever devised.
Now
we’re able to link the world’s computers – and therefore their users – in a
grand, universal mind. Like all minds, beneath the surface of this one races a
strong current of sex. Not, in itself, a bad thing – except that our universal
mind appears to be a drooling, sexually retarded sociopath.
Click
on one of those ads – or, like the academic authors of The Porn Report, just Google “free porn” – and you’re immediately
confronted by sites with names like “Eighteen and Abused”, and “College Girls
Exploited”. Although we’re assured the girls are all over eighteen, most look
considerably younger.
Once
upon a time, in order to see a young woman kneeling naked on a bathroom floor while a muscle-bound goon relaxes his grip on her throat just long enough to
make her drink a dog-bowl full of her own urine, you had to actually be looking
for it.
It’s
naive, I know, to expect much porn to depict real, loving, joyful sex. Fair
enough but, far from love, most of this stuff seems to express hatred – worse,
contempt – of women.
Follow
the links long enough, and you can end up somewhere called “ZooTube”. You might
think this is a site devoted to amusing footage of our furry friends; you’d be
wrong. It caters to men for whom the gagging, strangulation, hair-pulling,
face-slapping, spitting and name-calling of “regular” porn is no longer degradation
enough; men so jaded they can only be turned on by seeing women fucked by dogs,
horses, and anything in between.
I’m
not strictly anti-porn. Done properly, it can be a source of fun for couples
and release for singles. But a lot of porn used to have an edge of naïveté
that’s been lost as it’s become more extreme; it’s crossed the line from sexy
to ugly. Me, I love women – and it’s in no way a turn-on to see them treated so
brutally.
Internet
porn is as much a sign of our moral retardation as the nuclear arms race was
last century. It’s little wonder we can’t have a grown-up discussion about
issues like gay marriage; it’s got less to do with religious belief than the
fact that, when it comes to sex, at least half our species are morons.
