James - excellent article. Glad you're coming round to Germaine Greer!

I agree the author's ideas are simplistic and insulting to blokes. Ideas like: "He has learnt from pornography what women are, and what rights he has in relation to them. It doesn’t matter whether or not a woman is keen, he will go ahead and exercise his “rights” regardless." Are men the puppets of pornography, unable to formulate the most basic morals of their own? They don't have families? Mothers? Fathers? Girlfriends?

And surely in the *vast* majority of porn women aren't "openly crying", they're (pretending to) enjoy it. To find it "difficult to describe [internet porn] as anything but pure woman hatred" is rubbish. I would find it difficult to describe it as anything other naked people in sexual poses designed to turn others on. Isn't it? Did I miss something?

Then again, all those who say "women in porn freely choose to be there" aren't allowing for the complexity of the sex industry. Many women are there freely, others have been steered through a dark course of abuse and manipulation.

I agree with SJF (and the author) that we're yet to discover how widespread access to porn will affect culture. It's pretty self-evident to say that most 13-year-old boys are having a pretty studious gander these days. Praps we will find it's overkill. As I'm sure I've said before on these pages, my husband looks back on his first forays into the pornographic world with affection. It was difficult to aquire, so treasured and hidden. There was an erotic romance to its preciousness that boys these days don't experience.

It's rare to find wise writing on pornography. We don't need sweeping, simplistic pronouncements from either camp. Porn is neither entirely evil nor entirely unproblematic. For every girl who paid their way through law school, there's another who discovered heroin dulled the pain. But it is here to stay. So we need to decide, as a community, how to deal with it.

And the religious nutters also need a voice. So we can all, you know, ignore it.

Despite the author's opinion to the contrary, the latest empirical evidence I have seen shows that the increase in the availability of porn - and in particular it's cost to the "consumer" - has created a significant reduction in the incidence of sexual violence.

Also, the percentage of women who regularly access such internet sites has increased significantly, so it's not a one-sided debate.

The purchase of "appliances and accessories" via the internet by women is also booming, now that the face-to-face aspect has been eliminated and the world-wide economics of the industry are staggering.

Any moral aspects are an entirely different matter but I think they are more a symptom than the cause of a possible decline in social morality.

The value of human life has never been cheaper and everything is becoming more and more disposable, including relationships.

"James - excellent article. Glad you're coming round to Germaine Greer!"

The Germ did not write that article and besides she's into boys where I am not.

I have been to art exhibitions where people will rave how wonder the art is and I think it is crap. So what in one persons view is fantastic, is in the view of another a load of crap.

What people seem to forget is that porn is exploiting what is natural male desire. It seems that the moment the first camera was invented, what is classified as porn became a business. For many years it was a black market activity.

Vanilla no you are not missing something when you wrote that porn is about poses designed to turn someone on.

A few years ago some feminists came out and claimed that Cassanova hated women. The great seducer who put the womans pleasure above his own and spent large sums of money in order to seduce a woman, was in fact a woman hater.

A few thoughts come to mind in that these women who make these claims are either uncomfortable with heterosexuality in general or perhaps more accurately, uncomfortable male heterosexuality, just maybe they are uncomfortable with their own sexual desires and project this onto men?

Who Knows?

I resent the implication that my teenage daughter will be so ignorant of the world around her that she'll be vulnerable to a marauding pack of brainless p*rn beasts, one of whom will be her brother. It's one thing to consider the impact of the internet on future gender relations, it's another to speculate that women of the future will all have to move to some non-existent, porn-free island to avoid being ravished by addled males.

Both the article and most of the comments fail to understand the new ways young people are negotiating everything about their relationships in the digital world. I don't claim to understand them either, but I do know that technology is used to facilitate your old fashion teen romance and that a well placed knee is as effective as ever.

chainsmoker

'your old fashion teen romance and that a well placed knee is as effective as ever.'

Are you saying that we introduce martial arts to the multitudes of kids with sexually transmitted diseases throughout indigenous communities.

Some of the posts are overly reactive and emotional by arguing that an attack on violent porn is an attack on all men.

There is no doubt that violent porn, whether it depicts men or women perpetrating violence, is not what would be considered a healthy activity. Increasing reports linking hardcore porn to violent sex crimes cannot be simply ignored. The porn referred to by the author is more than just a quick purchase of a nudie magazine from a news agent, it is full on violence, degradation and exploitation.

It is all very well to talk about freedom of the individual, but what if one of these free individuals obsessed by the image of porn acted out these fantasies in real life. It happens and the prevalence of violent porn correlates with increases in rape and abuse of children and women. Like in all 'free' societies there is often a compromise between the rights of the individual and the rights of the group.

In the Little Children are Sacred Report, porn and exposure to sexually explicit material to children from a young age has contributed to abuse in many Aboriginal communities.

Link to report is here:
http://www.nt.gov.au/dcm/inquirysaac/

Violence in the media (porn or non-porn related) has been proven to be de-sensitising particularly to the young who are still developing biologically and emotionally to find their moral compass and establish a sense of empathy etc. The killing of the young Bulger boy in England was perpetrated by children who had just viewed a very violent film called “Child’s Play”. Reports at the time highlighted the behaviours that were acted out from the movie.

The parents have to take responsibility too but in a society with children more and more at home alone and greater access to information via the Net, it is also society’s problem and it is another serious issue that is ignored because of business interests.

Detractors of violent porn are not anti-men but anti-violence and you have to ask yourself is our society better off with it or without it.