Porn and our limitless appetite for it is one of the trickiest issues of our time.
The online world is flooded with every conceivable kind of sexual image as many as 30% of all our online searches are for porn.
The issue seems particularly fraught around teenage boys,speak to parents of almost any eleven-year-old and the anxiety is always the samemright now he might be happily playing football and chatting with his grandmother but within a few months the hormones will have kicked in and the internet will play some limitless and pretty daunting temptations in front of him.
The parents wouldn't want to deny their offspring sexuality.It's just there in protest at the way at what he sees online is going to mold that sexuality.
The worries tend to go like this,Porn gives boys an unrealistic picture of female designs,it divorces sex from emotions particularly those of kindness respect and love,it degrades both parties through fantasy and amorality.Banning and blocking porn isn't going to be the answer . When people eat badly we don't try to stop them eating at all,we hope to improve their diet,the same move should apply to porn.
You can't abolish the stuff and the sexual drives that feed it,so the goal has to be to try to make better porn more widely available.Better porn isn't stuff that even more thrilling or exciting or conversely less explicit,it is better in the more general sense of being better for us which really means less adults with the rest of our lives looking at a lot of porn generally leaves us feeling disconnected and hollow. That's because it doesn't seem linked to anything else we value in the rest of our lives it's merely about sex rather than being also about other things we care about like 'love,self-understanding,kindness or even intelligence.
The ancient Greeks weren't like this.Many of their statues with deeply erotic but at the same time they were dignified and intelligent in spirit.Sex wasn't for the Greeks some dirty thing cut off from the rest of life,it was in the middle of life something you could discuss without shape and that could be venerated along with other good things .
The ancient Hindus felt the same way which is why they curved so many of their temples with imagery that was at once erotic and full of maturity and humanity.Nowadays we don't as in previous Christian Aires,ban porn all together,but we leave it in a dark corner away from the mainstream respectability and intelligence. We have left porn largely in the hands of people who don't seem to be much interested in anything apart from sex and making a lot of money fast.Even the aesthetic appearance of websites signals the problem almost every porn site in the online world is garish,vulgar,loud treating customers and models like desperate beasts. Overall there's no need to be negative about porn just because of how most of it is today.
In 1800 a great many people offering medical services were quacks. What changed the image of medicine was that serious thoughtful and honorable people went into that field.
It takes up too much time and it leaves most people feeling ashamed.
None of that is necessary.
The solution isn't a banned porn,but to make it better.