Channel 4's Campaign for Real Sex season has garnered much publicity this week, mainly because of the announcement that a new show, Sex Box – in which a couple have sex in a box and then emerge, glistening, to be interviewed about it by Mariella Frostrup – is intended to "reclaim sex from pornography". Leaving aside the obvious question as to whether the public would rather a) watch attractive people going at it while alone, or b) imagine slightly less attractive people going at it in an opaque box in the company of a studio audience, I'm suspicious of this idea that "real" sex needs to be reclaimed from porn. Is it just a zeitgeisty buzz-phrase concocted by television executives to trick viewers into some kind of sexy Schrödinger box-watching scenario, or does it genuinely reflect a crisis for modern sexuality?
It's difficult to get away from talk of how porn is corrupting the nation's children. It's everywhere. We're facing a nationwide default block on pornography (or, as David Cameron probably calls it "that evil corroder of childhoods") and it was announced this week that a Cambridge study has found people addicted to sexually explicit material showed similar brain responses to alcoholics and drug addicts.
Meanwhile, documentary InRealLife takes a bleak look at the relationship teenagers have with an increasingly dominant internet. It opens with two 15-year-old boys, Ryan and Ben, cavalierly discussing the various types of pornography with film-maker Beeban Kidron. "Rough sex", explains Ben, "is like, manhandling the girl around." They're both grinning their little faces off. What about "cream pie"? "Ugh, I don't even know what that is," says Ryan, but his friend does. These boys, we are supposed to feel, represent the faces of modern teenagehood – a doomed generation zombified by hardcore pornography, viewing women as nothing more than a series of orifices, topped off with gel nails.
Upcoming documentary Porn on the Brain will take that stance. It's fronted by former Loaded editor Martin Daubney, a man who, having pulled a complete 180, is now concerned about the effects of pornography on the next generation. Forgive me for sounding cynical, but I'm struck by the number of former lads' mags employees who, since porn became topical, have been crawling out of the woodwork proclaiming that "things have gone too far", as though all the subjugation and objectification of the female body just snuck up on them as they were busy copping an eyeful of Melinda Messenger's cleavage sometime back in '97 ("nothing to do with me, officer"). I have to say, there's a lot of regret been professed since circulation rates began to fall and positions for anti-porn talking heads started cropping up.
The moral panic over porn has been incredibly convenient for those lads' mags journalists whose "innocently sexist" features on Britain's Best Boobs have been eclipsed by hardcore arse play, but Daubney does make some salient points, especially when he refers to a study by the University of East London that found 20% of boys were "dependent on porn to have sex". It's a worrying statistic, but it's important to remember that we have yet to see the true impact of ubiquitous porn on the psyches of the next generation, because they're all still kids. Those who have grown up with super-fast broadband and what rightwing newspapers might describe as "a smorgasbord of degrading, violent pornographic images" are only just getting to the age where they're experimenting sexually with persons other than themselves. To diagnose them all as alienated sex robots seems a tad unfair.
That's not to say that I don't think the way that female performers are dominated, dehumanised and humiliated in much of the pornography online has consequences. We're seeing, anecdotally at least, young men professing how "real girls" just don't live up to the girls in porn, while the young women themselves express frustration at being constantly expected to behave like shaven performing sex monkeys with no gag reflex. Ryan, InRealLife's compulsive pornography user, describes his daily wank as "the only time I feel disconnected from the world", but it's clear that he's actually finding it hard to connect with anyone. "It's ruined the whole sense of love," he admits. He talks about how the girls who agree to act out the pornographic fantasies their classmates watch on screen are immediately labelled "slags". "That's the thing that kills me, seeing these amazing girls with such nice personalities, and seeing that guys have already gone and done that to them …" he says. It's a depressing thought, but not one that's coming from someone so addled by erotic imagery that they're incapable of interrogating their own behaviour. This, perhaps perversely, gives me hope.
A recent online viral sensation, a short film called Noah, also conveyed how, despite the fact that the internet is frequently hailed as a triumph for human connectivity, it can increase feelings of isolation. The film plays out entirely on a teenager's computer screen as he experiences his relationship imploding, only to resort to navigating through the random, masturbating strangers on Chatroulette in the hope of finding someone, anyone to talk to. It is this despondent bunch of masturbators that Michael Gove was targeting when he hilariously suggested that teenagers send one another romantic poetry instead of sexting. Apart from wondering what Gove finds so terrible about teenagers expressing themselves sexually by sending one another filthy texts and images (provided it's consensual, no one is being exploited, and you're making sure your face isn't in the picture, where's the beef?), I was shocked to apparently discover that our minister for education has clearly never spent any significant amount of time with a real-life teenager. If he had, he wouldn't be suggesting that they attempt to find beauty in a world of disembodied cocks, because he'd know that, for a young person, expressing any kind of authentic emotion is social suicide. Sexting is not something that is ever going to go away, and "jizz on my tits", still means what it always has, even if you're wearing a cloak and saying it in Latin
("In mammis tuis emittere volo", I'm told).
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that poetry and porn-blocking are not the answer. Nor is, as the Telegraph has argued, making porn a central part of sex education, because, unfortunately, sex doesn't even seem to be a central part of sex education (how can you "reclaim" sex from porn when no one's telling you what real sex actually is?) No wonder teenagers are filling the information void with smut. It's time we looked at websites such as Make Love Not Porn, which clearly explains the differences between "porn world" and "real world" ("Porn world: women have no hair down there. Real world: some women shave, some women don't"), and think about making them part of a lesson plan rather than leaving the next generation of young men to work out for themselves how, actually, real-life girls are quite nice. Though I'm sure they're perfectly capable of doing that, because they're not the numpties some seem to think they are, it's best not leave it down to chance.
