Porn and Sexy Ladies

Strangely, over the last week, the subject of porn seems to have risen its head a number of times. (Ooops – that sounds like some dreadful pun. But maybe I’m just being smutty!)

It started last weekend, with a small group of friends, after a couple of drinks. I have no recollection of how the conversation started, but I do remember that it ended up with two friends, one male, one female, insisting that all men look at porn.

For reasons I don’t want to get into here and now, I got upset about it. I don’t mind admitting that it is something I am very uncomfortable with. I can intellectualise it, and reason that if it’s not harming anyone involved in its production, and is only exposed to consenting adults, it should not be a problem.

But as a woman, I have to say it makes me feel cheapened. I guess it doesn’t really matter if Joe Blogs wants to look at porn, but I would be upset if a man I was involved with was looking at it. I also worry about how children view it, how it affects their attitudes to women and most of all, how scarily easy it is to access on the Internet.

Given my feelings on the subject, you can imagine my surprise when I got a phone call from my youngest child’s teacher.

Having reassured me that my child was not in any trouble or at risk of life or limb, she went on to explain that there had been a little ‘incident’ at school.

It transpires that two of the children in the class had noticed the cards in phone boxes, advertising the services of… well… prostitutes. One of the children (both are boys) had decided that some internet research was required.

And so, when his mother left him for five minutes to print out information for his Olympics project, he decided to do a search for “sexy ladies”. What he discovered, was undoubtedly more than any child of his age (7 yrs old) could have predicted. I did not see them myself, but I understand that they were graphic images. Nice.

The following day, having stashed his print outs into his school bag, he decided to show a couple of his class mates – with my child being one of them.

Clearly, the two children that were shown the images were shocked.

“They were totally inappropriate, Mum.” I was confidently told (by my 8 yr old). And I don’t doubt it.

They told the teacher that the child had inappropriate pictures in his bag and all hell broke loose. The child was dragged off to see the deputy head, his parents were called in and the child was left in no doubt about the seriousness of his actions.

And that’s where I started to get concerned.

Had the child done this before, and been told it was inappropriate behaviour, I would have supported the school’s actions. But as it is, he had never done this before and could not possibly have known what he was going to encounter.

So do I blame the parents? Knowing them as I do, no, I don’t. I cannot believe there is a single parent out there that hasn’t, at least once, taken their eye off the ball for just a moment. And that’s all that had happened.

When I caught up with the father of the other child that was shown the print offs, I was interested to hear him also voice his concern that the child should not be made to feel shamed. In fact, there was a part of me that could see a little glimmer of entrepreneurial spirit in his actions – although I suspect his parents have greater hopes for him than his becoming the next Hugh Heffner!

Without in any way wishing to diminish my child’s concern at what he had seen, I did find myself smiling on the way home in the car.

As I said at the outset, I do have a bit of an issue with porn. Sorry, but as a woman, I just don’t like it. But any worries I may have had, about teaching my children to be respectful of women and their bodies, seem (for the time being at least) not to be an issue.