Sex has become a bit of a cultural non-event. Britney Spears gyrates half naked on our televisions, the Playboy bunny frequents our tracky dacks and doona covers and the Brownlow is a ratings spectacular not because of the footballers and their achievements but because of the WAGs (wives and girlfriends) in dresses that are oh so glitteringly brown and… low.
This week on Open House Clive Hamilton, author of Rescuing Sex from Pornography and Professor of Ethics at the Australian National University, joins Leigh to talk about sex and its evil twin pornography.
"Over the last ten years… pornography has gone to the darkest recesses of sexual behaviour on the internet," Clive told Leigh, emphasising the path that it's taken from the odd picture of a "naked man or woman to more extreme acts that have been dubbed 'bonzo' porn". The average age that children are now exposed to pornography is 8 and Clive attributes this to the ease of access to pornography that children now have on their computers and phones.
Society, however, also has a large role to play in this pornographic blurring of boundaries. At a recent visit to Dymocks, Clive was shocked to find a Collected First 10 Years of Playboy book sitting next to the 'great holiday fiction' and 'school holiday reads' in the window display. "When I brought this to the shop assistant's attention," Clive explained to Leigh, "her response was 'it's not really porn anymore is it?'".
It seems that the boundary between pornography and mainstream culture has all but been dissolved when it becomes socially acceptable to view pornography as "not really porn" and Clive cannot emphasise enough how important it is to stand up to this cultural shift before it's too late.
It may very well be the case that "we've reached a stage where [the accessibility of pornography] cannot be controlled," however, as Clive explained to Leigh, we still have a voice and what we need is to use it. "We need a strong public voice to say, 'no, it's not O.K.'"
To hear the rest of Leigh and Clive's frank discussion about this issue plaguing Gen Y and beyond, tune in to their interview here:
Open House: Saving Sex From Porn by 899lightfm