What a cat I put among the pigeons last week by suggesting, in answer to a question about pornography at a literary festival, that it should be considered suitable for pupils to watch and analyse this material in schools. I was accused, on social media of course, of being a danger to innocent children, and, yes, I received my first online death threat.
What, I wondered, do so-called grown-ups think our youngsters are up to when it comes to sex? The internet is the wild west of the information age, and the younger generation is far more adept than the older ones at gaining access to its more unsavory territories.
Teenagers will always be drawn to the raunchier aspects of whatever culture is available to them. This would once have been a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, passed around the classroom with a giggle, disguised beneath the cover of Calculus for Beginners.
In the 1990s there were the lads’ mags, and lots of work for any feminist mother trying to persuade her sons that the exploitation of women – putting semi-nude pictures of them on a bedroom wall – was not a good idea. That was a difficult one, because you didn’t want your kids to think sex was dirty or to make them afraid to share their interest in it with their parents. You just wanted them to know that women should never be used or objectified.
Now it’s a smartphone, a tablet or a laptop, always in the pocket or the bag, always ready for a selfie; and parents should know what the technology is being used for. It’s generally not just phoning home to reassure Mum and Dad they’re safe, or looking up the meaning of a word on the internet.
As a Baby Boomer who grew up during the sexual revolution, I’ve always laughed at the idea that a woman’s lot was to “lie back and think of England”. Our sex education back then tended to concentrate on fear of pregnancy, infection and loss of respectability – as, I’m told, is often the case today.
But we had free, reliable contraception, Aids was unheard of and we made it our business to find out about our pleasure. Books like Our Bodies Ourselves gave us the information, and the Women’s Liberation Movement encouraged us to become familiar with our genitals with a mirror and a torch.
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