UK Prime Minister David Cameron has announced a major campaign against online pornography, particular images that depict rape or child sexual abuse. Cameron's programme (note the Brit spelling) takes it a step further: UK Internet users will have to opt in to access to pornographic sites; default setting on new accounts will be preset with filters that prevent access to pornographic images. "These images normalise sexual violence against women – and they are quite simply poisonous to the young people who see them," said Cameron of the most violent images. The Church of England, a major investor in internet service providers, has since 2011 threatened to divest if ISPs and search engines didn't do more to control the amount of pornography accessible online. A graphic in that story notes that online pornography in a $60 billion (that's a "b") a year industry.
The more interesting stat to me, however, is one that notes that a third of UK teens learned about sex from online porn rather than from their parents or sex education classes. That reminded me of an incident during a year of teaching religion at a Chicago Catholic high school: During a conversation about sex and ethics, it became clear that a lot of the information the young men were getting about sex came from pornography; further conversation (and their own writing) revealed that what they actually want from sex–expressions of love and care–was the exact opposite of what they saw on the videos. We had a good conversation about sex, love, and pornography, but I wondered if that was unusual in a church school.
The UK government's new attempts to rein in online porn in that country will likely protect children (and adults) from images that aren't good for them; it will hopefully also protect child victims of sexual abuse. But it won't replace the need for parents and kids (and adults in general)–and I'd add churches–from having good conversations about sex, and especially about the meaning of "good sex," which is more than the moral question of whether sex is allowed or not in a relationship. That kind of sex you'll never see in a video.
