Thomas More Institute

Perhaps the only social phenomena that could be attributed solely to the internet over the last 20 years has been the meteoric rise in the use of pornography. Like all vices pornography is nothing new but the pervasiveness of it online has led to discussions of whether it should be filtered out (censored) at source by the state or whether privately by individual households or users.

Recently this discussion has taken on more urgency as evidence is emerging that children as young as 8 are regularly accessing pornographic materials online. Quite apart from the damage that such material so easily leads to with young people (not to mention adults as well) is the concern that such widespread use of pornography is harming young people’s expectations of how sexual relationships should be conducted. This concern is particularly acute with boys who are even losing sight of what ‘consent’ means in relation to sex, and who increasingly feel they have an ‘absolute entitlement to have sex with girls, any time, any place, any where, with whomsoever they wished’.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers recently passed a motion calling for teachers to be trained to give ‘age appropriate’ lessons to students regarding sex and pornography and the BBC aired a discussion on the subject of parenting and pornography. These are timely though one might wish for even more attention than a splash in the papers and a resolution from an annual professional conference, and a radio broadcast, for these matters have wide-reaching implications about how we view sex as a society and, crucially, the manner in which we create the next generation of Britons.

Importantly, ‘consent’ is a social construct. It is rooted in human nature and the basic need that humans have not only for sex and procreation but also for love and commitment. But as with any social construct it needs maintaining and so it is perfectly reasonable to say that it should be taught in school. But consent on its own is not a simple matter of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It has to be informed to be true consent, and it is the process of teaching informed consent that pornography interferes with by encouraging models of behaviour that, while manifestly sexual have little or nothing besides to do with the real world.

In order to correct the misinformation coming from pornographers it will be necessary to be in possession of what is normative for sexual behaviour. This goes beyond conducting a population-wide survey of what most people do and into the realm of saying that one kind of sex is intrinsically good while another is bad. Informed consent is invariably the most readily accepted feature of any sexual relationship that government, schools, parents and social organisations are willing to support en masse but it is worth considering that, when taken in isolation, consent is not strong enough to offer a principled argument to teenage boys to avoid looking at pornography. After all, if a teenage boy finds a woman willing to act out whatever bizarre ideas he may have then, according to the rhetoric of consent alone, that is fine and whether pornography is unrealistic or not is just a red herring.

The reality is of course that consent is used as a proxy for a raft of more complex values including (but not limited to) respect, autonomy, procreation, commitment and love. All of these need patience and a healthy dose of realism that pornography has always been incapable of – one of the reasons why it has frequently been censored.

Consent is of course a serious issue for individuals in sexual relationships but for wider society it is actually procreation that ought to loom large in any debate about sexual relationships. Consent remains vital whatever the context, but it does so because coercive relationships, while not only harming those involved, also have the potential to harm children as well. These children may be planned or they may not be, but when they arrive this fact is irrelevant. Children need to be loved by their mother and father and with this goes respect, commitment and autonomy, all values that inhere in healthy sexual relationships as well. But without procreation we just have ‘consent’, and if that is all we have, then there is no principled argument against 12-year olds looking at porn.