An Abhorrent Influence To Talk About

Fairfax and Age Newspaper journalist Sarah Gill with the aid of her latest article "Sex Ed Missing The Point" has placed herself at the forefront of a renewed battle on the place that pornorgraphy has within the lower year levels of Secondary Education.

Gills premise is that although the pornographic industry worth billions of dollars is here to stay, we should at least educate young people to be able to critique the explicit and implicit messages built into pornographic imagery.

Sarah Gill is absolutely right. Not only because exposure to pornographic material kicks in with considerable ease at ages as low as eleven, if we're able to invest time energy and resources into enabling young people to critique Monet Bronte and Bach then it ought to also be an equally high priority to do likewise with pornorgraphy. A material that's able to profoundly influence quite adversely how young men and women think about themselves and each other.

At the absolute coalface of what pornorgraphy purports to tell us about ourselves it is that women are an object to be used at will by men, although this theme of a dominant being does have some variations to it such as those that occur within same sex pornorgraphy of either gender.

Within hetrosexual pornorgraphy however the elephant that's in the room that isn't often spoken about is that this type of imagery portrayal of men is also damaging to the male gender in terms of the cultural parameters it sets and normalises, as indeed are the adverse effects of these for women.

In an age within which we're trying to eradicate domestic violence from our social and private lives, how can we not be talking about pornorgraphy in the same way we talk about smoking leading to cancer? To not do so almost seems negligent.

Not only because pornorgraphy should be exposed for the very low value it places on the lives of women and men, but also because we should be giving to young people the tools to feel better and more valued than any pornographic imagery is ever likely to instill within either gender.

It is a form of film and it has just as much if not more exposure than any other form of film accessible through Village or Hoyts. While I'm not suggesting that young people ought to be writing a thesis on the stuff, I do think like Gill that we should be talking about it.

A reader Pauline Hopkins who wrote into the letter segment of the same newspaper would appear to concur with this view. In a letter captioned "Abuse Taken Too Lightly", Pauline Hopkins goes on to point out that behind the child pornorgraphy industry is a tsunami of criminal behaviour ranging from child abduction trafficking and exploitation, which not only destroys the human soul of the children affected but should be taken more into account in the sentencing of those who possess and pass on such material.

Pauline Hopkins is merely making the observation that there is a lot more to child pornorgraphy than people are inclined to think about let alone what it says about children's place within our world. Sarah Gill does likewise in terms of pointing out what the adult pornorgraphy industry is really saying about women and men and their place in each others lives.

At the end of the day on these issues we should be producing young people who can critique the true meaning and messages of this abhorrent form of visual imagery. We want to produce young people who can make informed choices in the face of some very contradictory messages, to value themselves as people and to value the lives of others just as highly be they women or men.

How we go about about doing this may always be a point of conjecture or difference, although it ought to be hoped that method as such is our only point of negotiation and not whether we ought to be addressing it at all.

Sex Ed Missing The Point https://www.theage.com.au/comment/sex-ed-in-schools-is-still-missing-the-point-20161024-gs91ng.html

Abuse Taken Too Lightly https://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-age-letters/federal-politics-major-parties-remain-deaf-to-voters-pleas-20161026-gsb3mz

Youth and Pornography in Australia Evidence on the extent of exposure and likely effects  https://www.tai.org.au/documents/dp_fulltext/DP52.pdf