Vonny Moyes: We need to discuss pornography with our children, not conceal it from them

I’d been in the woods sourcing some new branches to fortify our den, when I heard the two Michaels whispering a few feet away. Following the the trail of the susurrus boys, I found them huddled together over a pack of playing cards. There, on the back of the nine of spades, there was a fully nude woman splayed out like a breakfast buffet. I wasn’t sure what she was doing – I was utterly devoid of reference – but I recall being shocked at the sheer amount of biff hair on display, and thinking she looked like some sort of exotic bird.

This image has stayed with me my whole life. I remember it in flawless technicolor. This was my first encounter with pornography. And this was not, I hasten to add, my last encounter. I watched Eurotrash when everyone else was asleep, stole a smutty tape from my mum’s boyfriend and quested my way to my first online sex clips on dodgy AOL dialup. Pornography – to give it it’s Sunday name – was a key part of my burgeoning sexuality. Today is no different. As uncomfortable as it is to acknowledge, young people watch porn. Young people will always watch porn.

This week the Guardian published an article on how it’s damaging our children’s future sex lives. The article argues that any boy with access to a phone can find his way to porn – and this easy-access is damaging how they ability to relate to real-life girls and women. Though the article itself was nuanced enough to explore the many problems contemporary porn has, the alarmist title is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the British attitude towards sexuality. The way we discuss porn in the media fuels the idea that it’s only for men, and somehow wrong or shameful – and if you don’t think otherwise, you’re a deviant. This is not a healthy state to inspire, especially when it comes to something so ubiquitously consumed.

Like most kids, my first encounter with it was accidental. In the days before the internet, it was considerably harder to find – though any shrewd youngster knew that you could reasonably stumble upon a stash in a bush or hiding behind the boiler. Today, almost every child is but a few erroneous clicks away from disembodied tits and suggestive messaging. My generation largely made their way through to adulthood without any discussion of this sort of material, because the risk of our exposure to it was considerably less. Today’s digital natives need to be primed to navigate the sheer breadth of sexual imagery they’re going to encounter. That requires openness on our part, and a willingness to discuss porn outside of the loaded language we’ve been given by the media.

Joanna Muirhead’s Guardian article made valid points. Like her, I share anxieties about objectification and commodification of women’s bodies, and the sensationalism of sexual acts. I worry about unrealistic beauty standards, the narrow representation of body types and proliferation of uncommon practices, and how these translate into teenage expressions of nascent sexuality. I’m mother to three boys and a girl, and I worry about it from both sides.

But at the same time, I don’t think continuing to waggle a finger in condemnation at the medium is going to help undo the damage it’s causing. Most of these concerns arise from the quality of porn out there – not from porn itself. It’s because the majority of porn we make is for straight men, with themes that reflect straight male tastes. Second to that, you won’t struggle to find something for gay male tastes. There’s precious little out there that isn’t delivered through a phallocentric prism. Good luck to anyone trying to find a depiction of anything other than caricatured Playboy lesbianism (ladies – please cut your nails). The breadth of desire explored through pornography is constrained by heteronormative masculinity. We’ve told ourselves for so long that porn is for men, so it’s made by men, so naturally doesn’t often reflect the desires of women. It’s high time we dismantled the idea that only men have a need for this sort of sexual outlet.

We’ve always made lewd images. Human nakedness has been a central facet of our artistic expressions since records began. This is because we’re sexual beings; animals prone to visual arousal. We’ve made sexual images for as long as we’ve been stomping around on the earth. We just happen to have a highly sophisticated tool for doing it now. People are only going to make more of it.

Problematic behaviour arises from the viewing of pornography without considering it against reality. We have to talk about it early if we want our young people understand this is a fantasy genre. People don’t watch Harry Potter and then expect to fling a patronus at someone the next time we feel threatened, because they know however much it emulates reality in some parts, it’s fiction. It’s fantasy, and enjoyable in the right context. We need to give pornography a context in modern society. We can’t blithely ignore it’s existence and hope that our young people will make it to adulthood without finding themselves wading through the quagmire of glory-holes and money-shots.

Like many other young people, porn offered a safe space to explore facets of my sexuality. It’s how I clarified and underscored my interest in women, without anyone else having to know at the time. At the time, I felt doubly deviant for my non-conformist sexual preferences and porn consumption. Now that I’ve dismantled my own guilt, I value what it gave me.

We need to work buffing away the patina of shame that covers sexuality if we want our kids to have safe and healthy sex lives.

Porn isn’t going anywhere – we need frank and open discussions about it, so our young people can discern fact from fiction.

And maybe if we all finally admit that we’re a) all getting busy behind closed doors and b) not totally horrified at expressions of sexuality, we might find a little more of ourselves reflected in pornography in the future.