Everyone talks about pornography and I’m sure that everyone would recognise it were they to see it. In this day and age, I doubt there is any adult, male or female who hasn’t seen it. 

I also doubt there are few children, boys or girls older than 13 and quite a few younger, who haven’t seen pornography. Unfortunately, many of those boys and girls and not a few older ones as well, regularly use the camera facility of their phone to make their own pornography, which they happily share.

Still, if a sarcastic proposal from a conservative legal website wins acceptance with the lunatic left, porn stars reading books in children’s libraries might just fight that horrible bigotry and slut-shaming that parents use to inculcate virtue in their children.

There are now apps that allow children and adults to anonymously link up worldwide on the internet and share intimate videos and conversations with each other. Isn’t it amazing that the left, who are ever ready to consign all members of the white male patriarch to purgatory or prison for every woke reason, are happy to endorse the complete sexualisation of women that is pornography?

What is missing from that knowledge, however, is the danger that internet pornography poses to our community and that danger is currently being underestimated. I want to suggest that describing horrifically brutal domestic violence as “testosterone-fuelled” or the result of the “patriarchy” is set up a left-wing ideological straw man. The more direct link is between the insidious effect on our morals of prostitution and pornography and that grotesque and immoral violence we witness daily.  

The word, pornography is derived from two Greek words; porneia meaning prostitution, and graphe, meaning drawing. Together, those two words describe precisely what pornography is: drawings of prostitution; in our age, videos showing what prostitutes do replace drawings. 

Prostitution is not the oldest profession because it is not a profession – a profession being the profession of expert knowledge. Prostitutes do have a sort of self-knowledge of their effect on men which is why it thrives. Past attempts to stamp it out may have proved fruitless, but they did manage to quarantine it to the palest of red light areas. 

That is not the case any longer. The internet has turned the one female, street-walker show into a worldwide, multi-billion dollar business that markets itself in every household, and at great speed, thanks to high-speed internet. 

The internet and technology have combined to create the money with which to seduce young women from their natural preference for privacy in their intimate relations. The internet has brought prostitution into the family home, on to children’s computers, and into family lives infecting teenage girls and boys, children unfamiliar with the moral demands that the responsibilities of family life will make upon them, with the sordid knowledge that pornography hands them 24/7. 

The most obvious effect of pornography is that it requires that many more young women become prostitutes. It was left-wing women brought up on salted herring diet of Marx and Engels who eulogised the prostitute, slave to every man’s passion, as a ‘working girl’. What crap. Like the slave, the prostitute can never be free of that serfdom. 

The less obvious effect of the pornographic epidemic is that boys and men will quickly learn to deal with every woman as if she is a prostitute. While the prostitute is everything that a real woman is not, this supermarket style of prostitution educates men and boys that all women are like prostitutes, pieces of meat, to be dealt with like any commodity that can be purchased, owned and subjected to every imaginable sexual and physical abuse.

The internet proves that there are millions of women who are prostitutes who tolerate sexual and physical abuse; and that is the primary cause of the epidemic of violence by men against women and by women against their children. Nothing must be an impediment to immediate sexual gratification and anything that threatens that right can be beaten into submission.

Internet pornography creates an imaginary world for young men where women are slaves to men’s carnal imagination. In that imaginary world, women are physically and emotionally inferior to men. 

Pornography is an insidious and socially destructive practice, destructive both personally and politically. It exists by prostituting the natural privacy of the sexual activity between men and women, a privacy without which there can be no decent and morally responsible family. 

As the unique, monogamous Western family is the mainstay of our democratic life, the gradual destruction of the family by pornography will have a revolutionary effect on liberal democracies. 

And it is democracy that is the real victim. Pornography implicitly teaches that men and women are not equal while explicitly debasing what is highest about sex, being a mother and father. It teaches that women have no purpose other than to satisfy men’s wildest passion while it promotes a hedonistic lifestyle where those who can’t satisfy the demand for pleasure are useless and disposable. Democratic equality between the sexes dies where pornography flourishes.  

Australian families must be able to ensure that their children can learn how to live as good men and women, yes, and as good citizens without such a corrosive influence. 

And just in case there are fools who would equate pornography with freedom of speech, I would remind them there are two freedoms in this world. There is the freedom of the wolf and the freedom of the shepherd. I am hoping, perhaps without good cause, that Mr Morrison knows the extent of the responsibility that shepherd has.

Dr David Long is a retired solicitor and economist.

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