Last month I went out for after work drinks with a group of millennial's from my office. Rum and cokes flowed, people relaxed and let their guard down and that’s when one of the group, let’s call him Nick, casually stated: ‘I have a lot of friends who do porn.’
No one seemed be at all perturbed by this revelation, it’s
possible that they were all just better at playing it cool than me. As I spat
my drink over the table I spluttered ‘WHAT??!!
What do you mean – do porn?’
‘Oh yeah’ Nick continued, using the same offhand tone you’d
use to discuss borrowing a phone charger, ‘I have friends who film themselves
having sex and then upload it on a pay-for-view channel.'
As I mopped up the Cuba Libre sputum from the table it was clear
that I was having trouble processing this information.
Nick helpfully explained: ‘I suppose it’s just a way of monetarising
your life, like if you have a driveway you don’t use you can rent that out, or
if you have some power tools you can rent those out, it’s exactly the same
thing.’
‘But…’ I stuttered ‘someone you know could see it?’
‘Yeah s’pose’ he shrugged ‘but no one really cares anymore.’
And with that he downed his drink and changed the subject,
leaving me sporting the sort of blank open-mouthed look that probably wouldn’t
look out of place on one of his mate’s home movies.
But once I’d composed myself and left the bar, it set me
thinking – was he right? Am I hopelessly behind the times and does no one
really care anymore?
Worryingly
I suspect that the truth is more unsettling.
If you are a millennial you had your formative years on the cusp of the expansion of the porn industry, with a
seemingly endless source of x-rated material available to you. This, combined
with the ease of making and posting videos with your smartphone, effectively
normalised something that was once taboo.
Porn has become such a social norm that flashing your
fandango to a paying audience is really seen as no different to lending someone
your panel sander.
And maybe millennials and their peers are so inured to this
that they really don’t care, but that doesn’t mean that nobody else does. I
don’t know if Nicks friends realised that their badly lit naked antics were
never going to go away, someone would
find it and judge them. They wouldn’t be able to put their amateur adult movie past behind them
and get jobs as primary school teachers because let’s face it, no one wants you
reading Harry Potter to a group of impressionable 7-year-olds if half of their
dads have seen someone waving their wand in your chamber of secrets.
That doesn’t mean that anyone over 35 is a judgemental prude. But we had
to work a lot harder to see
anything even remotely resembling filth, and this made us regard pornography
with a sort of reverence. Instant gratification was just not possible
with a dial-up internet connection - excruciatingly slow and noisy, it screeched
at you like a disapproving banshee. You
had time to cook your dinner before a single horizontal slice of naked flesh
had downloaded, giving you ample time to ponder whether you really needed to
see Tommy Lee’s wedding tackle or whether your time wouldn’t be better spent
writing a novel or learning Cantonese.
If you were lucky you might be
able to get hold of a naughty DVD but even that was a potential minefield. I
still have anxiety about the time I found a copy of soft porn ‘Flash Gordon’
spoof ‘Flesh Gordon’ in my local
charity shop and was subjected to an interrogation by the elderly bespectacled
man at the counter.
‘You do know this is an adult film?
‘Yes.’
‘You realise this
isn’t the one that’s on the television.’
‘I’m aware of that, yes.‘
‘This is not a film for children.’
‘I don’t have any bloody children!!’
I hadn’t meant to raise my voice to the nice, bespectacled
man who was merely trying to protect the honour of my imaginary children. But
by now there were a queue of respectable people forming behind me, one of them
most likely to be my old headmistress.
‘Ahh Kelly, so what have you done with your life? U-huh…oh I
see, buying masturbatory material from a charity shop. You’re not even classy
enough to go to a regular sex shop like the rest of us. It’s fair to say you’ve
let me down…you’ve let yourself down...’
I panicked.
‘Just let me buy my soft-porn and leave here like the cheap
pervert that I clearly am!’ I shouted at bespectacled man, as I threw my money
on the counter and ran from the shop.
No, I’m not proud of myself.
But having to work hard to get your freak on made you have a
bit of patience, even a bit respect for it. The trouble with pornography being
so readily available today is that it gives us a tendency to see it as just
another easily acquired commodity and the people in it as just ‘things’. From
there it’s a natural next step to viewing your own sex life, (which in your
20’s should be full of secret, shared, joyful moments), as just something else to
trade when your student loan needs paying off.
I’m not saying we need to return to the days of dial-up
modems and furtively acquired copies of Razzle but dear Millennials please stand
still and take time to smell the lube.
Have all the sex you want, in as many different ways and flavours
as you want. Experiment sure, but don’t feel that you have to be a part of an
industry that has tricked you into believing that your happy valley has no more
value than a cordless drill. Because you’re wrong Nick, people do care.
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