We must resist the tyranny of porn culture

However, this is also the point at which women of my generation shake their heads and part company with younger ones. I don’t have a single female friend who ever felt it was her job to outdo the sex industry in order to keep the attention of her man.

The thought of being in direct competition with pneumatic shaven blondes never really crossed our minds. Not because we believed our men-folk had never glimpsed X-rated photos. Pornography has existed in one form or another since civilisation began, as paintings on brothel walls in Pompeii show. We simply didn’t see our role as vying with the porn merchant’s tawdriest renderings of male fantasies. The warm fleshy rarity of imperfect bodies, as held by memory and feverish imagination, seemed more than sufficient. Passionate letters and telephone calls (listening to the person you love is more erotic than most visual aids) helped bridge any distance. If you did bestow a naked Polaroid or print upon your beloved (yes, such things happened, even then – as the notorious photo of the Duchess of Argyll proves), it lived under lock and key.

But now pornography is online and readily accessible, to the point where it informs and influences mainstream aesthetics. I’ve lost count of the number of fashion shoots or sex scenes in films that borrow heavily from porn.

So it’s not surprising that the poses and multi-positional demands have seeped into women’s fears and insecurities. And unlike the intimate naked portraits of old – whether they be Boucher paintings of Louis XV’s mistresses, or Egon Schiele’s sprawled, self-pleasuring models – the images are now in formats that lend themselves to widescale distribution and, sadly, abuse.

Nobody wants to curtail a young couple’s experience of sexual intimacy, but, equally, no one wants to see it become routine for women to offer up trophy photos of their naked flesh. And they are trophies, aren’t they? If the exposure was just for the thrill of the fleeting erotic moment, then Skype or Snapchat would suffice – with no lingering evidence.

But the expectation has become that young men can and should boast, “My girlfriend’s hotter than a porn star!” It only takes one ill-judged moment for an insecure young man to prove the sentiment by displaying an image – any 16-year-old can give you an example from their peer group. Nor should we be startled by this. How can teenage girls resist social pressure to flaunt their wares, if Hollywood goddesses can’t?

This is all sadder than I can express, because erotic privacy is one of life’s towering glories; how can you discover the pleasure of true intimacy when a lens constantly intrudes? And where will such voyeurism lead? Sex in Google glasses, so everyone judges your performance? Women demanding and distributing photos of men’s private parts in the name of gender equality?

The unthinking tyrannies of porn culture should be fought as fiercely as other forms of injustice. We all know depriving girls of education is barbaric – but persuading educated women to pose like harlots for their boyfriends isn’t much more progressive.