Pornography: The New Normal

I was fascinated by the reactions last week to the British government's intention of making British customers positively "opt in" to allowing pornography to be part of their internet package.  The idea is ostensibly to protect children from seeing images which may prove harmful.

I read three responses: one an article on the BBC website; and two in my weekly fix, The Spectator.   The first was simply one of those 'I watch porn; I don't like the violent stuff; but hey, the things I watch are harmless recreation' pieces.  The two in The Spectator were, as one might expect, somewhat more sophisticated and, indeed, from the pens of two of my favourite journalists, Rod Liddle and James Delingpole.  

Liddle's argument was that the Tories' policy was more to do with appeasing their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats; Delingpole's was really about the government overreaching itself in its policing of private behavior, but he did this via the slightly unexpected means of arguing that porn consumption was not simply a male monopoly but was enjoyed also by a large number of women.  Continue at Carl Truman