Digging the dirt

I became a pornographer at 14. I am prompted to share this unappetising confession with my reader by the current moral panic in Britain (and isn't there always one?) over the pornification of the mainstream and how young minds should be protected from absorbing the objectification of women by putting Maxim on the top shelf, banning, etc.

The fact is that the more difficult it is for young lads to get hold of porn, the harder they will try (sorry) to obtain it. At 14, I was a member of the most sexually oppressed class of one of the most repressive countries in history. Sex, what was it like? I wondered feverishly, prefiguring a Monty Python character. Its very cloistering drove my sloshing hormones into great swells. Clearly, wanking, being freely available, had to be a very inferior substitute. I was ravenous. There was nothing for it but to write my own. Indeed, I believe my porn story was my first piece of creative writing, which tends to affirm the link between sexual repression (see Harold Bloom) and poetry, which I began writing at 15.

The tale of lust was, necessarily, almost entirely imagined, drawn from wild speculation and boasting in the schoolyard, my mother's bookshelf and so on. We were very backward at 14 then ... I showed my best friend this grubby effort, written on paper from a school exercise book, and he begged piteously to be allowed to keep it for a while. It was only by accident that a month or so later I discovered the class cynic had been flogging copies all around the school. It was my first experience of royalty theft.

The point is, even if you don't mention the porn, this mix of sexual hunger and verboten thrill will always have the young stalking through the undergrowth of libido. Purdah has precisely the reverse effect to what is intended. I think the Danes have it right. Get everything out in the open and exorcise the power of the porn industry, along with the appalling attitudes towards women that it promotes.

I am not referring here to the really disturbing trend of sexualising children with junior thongs and the like. That is altogether a different issue, one of amoral commercial exploitation aided by parents so desperate to be thought cool (which they cannot be) that they have abandoned common sense.