by Colin Morley

Created on: December 07, 2008   Last Updated: January 23, 2009

Do you remember being at that age when you had learned your alphabet enough so that you were just about able to look things up in the dictionary?
Do you remember the first words you looked up? They were "rude" words that you'd heard adults using and you wanted to be sure you understood properly so you could tell your friends.

Take another look at that old family dictionary on the shelf.

Note the dirty finger marks around that f' word in there. Apply the same logic to some other words you can think of. Am I right or am I right?

So long as we live in a society which imposes via religion, custom or received wisdom moral boundaries which place taboos on sex and sexuality then our natural human curiosity will always lead us to look outside those boundaries for enlightenment, amusement and satisfaction.

Anyone who uses the internet for just about any purpose today cannot fail to be aware of the prevalence of pornography. Our In Boxes are bombarded with junk mail inviting us to improve the size of our sexual organs, increase our sexual pleasure or subscribe to some website which will fulfil our every sexual fantasy. If a vast number of people did not take up these offers, then they would cease. Nobody continues to spend money on advertising campaigns that do not make money.
So who is to blame for this spread of internet pornography? You are and I am. We started all those years ago thumbing through that old family dictionary, and we just can't kick the habit.

I can hear the discontented grumblings already. "Not me!" "How dare he blame all of us together?" "I've never looked at porn in my life!"

True, we are not all paying customers of the pornography trade.
We do not all approve of the enormous and growing number of sexually explicit images invading the internet.
Many in society spend a great deal of time and effort in campaigning against pornography, or at the very least ensuring that it is not freely available to our children, who risk becoming as "corrupted" as previous generations.

And here is the crux of the argument. When did you last speak to your children about sex and sexuality?
When did you start to teach them that the human body was something to be ashamed of? Not necessarily in those stark terms, but by ensuring that they never saw you naked that they never suspected you were normal parents who made love with each other. When did you start hoping or imagining that they would never grow up and develop a sexuality of their own? When and why did you imagine you could

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