Buried Alive by Porn...

Recently there has been quite a bit of emphasis on the ease in which children are able to get their greasy little mitts on the worst filth the world has to offer. Many broadband companies are having to implement new rules and barriers to prevent minors from being able to access 'adult' material online. The only problem with this is that I thoroughly believe it is impossible to protect children from adult material. To be honest, I think it's unnecessary and I shall explain why.

When I was about 10 I had a friend who lived very close to me and had some very open-minded parents. This was a very good thing and I feel I should say that their openness and love towards each other has kept them together to this day. It was, however, a point of interest to us as ever-curious youngsters because we could see hints of their bedroom antics occasionally around the house in the form of the occasional saucy bit of underwear or erotic chocolate treat. I must stress however, that as 10 year-olds, we really didn't care about such things or want to know what was going on behind closed doors.

It is worth noting that no matter what you do to avoid such things they will, occasionally, jump out and smack you in the face when you least expect it. That is exactly what happened to my friend...

When I was younger I used to go fishing with my friend and we fancied ourselves as avid fishermen and were always eager to learn more about the sport. Upon discovering that there had been a large number of carp released into our local canal, we decided that we would try to catch one of these beastly fish, but in order to do so we would need advice. So, when my friends parents were out, we went searching for fishing magazines that we knew his Dad had, with the intention of learning the art of catching carp.

Bob Nudd, make me proud!

The search in the garage yielded no results and there were none in the downstairs cupboard so we commenced our search of his parents bedroom. Sure enough, in the top shelf of his Dad's wardrobe, we could see a picture of Bob Nudd -- a championship angler -- poking out from a pile of magazines. We had found the motherload and smiled in anticipation at learning how to fish like a pro. My friend, being the taller one, reached up and grabbed the magazine, pulling with all his might. This was when it happened...

With a yank, the whole pile of magazines collapsed out of the cupboard and fell onto my friend, literally knocking him back onto the bed behind as they poured out of the closet. The fishing magazine was buried -- along with my friend -- amongst the most humongous pile of porn magazines I have ever (and will ever) see. One magazine even landed, open, with a centre page spread on my friends chest.

My point here is that we were not looking for smut, nor were we interested in it, but our childish search for fishing magazines instead led to my friend being literally buried alive by porn. When my friend lifted the centre page spread from his chest, his reaction was not, "Whoa, that's nice" but "What the fuck is that?Urggh!"

Yes, my friend. That was a vagina.

We frantically pushed the magazines back into the cupboard, ignoring the pages that appeared to be stuck together and tried to assemble them into the same order as before. There was no curiosity to look into the unknown any further, we just made off with Bob Nudd and tried to wipe the experience from our minds. The funny thing is, my friend was pulled up at a later date by his Dad who had apparently kept an 'order' to the magazines and had guessed that his son had found the stash. His assumption was that he'd searched for it; the truth was it had almost killed him.

Children are not interested in porn until their teens and when we were introduced to it at a young age, rather than being aroused, we were put off it for a good while. There is no way to completely 'protect' children against porn and there is no need to go to extraordinary lengths to do so.

Obviously, times have changed and now the internet is the worlds largest library of pornographic material. The ease in which people can access porn, even accidentally, is quite staggering. I always used to joke that anyone could find a picture of a naked lady within 30 seconds of logging on, even on a blocked PC. I've not yet been proved wrong.

A good example of this was experienced during my time at college. I was 17 and studying Geology. Most of our time was spent in the classroom studying rock types and formations however we did occasionally get a chance for a field trip or, on this particular day, a trip to the computer room. We were learning about igneous intrusions and our tutor urged us to use the internet to find examples of them and in doing so, he managed to accidentally get every computer profile in the class blocked for a week.

An igneous intrusion is where rock strata has had magma injected into it, leaving a 'blob' or 'sheet' of volcanic rock surrounded by softer rock. There are many types of these and when searching for batholiths, sills and diapirs we quickly found what we were looking for. When it came to dykes however, our results were inconsistant at best.

Some of us found this:

Whereas some of us found this:

Obviously I had not wanted to search for porn but that was exactly what I found. It is worse with the modern internet search engines because it seems that typing in something as innocent as 'tea cup for girls' is likely to bring up results '2 girls 1 cup' and all fetishes related to cups. Despite this, I don't think young children are going to be tempted to click on the more filthy links and if they do, boy will they regret it.

Teenagers on the other hand will search for porn. They will search for it and they WILL find it and nothing in Heaven or Earth can stand between a teenager and porn. Even if he doesn't find porn in the strictest sense, anything with any iota of flesh showing will do: FHM, Art websites, African tribes, science websites anything and I mean ANYTHING will do. All this means is it's completely futile to try and stop a teenager from accessing porn and preventing access or making it difficult to get hold of will only add to the fun of trying to find it.

So what do I say to parents trying to discourage their children, or teenagers, from accessing porn? Show them the most sordid, horrible, disgusting, foul material you can get your hands on. Show them the horrors of the internet and suddenly, it might not seem quite as much fun.