KEY POINTS:
There was a time, not so long ago, when sexual imagery was not readily available to youthful eyes. In this vanished world, the pubescent male had his work cut out when it came to finding material to feed his hormonal appetites. But in this particular field of endeavour,
adolescents once displayed an uncharacteristic willingness to do the work.
Everything from newspaper supplements to mail order catalogues was examined with the diligence of a librarian collating an index. A feature on stockings - interesting. An advert for a bra - bingo! And on more bountiful days, perhaps in the dentist's waiting room, the perfumed pages of fashion magazines might reveal an admirable artistic contempt for such dreary conventions as clothing. You'd take a filling or two for such small triumphs.
In these restrained conditions, any sign, or even suggestion, of female flesh would be duly noted and stored in the memory bank for later reference. This was a time, the 70s, when D.H. Lawrence novels, in which characters were bedevilled with throbbing "loins", still enjoyed a risque reputation. In my school library, which was in no respect a literary environment, Lady Chatterley's Lover was on permanent loan.
At home, popular novels, like The Godfather, were speed-scanned for promising words - "skirt", "underwear", "unbuttoned" - that might lead to action passages.
In a demonstration of the kind of solidarity for which teenage boys are seldom credited, the workload was sometimes eased by better-read teenagers who shared page numbers. For those of us who came of age in the prudish 70s, the television was scarcely a more reliable source of inspiration - with only one or two channels, certainly not able to be described as racy.
Even the Taleban would have found little worthy of stoning. There were re-runs of The Avengers, with Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, often dressed in leather or tied up in ironic jeopardy, but in terms of actual bedside activity, whole weeks and months could go by with not so much as a fleeting nipple.
Occasionally TV did let its hair down, in series like the legendary 1976 drama Bouquet of Barbed Wire, of which Clive James wrote: "By the end, everybody had been to bed with everybody else except the baby." Yet the question remained: how could you watch British actress Susan Penhaligon in all her generous glory with your parents in the same room?
Better to affect a nonchalant interest as you examined the cover of a Pink Floyd album. And somewhere, beyond the truncated reach of everyday life, was the clammy presence of pornography - furtive, semi-legal contraband. I recall the anxious drama of getting in to see the X-rated Black Emmanuelle at the local movie theatre when I was 14.
A group of friends and I spent about half an hour outside the cinema working up the courage to try to pass for 18-year-olds. As a result of our pointless deliberations - the cashier would probably have taken money from the occupant of a pram - we missed the beginning.
Fortunately, it wasn't difficult to catch up with the plot. Still, porn in the 70s was almost entirely centred on magazines. They ranged from well-known titles like Playboy and Penthouse at the softer end of the market, glossy forests of pubes which were available in newsagents, to the gynaecological hardcore whose provenance was less obvious. The first time I ever saw the latter sort was when I was about 9 years old.
A boy named Joseph at my primary school showed me a series of photos he'd ripped out of a magazine. They were in lurid shiny colour and depicted a nurse and a male patient. The first picture was almost banal. Although the nurse was conspicuously attractive and seemed to be wearing rather too much makeup and an unusually short uniform, she was just taking the patient's temperature.
After that the proceedings became progressively less medical. I can vividly recall the look of diabolical pride Joseph wore when he showed the last photo, an image which defied not just belief but everything - admittedly not a great deal - I understood at the time about the nature of human relations.
The man had an erection. This was not in itself a revelation, for I'd heard rumours of such things. But it was what the nurse was doing with it that was so astounding. Why on earth, I wondered, would someone do something so bizarre and distasteful? And was a nurse going to do that to me when I grew up?
The information contained in this image was a shocking preview of a world that made no sense to the pre-pubescent mind. Everyone in the playground wanted to see the pictures, and such was the excitement they inspired that within a few minutes they lay torn and disfigured at the frenzied hands of the mob.
In the 80s the influence of feminism gave rise to the New Man, the male who was in favour of sexual equality, sympathetic to female-only solutions, and ball-crushingly sensitive to the "objectification" of women.
In this atmosphere of pronounced gender grievance, pornography was the preserve of the misogynist, the sexist pig and, not least, the rapist. To the sisterhood's perceived puritanism and the dull earnestness of their male supporters, there soon followed a backlash. As if to mark the birth of a new age, the leaders of the backlash were quickly awarded a name - the New Lads.
Their manifesto called for guiltless fun, irony and a more knockabout attitude to pornography. There were none of the grand claims for sexual liberation that the hippies had made. Instead, the New Lads claimed that it was just a matter of having a laugh and not taking everything too seriously. Let's be grown up about this, was their argument, by being more boyish.
At the same time, a new generation of women became bored or disillusioned with what they saw as the shrill joylessness of old-style feminism. Thus the stigma attached to porn was replaced with a kind of worldly acceptance, even approval. Porn became cool, after a fashion, and to be anti-porn became square. The only people to take porn seriously, aside from a few feminist dinosaurs, were the businesses that made millions with the advent of videos, DVDs and, most significantly, the internet.
Nowadays porn is everywhere. Young men look at it without apology or shame. Sometimes young women, too. Society has become radically more sexualised and sex, which has always sold, has been transformed into a much more explicit commodity. What seems particularly notable is that women have become more active and willing participants in the pornification of female sexuality.
Everywhere from the growth in breast implants and cosmetic surgery to the proliferation of bikini wax salons to the trendiness of Agent Provocateur to the transformation of glamour models into role models - a porn aesthetic has taken root in everyday life. At the same time, the most graphic and extreme depictions of every conceivable sexual scenario with every imaginable permutation of humanity (and not just humanity) is accessible at the click of a computer mouse.
A wealth - or a poverty? - of porn channels is available on satellite television. Lads' magazines carry pictures of unfeasibly pneumatic teenage girls whose singular aim is to convince readers that they think of nothing but sex. Lap-dancing bars have spread like a virus.
Rap music and videos portray women as venal nymphomaniacs. Minor nobodies become minor celebrities through the dissemination of their private sex tapes. And arthouse cinema has begun to feature unsimulated scenes of sexual intercourse.
Leaving aside the deep and shallowing impact such developments may have made on society at large, it's worth asking what effect they have had on the adolescent male imagination. What do teen boys now think of girls and women? Of course, they've always fantasised that they were secretly wanton hussies.
That's what boys do. But it was a teen fantasy supported by little more than bra adverts and D.H. Lawrence. Now, though, there is an abundance of evidence to suggest the fantasy is real. And as a consequence, the world looks an awful lot like a teenager's wet dream.
That might mean that adolescents are now in a permanent state of overstimulation, their every tumescent thought reflected and enhanced by an instant visual representation which is, in turn, mimicked by compliant teen girls.
Or it could add up to the opposite, that the ubiquity of pornography has created a kind of blase, seen-it-all contempt, a familiarity with excess that leaves the imagination not sated but empty and disappointed. Neither option sounds healthy or even enjoyable.
And perhaps neither is the norm. Nonetheless, growing up in the age of porn must often be confusing, working out what you desire when your desires are already worked out for you, full of carnal knowledge and ignorant of its related emotions, seeing so much and feeling so little.
- OBSERVER
