Self abuse

I never used to like pornography – not really. Yes, in my teens in the Seventies I used to have the odd copy of Mayfair under my pillow; yes, as a student in the Eighties I used to filch the occasional Fiesta from my flatmates. But on the whole I didn’t really go for jazz mags or blue movies. I found them tedious, repetitive, absurd and very embarrassing to buy. There was also a certain bleakness about the harder, nastier porn videos: all those sad and sorry women; all those contrived and silly poses. And as for the guys with mullets and thick moustaches: ugh!

In 2001 I went online. A few months later, sitting idly at my laptop feeling a bit bored of typing my own name into Google, I decided to have a peek at all this porn that was supposed to be saturating the Net. I did this by googling the words ‘girls’ and ‘hardcore’.