I suppose I’m a fairly typical guy. I love Top Gear, sport and action movies. I love extreme(ish) endurance challenges, prog rock (can’t believe I just admitted that) and nothing more than a banter-filled evening with my mates. I’m also madly and deeply in love with my wife of 19 years and I totally adore and love to bits my two daughters Emily and Annie who are 12 and very nearly 14.
I also have a sex drive. I’m a red- blooded male, so what do you expect? The fact we don’t talk about it much in churches doesn’t mean that we don’t have one. However, there’s a problem. The world outside the Church is highly sexually driven but they do talk about it. In fact, they don’t just talk about it; they flaunt it and get in everyone’s faces. The Church by contrast seems powerless to respond, and the sexualised culture we have marches on.
There’s a lot I could say but in a few short words I’ll say it as it is: I’m pretty sick of the porn peddlers. It drives me mad (anger is a very underrated fruit of the spirit). I walk into a newsagent with my two girls and right in their faces are a bunch of lads’ mags with bare-breasted women and smutty headlines. So what’s that saying to my girls? It’s saying something like this:
“You are objects of sexual gratification for blokes. That’s all you’re good for.”
And what’s it saying to men? I guess it’s something like this:
“This is what drives you. We know what you’re really all about. We know what you really want. And it’s smut and sleaze.”
Time to take a stand I think fellas.
You want to make a difference? Next time you see lads’ mags in a newsagent at eye line level, either turn them all around or scoop ‘em up and place them on the counter and ask them to be displayed more appropriately. Evil persists when good people do nothing, as Edmund Burke said.
It’s also time for blokes to start to speak up and put up. We’re not all driven by sleaze. We can flipping love sex but be monogamous and strictly eyes front. We need to start fighting the porn cancer that’s eating at the hearts of men. Watch this space, but I feel like a man at war.
As for page three? It’s become so culturally ingrained we’ve forgotten how demeaning it is for us all. I’m writing this on the day that the topless pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge while on holiday in private have been published. It’s a disgrace. Let’s show that we want no more part of this. Take five minutes and sign this petition. Time to start demonstrating that ‘real men’ don’t do porn.