Well, here’s an intriguing little item by way of a break from war news. The abundance and popularity of porn on the Internet, and what that may do to men’s attitudes to women, and how strangely little attention the subject gets.

For a political perspective you would have to search to the very margins of feminist debate. It is as if an entire generation of research into the emotional effects of porn has simply been forgotten, leaving us with porn galore and not the faintest idea what it does.

The most sinister aspect of the whole subject is how inextricably confused lust seems to be with hostility, at least in this kind of pornography. (And is there any other kind?) Judging from the description (I have to be honest: I’ve never looked at this kind of, er, material) it’s not even slightly erotic, it’s more like assault. Slut this and slut that. It appears to be all about treating women as toilets (very literally) and hating and mocking them at the same time. It’s hard to see how that can help poisoning men’s attitudes to women…and the stuff is ubiquitous. Not a happy thought.

But the emotional consequences of casual porn use, or the effects of its cultural ubiquity, are completely ignored. Whether porn might be harmful to a non-addict is never even examined…Here is some evidence. Experiments were carried out on ‘normal’ men, not addicts, for research by Edward Donnerstein, a prominent academic and author. ‘On the first day,’ he reported, ‘when they see women being raped and aggressed against, it bothers them. By day five it does not bother them at all. In fact, they enjoy it.’…Even porn which wasn’t violent made the men twice as likely to say they felt aggressive towards women. This is not to say that porn turns men into rapists; it doesn’t need to, for it trespasses on the mind more subtly. The evidence proves that porn invites its audience to view women differently – as inferiors, as objects, only good for sex. This is the problem with pornography; it alters the way men look at women…and it even alters the way women look at themselves.

And this isn’t even Fashionable Nonsense. In fact if the author is correct it’s only ‘the very margins of feminist debate,’ which can be fertile territory for FN, that notice at all. That’s one of the worst aspects of FN: the way it can discredit useful, necessary, original lines of thought and inquiry. I used to like those margins of feminist debate, until they got cluttered up with touchy-feely irrationalists and earth mothers and science-haters.