Mary Whitehouse Again…

I wrote some time back that I wished Mary Whitehouse would rise from the grave and start campaigning against the moral standards of the day, as she once did. This morning I felt that more than ever as I scrolled through Twitter. I don’t have time to read the paper and rarely watch the news so I tend to get updates via Twitter. Until recently my preferred paper online has been The Independent. But I’ve noticed recently a large number of random tweets from them, this mornings ‘University Introduces Puppy Room’ was one such random item, but is actually kind of interesting. What I do object to though is the porn and sex tweets. This morning I scrolled through to find these in the space of just a few hours:

What women really think about masturbation
These are the most adulterous professions
Top 10 Pornhub search terms
The woman who accidentally sent anal porn to her students 

And that’s just a snapshot over a few hours…

What’s more these are not just one off tweets they are there to generate traffic to The Independent site so they are tweeted again and again. I was complaining to my husband about this and his response was, ‘are you sure they haven’t been hacked?’ – ah if only. But no, this is not worthy of a hacker, because these days this kind of ‘news’ is mainstream.

What on earth is going in if we accept that this kind of thing is ok to be around all day every day? I have kids and I want to encourage them to know what’s going on in the world around them, and in this day and age that’s more than likely going to be online. You would have thought perhaps a national newspaper might be the place? Twitter’s age limit appears to be 13 – which seems far too young to be allowing them to see stories about anal porn for a start.

Of course this is part of a much wider problem surrounding the internet and safety for our kids, I realise that, but I certainly expect more from a paper like The Independent – a ‘proper’ paper – this is the kind of thing you’d expect from red tops!

Where have our standards gone I wonder? I am not a prude by any stretch of the imagination but for goodness sake, our society seems obsessed with sex and porn and we are just accepting that it’s ok? It’s not ok! not at all. And of course I’m thinking about it from a Christian perspective but even without that, do we think it’s ok to allow children to be continually exposed to stories about sex and porn, if not actually exposed to the real thing? Do we think it’s ok that they are growing up seeing images and behaviour around them that would have once been consigned to ‘after the water shed’? In fact does the water shed even exist these days?

What is it going to take to change this? Or is it going to get worse? Mary Whitehouse where are you when we need you?  (probably turning in her grave)