It's Either Wanking or Genocide.

 

 On a clear day, in bright conditions, even without my glasses, I can usually read a street sign comfortably from about thirty feet. It's impressive, because it means that despite my best efforts, I didn't somehow wank myself blind by the age of fifteen.

 I don’t think anyone needs to be told how horny teenagers are. It’s a force of nature. Kids are given huge doses of hormones and new, exciting body parts, and they want to try them out so badly it drives them a little bit crazy.

 You can’t blame them; coming out the other side of puberty with a new body and having nobody to grind it against is like being given a top of the line Ferrari (or in my case a 1982 Lada Riva) and then not being given the keys. Or more accurately, finding out the keys are in the pants of a species that will never, ever let you have them.

 So teenagers masturbate a lot. We all know that; it’s what keeps the profits over at Kleenex looking so healthy. Teenagers jerk off with a ferocity and determination not normally seen this side of Ray Mears trying to get a fire lit, and that’s fine.

 My only real objection is that these days, porn is too easy to get hold of. My generation had to work so damn hard to see porn.
 I was one of the lucky ones who had a cable TV box in my bedroom, so every night at midnight, when the porn channels did a ten-minute-teaser, I actually got to see it.
 Hell, I used to tape it. On VHS, because I'm a hundred fucking years old and that's what we did back then, when we weren't drying our clothes on the mangle or chasing a hoop down a dirt road with a stick.
 Having a grainy VHS of erotic advert montages meant you had to hide the tape, too.
 All porn was hidden in those days. Some of the luckier guys had older brothers who might have some actual, not-taped-off-the-TV porn somewhere, but it was always a gamble stealing it, even if you could find it.
 These days, all kids have computers and it's all freely available. Those of us who remember a time before the internet are left feeling like aged hunter-gatherers, baffled by the invention of farming. We used to have to go out and run miles with spears and bows and bring down our food, and now the food is just there, in the homes? Seems like cheating.
  Still, old-school porn taught valuable lessons. It taught you how to do important things that are necessary in life, like using a VHS recorder, hiding illegal items and lying to authority figures. It was a rite of passage that is really being denied to the younger generations.
 Maybe not for much longer, however, as there has been a move in recent weeks, complete with petitions, to force all internet service providers to block porn completely. You would only be able to see it by ticking the “I am a pervert” box on your internet contract.
 This, the thought police have decided, will prevent underage people from seeing anything rude.
  My initial reaction was incredulity - well, actually, my initial reaction was to save all my porn to disc in case this campaign ever gains any traction, but my first emotional reaction was incredulity. This is never going to work, as a plan. Fourteen year olds know way more about computers than adults, as a rule. They’ll figure out some sort of devious, back-door way to make computers show them deviants’ back doorways in no time flat.
 Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to do without porn, and that’s not on, because we all watch it.
 Everyone does. It’s an open secret. Even if you only watch once every six months, you’ve looked at porn. I know you have. I have cameras in your house.
 …Alright, I don’t, but those of you who aren’t now frantically ripping off your wallpaper in a paranoid search will probably agree that most people like to watch other people fuck each other once in a while, and that’s normal.
 The ones who are abnormal are the ones who are so preoccupied with other peoples’ sex lives that they want to enforce draconian laws on us, but I’ve written about them before.
 The rest of us – teenagers especially – need a release of some kind. It’s only masturbation that stops most kids from shooting their classmates. I’m completely sure that last year’s riots would have fizzled out in minutes if the government had just spent an hour broadcasting porn on the TV, because everyone would have been too distracted to go looting.
 Onanism, I'm saying right now, is a force for good in the world, because it stops everyone going mental.
 Self abuse saves lives.
 Y'know who never sneaks away for a quick fifty off the wrist? Everyone in Al Qaeda. There's a connection, there, and we ignore it at our peril.
 Granted, the uptight and morally outraged claim that readily available porn is a danger to children, but that’s ridiculous because, before sexual maturity, kids have no interest at all in porn. They couldn’t care less. Even if they stumbled across it, they’d probably click away because it holds no fascination for them, unless it’s in a “where do babies come from?” way, in which case for god’s sake make sure you’ve had The Talk with them before they stumble onto RedTube, or they’ll end up thinking all babies come from determined looking German men doing unspeakable things to 35-year-old “schoolgirls.”
 All in all, though, porn is no threat to kids. The young ones don’t want to watch it, and the hormonal ones will get hold of it some way, so you might as well accept it. Kids are better off locked in a room wanking than out on the streets happy slapping, mugging old ladies, or playing shitty music on their phones and forcing me to murder them as a result.
 All the dreary busybodies are doing is trying to accomplish the impossible and stop teenagers playing with themselves. By trying to stop porn, they come off as a flaccid Canute, trying in vain to hold back the nubile, fleshy, lubricated, grunting, writhing, spreadeagled, moaning, bucking tide.
 …Excuse me...