My introduction to sex came from an uptight woman in a suit. She visited my secondary school when I was 12 years old and gave a talk that essentially told us "Sex is bad. If you have sex you will get AIDs and there is no cure, and you will die alone". I don't know how much sex education has changed in the last 15 years, but that was all I got. I returned home that night and told my mother "I am never having sex". Of course, I did have sex, in fact, I did it for a living for a long time, I don't have AIDs and I am perfectly happy and healthy, both in body and mind.
However, my sex life started late and has always been warped, I don't for one second blame my parents, they were incredibly open if I wanted to talk about sex and boys and where babies came from. In some sense, I do blame school. I attended one of the top schools in my catchment area, an all girl school, boasting high grades and students going on to attend Cambridge and Oxford each year. So why on earth was I not educated about sex? Not even the biology side of it?
When I lost my virginity, it was in a threesome with an older male and one of my female friends, I remember whispering to her "how do we know when it's supposed to be over?" I had no idea about ejaculation and foreplay. I knew what oral sex was and I knew where things should go. I had learnt from talking to my already sexually active friends and I had messed around with girls so I understood that an orgasm occurs at some point and feels pretty good, but that was where my self education ended.
When I was growing up, we didn't have the internet in the way children and teens do today. I didn't have a smart phone until I was 20, it was a sidekick, you could talk on instant messenger but there was no internet access and website browsing! There was no such thing as iPhones, Facebook was brand new and very basic, Twitter, Tinder, Instagram, Periscope and Snapchat were so far into the future I couldn't even have begun to grasp the concept of them. I had a Myspace page and AOL instant messenger, we had dial up internet on the family PC that you could only use when someone wasn't using the telephone.
I did not see porn until I was 21 years old, and it was my own porn.
In this day and age, children have a smart phone at age 5, internet access is an everyday normal occurrence, at home, at school, on your tablet, laptop and smartphone. Porn is more accessible then it has ever been and there is absolutely NO way that parents can 100% control everything their child see's. BUT they can educate their children.
I have worked in the business of taking my clothes off for 10 years, it is fair to say I know my way around the sex industry, every aspect of it. I have been a stripper, a dancer at a fetish club, a topless model in lads mags and papers, a Penthouse Pet, a centrefold, a lesbian porn actress and of course a full on, no holes barred, internationally recognised pornstar.
When I was asked to comment on the NSPCCs recent claims that Porn is robbing young people of a childhood, that their helplines are flooded with calls from anxious teens, worried about porn addiction, upset because they don't look like the girls in the movies, I did take a while to think about whether I should respond. Anything where young people are involved is a sensitive subject, and I in no way, shape or form agree with young children accessing pornography and copying some of the things they see. When I have children, I will not want them accessing hardcore porn and attempting to copycat a scene. However, I must defend my industry, my career, my friends and the companies that I have worked for.
Let me start by saying this - we do not want children accessing porn. Not one solitary person in the porn industry, wants young teens watching these movies. porn is made for adults, consenting, fully grown adults. Ethical and moral reasons aside, these children don't have credit cards! They don't pay for what they see! They watch it for free on pirate porn sites. Any respected porn company has a credit card system. You cannot access and watch these movies without entering your credit card details. The free and easily accessible pirate porn sites are as much our enemy as they are yours, when people don't pay for porn it damages the economy of our industry.
As an actress and also someone that has worked on my own movies, writing and producing, I wish that porn was more policed when it came to children accessing it, I wish that it was less easily accessible, I wish people paid for it, but has anyone ever TRIED to police the internet? It is an endless cesspool of everything you could possibly imagine. I will defend the porn industry till the day I die, it is full of good, hard working, amazing humans, that make porn for the enjoyment of consenting adults, we are just doing our jobs and making a living.
On that note however, we must all be realistic and realise that as long as there is the internet, there will be easily accessible pornography and the best thing that we, as adults, can do for the younger generation, is educate them.
Blaming porn for children being sexually active and anxious about sex, is a single minded and uneducated view. Snapchat, Tinder, Facebook and even Whatsapp, all give young people an endless platform for swapping messages and photos without their parents knowing. I feel endlessly sorry for the younger generation. They are so far ahead of the education system and, in many ways, their parents and teachers, when it comes to technology and access to porn and sex, that they are diving in head first with no warning. No one has warned this young girl that sending a boy a picture of herself naked means she has left herself open to this photo being spread around the internet, amongst friends and peers. No one has educated her because, when her parents and teachers were in school, this didn't happen.
If we DON'T educate, how will these young people ever learn? Sex education is practically nonexistent in the curriculum, there are so many things I wish I had been taught at school, I wish I had been taught how to handle finances, how to get a mortgage, how to keep your credit rating above average and I desperately wish I had been taught about sex.
Education needs to be brought forward to keep up with the young people in school today, the internet and social media need to be considered, sex needs to be considered, and yes, so does porn. Not in a way that children should be introduced to porn, but in a way that it should be mentioned during sex education and that children feel they can be open and ask questions. If sex wasn't painted as evil and dirty, then young teens wouldn't feel so guilty and ashamed when they become curious and want to find out more, it is only natural to want to explore sex when puberty is on the horizon. I was sexually curious from a very young age, but left terrified and worried after poor education and lack of information when it came to sex.
Porn is forever painted as the demon in any situation involving sex, and I doubt that will ever stop, but it is time that people realised there is more to the situation then porn. Sex is a natural thing to be curious about and with the age of social media and the internet upon us, we must come equipped with the knowledge to educate young people about these things rather then scaremonger and try and paint it as evil.