There’s sex and there's love - but not always together

Big players in the music and fashion industries, run by men letting their fantasies rip, are presenting images of even pre-pubescent girls behaving like sexually experienced and aware women. And through these images, young girls are being manipulated into thinking that playing up to male fantasies is what they themselves really want and how they express themselves.

Do we really think that the girls in the children’s clothing catalogues or clips, would really, off their own bat, pout and seduce the cameras? These are children who, presumably, have never even kissed, let alone had sex.

I believe sexually provocative images of children under the age of consent, should be banned. Without such legislative controls the children being used in these ways are becoming ever younger.

Are you comfortable about primary school girls wearing G-strings and pubescent girls feeling like they have to sexually please boys to be cool?

I’m not.

And I’m no conservative moraliser.

What I am is a woman with a lived experience of having swallowed a grown man’s fantasy about what it was to be an attractive adult. I believed that to be lovable, I had to sexually please men. I was told this from the age of 14.

I lived that out, having indiscriminate and therefore bad and unsatisfying sex for a couple of decades. It took a couple of decades to work out how to stop shoving my real feelings about it under the carpet and discovered what it was I really wanted from intimacy.

This, surprise, surprise, was a loving relationship, with someone who respected, honoured and valued me. It took another decade to work out how to break my patterns and discover that the sex in this situation is a knock out.

You don’t need to wear a burkha to find that. But touting your sexuality to passers by isn’t the most sensible way of going about achieving it either.