Porn in the parlour? Be careful

Fred Khumalo: First it was Vuyo Mbuli; then, not to be outdone, Tiger Woods decided to show his colours, too.

In quick succession, Ashley Cole and John Terry were also exposed as pretenders to the much-coveted throne of The Bonking Celeb.

While the revelations of the gentlemen's dalliances provided some colour and light relief in the lives of many who derive their sense of self-worth from the pain of others, it is no secret that they did untold damage to the marriages of the four gentlemen.

As I write this, Cheryl Cole, the wife of football player Ashley, is considering moving from their home in the UK to the US in the wake of the increasingly embarrassing revelations about her husband's extramarital affairs.

Although no divorce papers have been served yet, things are also not looking good between the Woodses. Not much has been reported on Mbuli and Terry's spouses' responses to their husbands' shenanigans, but one can only imagine the palpable pain and tension in their homes.

It's easy to say the men only have themselves to blame. But do they? You look at their wives - all glamorous trophy girls - and you wonder what drove these men to cheat on their beautiful, apparently supportive spouses.

I suppose it's an easy question to pose if you are not in their boots - when you don't get hounded every day of your life by women who are after your body (and your money and glamour?). Call it the burden of celebrity.

Which brings us to the next question: is the tendency to cheat, especially among the rich and famous, on the increase? Or is society, in general, experiencing spasms of extramarital sex on a more regular basis?

I have no figures to back me up, but it is my sincere belief that as a society we have become overwhelmingly sexified - and the more money and influence, the more exposure you have to sex. Gentlemen's clubs and men's "skin" magazines are easily accessible to the moneyed classes, and it is among these classes that these apparently rising levels of cheating are being reported. This is not to say poorer people don't cheat on their loved ones. They do.

It is just that the moneyed classes have the power and influence to objectify sex.

It is they who buy sex in its various manifestations.

I know that many will say that visiting men's clubs and buying men's magazines is "clean, good fun" as it gives men an outlet for their needs if and when their loved ones are not available. Sometimes going to the men's club is simply for innocent titillation - just watching, but no touching or engaging with the women whatsoever, sir!

But why I am telling this story if it's been published on the Lifestyle pages? I am telling a part of it for my own selfish purposes, I suppose, as I want to respond to a proposal by Multichoice to launch a porn channel in this country.

A cynical colleague of mine has pooh-poohed the idea of the proposed channel - but for an entirely different reason: "They are going to give us soft porn; if you want to give us porn, give us hard-core, man, or nothing at all."

Aha, therein lies the rub, said I.

There is a thin line between luxuriating in innocent, sexual titillation and losing oneself in the maelstrom of sex addiction.

Let's not be prudish about this now, there are many happily married men and women - pillars of society, and an inspiration to their communities - who visit men's clubs, and who watch porn movies, with varying degrees of control and discernment.

But the truth is that when sex has been nicely packaged and presented to you brashly and with unfailing regularity, it might begin to be a problem.

Witness the story in our Lifestyle section today. It's a heart-wrenching tale of a 21-year-old who has been diagnosed as a sex addict.

At the age of six, he started watching hard-core porn with his mother. By age 13, he had lost his equilibrium entirely. His performance at school plummeted, his social life at home was disastrous as he transferred his hard-core porn experiences to real-life people at home and in the neighbourhood. The incandescent flashes of porn images had taken charge of his every waking moment.

From hard-core porn, he started visiting brothels, and got sucked deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of sexual depravity (at least as it appears to some of us).

So, in other words, a graduate of soft porn will soon find himself deep into hard-core, and sinking deeper into other forms of risqué sexual habits. To use another analogy, a drug user starts experimenting with stuff like glue, but inexorably he is most likely, in the long term, to find himself hooked on heroin and other tougher stuff.

Not unlike Woods, the sex addict who has graduated from hard-core movies will start doing crazy things such as propositioning his best friend's wife in the kitchen at a dinner party (obviously thriving on the adrenaline that this risqué behaviour is likely to trigger), as the Lifestyle story suggests, or having sex with strangers in dangerous alleyways. And so it goes.

Look, we live in a free country and we take pride in our constitution and the Bill of Rights, which guarantee us unfettered freedom of the press, freedom of expression and other civil liberties.

But, as the cliché goes, every morsel of freedom has to be enjoyed responsibly.

So, the proposed porn channel, while it might appeal to many open-minded adults, has to be handled with due care and responsibility.

Younger people, as I have suggested above, are more susceptible to the long-term psychological damage that exposure to pornography might bring into their lives as they grow up.

I don't know how they will do it, but Multichoice should strive to have stricter control over access to the channel, to protect children.

Who knows: maybe the likes of Woods, Cole and Terry, with their money and influence, are simply helpless victims experiencing the inevitable climax (excuse the pun) of continuous and unlimited exposure to commodified sex - in the form of movies, sex clubs and an endless supply of willing and forceful sexual partners?

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