For people of my generation, porn was something you found in bushes on the way to school or in your friend’s father’s toolbox.

The reason buses were late was not because of heavy traffic or scheduling difficulties, but because the drivers and conductors were waylaid by bored housewives who dressed in sexy negligees, even in the afternoon.

Window cleaners and driving instructors engaged in practices so debauched they required ecclesiastical intervention, in the form of the confessional.

I remember knowing instinctively when these bawdy, sub-Carry On romps came to our local picture house, without really understanding what they involved, that they were not intended for the likes of me. They had been given an X certificate such was their power to corrupt young minds.

It transpires that porn does have the power to corrupt, but not in the way we imagined back in the 1970s.

Today porn is everywhere, instantly available and ubiquitous, in all guises and extremities and to people of all ages. A study published last year revealed that a third of nine-year-olds had unintentionally accessed porn by the age of nine.

The potential problems this might create for society is not, particularly, to do with the severity of content – most porn is formulaic, predictable, and banal – but rather with the habits it generates.

Catherine Carr’s radio series About the Boys, currently airing on Radio Four, paints a fascinating and insightful picture of how young men engage with porn, young women, other young men and with society, in 2024.

She travelled the country, interviewing teenage boys on a range of subjects, from sex to pornography, feelings and isolation, and her findings are as........

© Herald Scotland