Addicted to Bollox TV

Liz Longhurst, whose daughter Jane was murdered by a man said to be addicted to extreme internet pornography, is appearing in a Channel 4 documentary to be screened on Sunday.

Mrs Longhurst will give her views in the documentary, which examines how men's relationships with women are said to suffer due to porn addiction.

The Channel 4 programme will explore claims that there is a chemical basis for the condition, and draws on scientific research concluding that porn taps into the same dopamine pathway in the brain as cocaine.

Longhurst said: I give my views on the programme that it's hard to say why people become so heavily addicted to pornography. And I accept that it is only in a few cases where individuals feel compelled to act out extreme acts of violence upon women inspired by internet pornography like Graham Coutts did to my daughter.

Longhurst added: I strongly believe that certain people like Coutts would not commit such horrendous crimes if the imagery that they become addicted to was not so readily available. A lot of people view child pornography out of curiosity and later become addicted. Some will then carry out sexual acts on children, and most cite online pornography as the driving force behind their behaviour.

But I do not object to all types of pornography. I want to make this clear. I have a live and let live attitude. I tolerate a lot of things I am opposed to. What I object to is imagery that inspires violence.

Addicted to Porn is due to be screened on Channel 4 on Sunday 16th December at 11.25pm.

Aggregate reviews from the forum

Just watched this crap, it was, as expected, sensationalist journalism at its worst.

Partly about Coutts and partly about a man addicted to porn trying to quit his addiction.

Several times the program said that Coutts addiction lead to his murdering Jane Longhurst and the only corroboration was a cop who declared that he was convinced the porn made Coutes do it and an American psychologist who has studied sexual criminals and said that they all seemed to to use porn. One person saying extreme porn 'normalises' violence and another that looking at extreme porn could lead to wanting to commit violence.

A pretty grim and harrowing resume of the Longhurst case, I have to report. More generally, the show starts by saying how 4 million men regularly use porn, but fails to mention how it's use amongst women is actually the biggest growth area. Not a word of dissent was presented to challenge the central view of "porn being damaging" in the whole hour long spectacle.

It wasn't just bad that the Coutts coverage was one-sided, but that they conflated it with the very separate issue of porn addiction at all. The show would've been a bit better if they'd just made it a story on some people's struggle with porn addiction, without trying to conflate it with the very political issue of Coutts' case, or trying to scaremonger it into "Porn is bad!"

The whole thing reminded me of the parody propaganda film in Futurama's I Dated A Robot - if you watch women On The Internet, you will lose interest in real girls and won't hold down a job!