This week, David Cameron declared that he would be doing everything in his power to block violent internet porn.

By violent porn, he means anything that depicts simulated rape and the type of porn that would not even be allowed to be sold in UK sex shops.

Kudos to him I say, if not for anything else for standing up for what he believes in.

But as much as I hate porn, not to mention violent porn, I do tend to thread carefully when it comes to banning anything at all.

My humble experience in life has taught me that the moment something is banned, the more desirable it becomes, even to those who never desired it in the first place.

Of course, there are things we should always ban no matter what, but we should keep them to a minimum and ban them only when we have absolutely no other choice.

For example, even at the risk of making it more desirable, we should always and invariably ban child pornography because, children cannot legally, morally or even consciously consent to performing such acts; so even if banning child pornography makes it more desirable, the alternative is so unacceptable that we have no choice but to ban it and punish all perpetrators with tough sentences.

But when it comes to banning any type of adult content, produced by consenting adults for consenting adults, I tend to lean towards the ‘be and let be’ school of thought.

Whilst I hate anything that could remotely degrade women, and violent porn seems to do this very effectively, my feeling is that a complete ban would push it underground, its value would rise, and we’d simply be fuelling its production.

Cameron also wants Google and other search engines to take the role of parents, when clearly that’s not their role to play.

He is assuming (and he’s probably right) that most parents are not tech savvy enough to install the right filters to protect their children, and based on this belief, he is trying to put the onus on search engines.

Sadly, as well-intentioned as he might be, the man is not quite familiar with how search engines work. He does not realise that if enough people wanted to, tomorrow, the word ‘cat’ could start returning porn results, and not of the feline type.

Again, as much as I loathe anything that degrades women, and as much as my first instinct would be to ban violent porn from the face of the earth, I don’t get how this is different from producing a film that depicts murder, mutilation or torture.

Quite frankly I think that Barbie dolls and all the photo-shopped images that surround us do more harm to women than all the porn in the world.

I can’t wait for the first scientific results proving Cameron right or wrong, because for the time being I’m getting the uncomfortable feeling that one man’s morality (or political agenda) is carpet-bombing a whole country.