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We have come a long way since 1960 when the dead hand of the censor was lifted off the classic novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. As a youngster, I must have got hold of a contraband copy and my youthful fingers trembled as I turned the novel's pages. I am not surprised that author; D.H. Lawrence first considered calling his novel Tenderness. The love making between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover Oliver Mellors was in fact sensitively portrayed. The language used was matter of fact without intending to shock. The censors were right to lift the ban.

Here was a golden opportunity in literature to treat the act of making love as the most pure and noble of human experiences. Instead, the floodgates opened to reduce this most precious of gifts, that of procreation, to the depths of degeneracy. Pornography has turned love-making into a display of semi-violent crude sex. It is now as far removed from romantic love as it is possible to be. The scenes portrayed are often perverted, depraved and in graphic form similar to biblical visions of hell. Few of us can relate such activity to our own lives.

What happened to the inspiring nature of lovemaking; the quickened heart of love at first sight; a shy flowering of mutual attraction; the chemistry between two people we know exists but cannot fathom. Is the love that grows to a point where a partner's life is more important than one's own still recognized? Pornography slammed its jackboot on the neck of mutual affection, togetherness, tenderness, shared spirits and ideals. Porn trampled on commitment, the concept of developing relationships through the most beautiful form of foreplay imaginable; the courting process. Pornography is what pig swill is to food. The quackery of mockery clubbed the world's romantic idealists and set out its stall to the most base of animal instincts in man.

True lovemaking is a carnival of living for its purpose is life. Pornography represents the death of spiritual and physical romance; it drives a stake through its life-giving purpose. It wasn't the removal of censorship that let loose the backed-up sewer of pornography that flooded over our lives. It was our inability to separate the highest form of romance from the most debauched and degenerate of sex. We are reminded of Elizabeth Browning's poem: How do I Love Thee? This beautiful poem is still voted Britain's most loved romantic poem. If the word beginning with the letter L was replaced with another four letter word beginning with F would that poem and many other sonnets of pure love have survived for five minutes let alone hundreds of years? That is the difference between animal rutting and romantic love: One lasts for a few minutes to leave a feeling of barrenness, the other lasts for centuries and leaves one with a sense of fulfillment.

Michael Walsh was voted 'Writer of the Year' by the editorial board of Euro Weekly News. This English language newspaper is read by 550,000 readers. A broadcaster and author of over thirty titles, he is a journalist / columnist providing hundreds of media published articles to mainstream international media. The author's specialty is poetry, current affairs, globalization, the Third Reich and World War Two.