If you follow world news, you'll already know that Iceland's Prime Minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, is calling for a ban on Internet pornography and if the law gets passed, Iceland will be the first Western democracy to block internet porn. Print pornography and pornographic videos are already illegal there, as are strip clubs and allowing employers to profit from employees' nudity. These laws recognize women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale. Imagine that!

Fears about the damaging effects on children have led the Icelandic government to work on legal measures to try and stop the flood of graphic sexual material infesting their country.

Interior Minister Ögmundur Jónasson has set up working parties to find the best ways to stem the tide of online images and videos being accessed by young people through computers, games consoles and smartphones.

Some of the methods being considered include blocking porn IP addresses and making it illegal to use Icelandic credit cards to access x-rated sites.

Iceland faces huge opposition; the Minister of the Interior is writing the legislation and the Prime Minister will spend much (possibly all) of her political capital signing it. We believe she needs to be encouraged and profusely thanked for her courage and vision to do so.

We at PoSARC can only hope this is the beginning of an important trend and that other countries will soon follow suit.

The children whose well-being we need to be concerned with, will, after all, grow up to be teens and then adults. At PoSARC, we already know what happens when young people are exposed to pornography at early ages and how that influences the way they see the opposite sex (and will therefore treat them), how pornography shapes the brain's sexual arousal templates and how these children and young teens will be placed at risk for compulsion/addiction.

Ask your sex-addicted significant other when he first started looking at pornography and then consider how much time, money, heartache and arguments you have both spent on this egregious "habit" which, though likely begun in his early years, may have progressed into other sexually problematic behaviors before destroying your marriage and family life.

Many of us have all but given up hope on those sexually compulsive partners who continue to argue for their right to use porn/act out sexually despite our requests that they stop, who will use their rage and other defensive strategies to terrorize us into keeping quiet about it, all of which relegates us to the sidelines in our own marriages/partnerships.

Perhaps it is too late for so many of these sex addicts. Perhaps it is impossible to save our own marriages/partnerships.

We cannot, however, afford to sit idly by and allow our children to be next in line for wholesale corruption by Big Porn, Inc. It is already happening: the average age of a kid looking at porn on the internet was dropped this year from eleven years of age, to eight!

If you care about our children- our young women being socialized into thinking the most important thing they can be is "hot", a commodity for males to sexually consume and then toss away, and if you care about our young boys whose sexuality is being hijacked by greedy, sex-industry profit-mongers, then here is your chance to do something:

THANK THE PRIME MINISTER for having the courage to stand by her convictions to ban internet pornography. Thank her for spending her political capital on such an important issue!

Here is her e-mail address: maro@norden.org
You may want to write in the subject line: THANK YOU Prime Minister for banning internet porn!

To send her regular mail, write to her at:

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir
Stjórnarráðshúsinu
150 Reykjavik
Iceland

To read more on this topic, you can google Iceland + anti-porn legislation