Dame Emma Thompson finds young people’s expectations of sex ‘disturbing’

Dame Emma Thompson has said young people’s expectations of sex “can be very disturbing indeed”.

The actress, 63, has spoken out about the “easy access” to pornography and the pressure on school girls ahead of the release of her new sex-worker inspired film Good Luck To You, Leo Grande co-starring Daryl McCormack.

Speaking to Beth Rigby, Dame Emma said: “I think some things are worse when I hear stories in schools about boys and what they expect from girls – and I mean that the easy access to porn, so anal sex is because it’s so freely available to watch in porn.

“If you talk to young people about their sexual knowledge and what they expect and what they think sex is, it can be very disturbing indeed.

“I think it can interfere with their sexual development because it’s all been taken away, industrialised and fed back to them in a completely un-indigestible form.”

Dame Emma also said she thinks the sexual revolution is a “very complex issue”.

She said: “It’s not like we had that and then everything was better. And now young people, it’s all better.

“It’s never like that in human experience, we take a step forward and then we tie ourselves into weird knots because the fact of the matter is we have no respect at all for our sexual desires.

“We ridicule them. We make them the butt of our jokes. We don’t respect what our desires are.

“And we find when they’re odd, which they often are we find them shameful and ridiculous.”

Beth Rigby Interviews continues at 9pm on June 9.