In the British imagination, Americans often feature as prudes—“American women would view the whole notion of ‘wine o’clock’ with horror,” the former M.P. Louise Mensch, who moved to New York last year, recently wrote in the London Times. When it comes to online pornography, however, it turns out that the British may be more puritanical. This summer, Prime Minister David Cameron announced a plan to fit every new broadband account in the U.K. with a “family-friendly” filter, so that, beginning later this year, Brits who want access to the seamier corners of the Internet will have to “opt in” in order to view them. “Tear off your genitals, smash up your wanking headphones, because porn as we know it is over,” Clive Martin wrote on Vice’s British Web site, calling the measure “a kind of wanker’s census.” In Cameron’s country upon a hill, Martin predicted, homemade sex tapes would be to porn as moonshine was to gin.

Practically speaking, the opt-in program requires the British porn enthusiast to do little more than uncheck a box. Still, as an attempt at cordoning off the Internet, the plan recalls the Secretum, the cupboards in which Victorian curators of the British Museum sequestered items that were judged to be obscene: wax phalluses, a statue of Pan having sex with a goat. Even for the porn-indifferent, the scheme presents complications. Whereas American couples cringe at “the conversation,” in which people who have been casually dating are compelled to determine the status of their relationship, British couples have lately begun to dread the prospect of sitting down to discuss whether their household will be porn-friendly or porn-free. Besides, the plan’s critics asked, what about false positives? (Smartphones in the U.K. already block inappropriate content, as this reporter found out when she tried to look up Baudelaire on her iPhone.) What about people who live with roommates, of whose Internet needs they would prefer to remain oblivious? What about having to call up an operator at BT—the U.K.’s equivalent of Time Warner—to tell him that you’re having trouble logging on to “Girls Gone Wild”?

Claire Perry, M.P. for the Devizes constituency and Cameron’s Special Advisor on Preventing the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood, agreed to answer a few questions over the telephone the other day. Perry introduced the idea of a default filter in the House of Commons in 2010, several years after her children Googled “American girls”—they were interested in an Addy doll—and were directed to a Web site that Perry remembers as “shocking.” (A highlight of the debate occurred when Peter Bottomley, M.P. for Worthing West, said, “Most of us have a naked body, and very few of us inherited celibacy from our parents.”) Perry was eager not to be mistaken for a latter-day Mary Whitehouse, the morals campaigner who, in 1973, tried to get Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling” banned from the BBC. (Whitehouse’s grasp of the double entendre was such that she once wrote to a producer to express her “very great pleasure in your truly delightful programme on the beaver.”) “I’m not in any way an anti-porn crusader,” Perry said. “I consider myself very liberal when it comes to sexual relationships.” But, citing reports of thirteen-year-old girls saying that they’d been asked to perform threesomes and anal sex, she said, “I’ve yet to meet a woman—and I clearly don’t have very interesting friends—who would find that to be a satisfying sexual relationship.”

Perry argued that children are encountering extreme images online, and that parents “know we’re being rubbish” at keeping up with technology, in order to maintain filters. (According to Perry, only four out of ten families have managed to install them.) Her cheery candor brought out the Ali G in her interlocutor, who asked if she remembered her first experience of pornography. “I do,” Perry replied. “I went to see ‘Emmanuelle’ when I was fifteen, and I was absolutely horrified at the idea that I was going to see, you know, an erect organ on the screen.”

But what about the privacy rights of porn viewers? Over at Vice, Clive Martin was reporting that the opt-in plan had become the subject of much talk in the pub. “Most men, I think, are fairly anti the idea,” he said. “No one wants to be the guy who confesses to being a big RedTube user.”

Perry, whose Web site was recently hacked—guess what the hackers posted there?—said she didn’t feel that requiring people to uncheck a box, in the name of public safety, was “such a big ask.” A recent German proposal would have required porn-seekers to verify their age at a public building like a bank or a post office in order to get a PIN code. (It didn’t pass.) “To me, that is sort of the masturbator’s walk of shame,” Perry said. She continued, “Why do they think you get targeted ads? The game’s up, guys—Google knows what you’re doing!” ♦