We would never take people seriously if they suggested that the whole of any industry or culture was represented solely by its worst elements. So why do we accept such blanket criticisms of adult entertainment?
The British. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me that the average Briton is incapable of being content with life unless they’re absolutely petrified of some existential threat. I’m not sure why this is. It’s a bit weird and probably not very healthy. Video Nasties, drugs, Mad Cow Disease, more drugs, AIDS, some drugs, Keith Vaz’s One-Man Campaign against the video game industry, various diseases before we actually got to a pandemic, and vape-based drugs.
In the contemporary, perhaps no moral panic has been quite so recurrent as the scourge of online pornography. The Internet was barely a thing before the media brought to light the trade in illicit CSAM material online, and no doubt encouraged a bunch of nonces to take AOL subscriptions because they now knew where to get their hands on it. That, in turn, led to Operation Avalanche and Operation Ore, where the mere presence of a credit card number in Landslide’s Age Verification database marked you as a paedophile, regardless of whether any actual evidence existed.
We’ve had the Dangerous Pictures Act, we’ve had the Audio-Visual Media Services Regulations, we’ve banned facesitting because it could kill someone, we’ve had the CPS give up trying to enforce the Obscene Publications Act, and we’ve had a bunch of shifty companies trying to peddle a new AV solution that they promise won’t become Landslide 2.0, nor will it be the source of the next Ashley Madison-style clusterfuck.
Radical feminists like Julie Bindel—who still believes that human fingers are nothing but hollow rubber tubes that contain bright red blood—assert that pornography is among the purest evil perpetrated against women. John Carr, a self-described expert on the subject, would gladly throw all of our rights to freedom of expression and privacy on a bonfire to get back at the ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’ he believes are ruining the world.
There are more than a few campaign groups, including right now CEASE, who are threatening to sue ICO over some rather vague concerns about the misuse of children’s data by pornography websites, but whose mission statement makes it clear they want to see pornography die.
The anti-pornography campaigners generally have the same ‘IWIN’ button in their argumentative arsenal; that pornography is violent, it depicts abuse, and that it promotes unhealthy sexual attitudes as well as glorifying sexual crimes like rape and incest.
In reality, this is a nonsense argument. I’m not going to deny that there is no violent pornography. There quite clearly is, and even as I sit here, typing away a defence of pornography, I can think of a few producers and websites that I really kinda wish didn’t exist. I’m also not going to pretend there aren’t some damaged people working in the porn industry, but if the events of the past few months have taught us anything, is that there are also some incredibly damaged people working for the Metropolitan Police.
If I were to claim that the entirety of the horror film genre, all 100+ years of it, from Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Doctor Cagliari, through to the nuclear-monster movies of the 50s, the Hammer Horrors of the 60s, the exploitation of the 70s, slashers of the 80s, whatever the fuck they did in the 90s before Scream, the post-Scream slasher revival, and the haunted house and zombie crazes of the 2000s could be completely and unquestionably represented by the likes of August Underground and A Serbian Film, you’d quite rightly call me a prat.
The same applies to every genre of film and television, and it also applies to pornography. If all porn is nothing but a bunch of men manhandling and abusing a woman, then what the fuck is Yanks.com? It’s a website run by women featuring masturbation videos and who donate $1 from every new subscription to the women’s charity, Call to Safety.
If pornography doesn’t depict loving, consensual, romantic sex, then what the fuck is SexArt? What the fuck is Ultrafilms? What the fuck is Viv Thomas? What the fuck is Nubile Films? What the fuck is X-Art? What the fuck is Transsensual?
If all pornography is purely violent and utterly depraved, then what the fuck is Girlfriends Film? What the fuck is Girlsway? What the fuck is Digital Desire? What the fuck is Sweetheart Video? What the fuck is 21 Naturals? What the fuck is a lot of things? Are they no longer porn? Are they something else?
Even the mainstream sites out there like Devil’s Film, or New Sensations, or Private, or Burning Angel don’t generally deal with this parade of horror, degradation and brutality that these cherry-picking campaigners point to as representative. Nor is every single film centred around some pseudo-incestual fantasy about wanting to bang your stepsister or stepmother. And even in the realms of the more ‘extreme’ material, there is still a gulf in ethics between Kink.com and Legal Porno.
The simple truth is that trying to align the likes of SexArt or Girlfriends Films with the Legal Porno and Adult Doorways of the world is an intentionally intellectually dishonest argument. Out of context, you can make the pornography industry seem like a vile slew of unyielding abuse, but out of context, you can piece together enough footage to make Nick Barmby look like England’s greatest ever footballer.
The campaigners like Carr and Bindel don’t want to make any distinctions. They don’t want to acknowledge that ‘porn’ is an insufficient catch-all term that is applied to all sites that seek to arouse, regardless of their method or intent. They draw bullshit comparisons by omission between the cheesy ‘paying the plumber’ fantasies and the creepy ‘coercing your stepdaughter’ ones. They argue that the ‘teen’ tag indicates moral corruption among viewers, yet ignore that ‘MILF’ has long been a more popular term.
And their selectiveness in their outrage is perhaps their most damning moral failing. While they criticise straight pornography for pairing 18-21-year-old female performers with older men, they don’t seem to express any concerns over young ‘twinks’ being paired up with 40+ hairy bears. They argue that pornography is sexist and misogynist, yet there is nary a word about the clear racism involved in reducing all black men to the size of their dicks. If pornography is that damn harmful, why is it only harmful to women? I’m sorry, but as a woman, I find the idea that I am some delicate fragile little flower fucking offensive.
So why do these arguments succeed? Why is it that a group of moral puritans and fundamentalists can gain the ear of government and incite their followers to join them on their moral crusade? Because this country has a particularly barmy view of sex.
The campaigners often adopt a ‘think of the children!’ platform, which is surprising given how little we actually do. If children are, as they claim, getting their sex education from Pornhub then what the fuck does that say about the standards of education in our school system? Half of the problem is that we have such a 19th Century mindset that we try and ‘shield’ children from the realities of human development. Sex education, for many children, doesn’t even begin until they’ve started puberty, at which point the biological programming that’s trying to get us to spawn more mini-mes is fully in effect. Put simply, it’s too late.
However, we daren’t start sex education at a more responsible age lest the religious zealots lose their collective shit and get backed by a campaign (likely in the Daily Mail or Telegraph) to oust the moral degenerates corrupting our children from the halls of power. Rationality and reason often fly straight out of the window when it comes to sex, and our media are the biggest culprits of maintaining that deranged status quo.
The very idea that our media would appoint themselves as the moral guardians of righteousness is so utterly preposterous as well. While these journalists happily jump on the anti-porn bandwagons, repeating the strawman arguments of the mouthy campaigners, they show no sign of evaluating their own behaviour. Our media applauded their own role in the upskirting ban, yet think there is nothing remotely creepy with having celebrities stalked by paparazzi.
Perhaps nothing demonstrates the absurdity, hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance of the British media than The Sun’s angry response to Brass Eye’s ‘Pedogeddon’ episode, next to which they ran an article fawning with praise over a then 14-year-old Charlotte Church’s breasts.
Porn is a fantasy. It isn’t reality. If it’s providing sex education to kids, it’s a sign that sex education is failing and that is the real problem. We don’t allow the TV and film industry to be surrogate teachers on ethics and social etiquette because we recognise that they too are a fantasy. It’s no more socially acceptable to run around sticking arrows in people like Oliver Queen than it is to want to bang your stepmother. But we don’t worry about children growing up, donning a knock-off Robin Hood outfit and murdering people who have supposedly failed the city. We don’t do that because we’re hopefully teaching them that’s not how you’re supposed to behave.
If we truly want to ‘think of the children’ how about we develop some sort of consistency in our approach to sex and how we speak about it? How about we stop shaming people like Max Moseley for their private parties? How about we stop openly stalking celebrities? How about we learn to accept that people’s sexual peculiarities aren’t necessarily that peculiar?
How about we stop going through a female teacher’s Instagram pictures and publishing the sexiest ones after she’s just been arrested for blowing a 15-year-old?
How about we encourage parents—who have presumably had sex—to stop behaving like giggling little Year 7’s and actually talk to their children about it instead of outsourcing responsibility for what is a significant part of the human experience? How about we begin age-appropriate sexual education earlier, and how about we address the issue of fantasy vs reality like we do for abso-fucking-lutely everything else?
And how about we stop having dishonest arguments where we equate the overwhelmingly average porn video with some brutal extreme shit that might show up on PornHub, but is most certainly not representative of an entire medium of filmmaking?
Yes, children shouldn’t watch porn. Parents should educate themselves on how to stop them watching it. Despite what John Carr believes, you don’t need to be a ‘geek’ or a ‘nerd’ to lock out the majority of pornographic websites. You don’t need to be a geek/nerd to take an active interest in what your child is doing online.
You wouldn’t hand your child as much as a hammer without being certain they knew how to use it responsibly and appropriately, so why would you hand them a mobile phone without taking precautions? Why aren’t you investing in a router that lets you take full control of your household internet? Why are you all being so fucking lazy?
However, even stopping them from watching porn is tackling the symptom rather than the problem. We should be demystifying sex, in an age-appropriate manner, so that children hitting puberty gain a better understanding of what the hell is going on with their bodies. Currently, we treat sex too much like Chief Wiggum’s Forbidden Closet of Mysteries and that is just asking for trouble.
KATH RELLA
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The British establishment have always regarded porn as an obnoxious foreign weed that must be tightly controlled if it can’t unfortunately be eradicated altogether. Even pre-internet when the UK had the strictest censorship in the Western world there always seemed plenty of miserable MP’s and other campaigners whining that the law was inadequate to protect children and others from an ever-rising tide of filth and they could rely on humbugging tabloid journalists to amplify their tight-arsed views. Our fun-loving PM has been pulling out the stops to have the hard-right filth-fighter and former Mail editor (and foul-mouthed bully) Paul Dacre appointed as the head of Ofcom.
Moral campaigners have never shirked from using outrageous propaganda to downright lies on this issue. They aren’t interested in the facts and they never have been. The likes of Radio 4 journalists see sex entertainment solely as a cesspit of sexism in which women cater to the needs of sleazy men. If children engage in inappropriate behaviour at school then internet porn must be responsible QED. The similarities of approach between, say, The Guardian and US conservative groups, whom they would otherwise despise, are striking. Moral panics serve political agendas and they boost ratings.