Politicians, Prohibitionists And Porn: A Bad Combination

Let’s not allow outrage at inappropriate workplace behaviour by an MP to further embolden the moralising opportunists.

Does it really matter that an (officially, right now) unnamed Tory MP was (allegedly) watching porn during a session of the House of Commons? Well yes, clearly it does – though perhaps not for the reasons that many are jumping on.

Watching porn at work is clearly inappropriate for most jobs – though perhaps we should qualify that a little. If you are alone, on a break for lunch or such and are using your own device, then I’d say fill your boots unless your employer has a blanket ban on accessing the internet for personal use of any sort on company property. But if they don’t, then watching porn during your free time is as legitimate as streaming music or checking social media. As long as you are not showing it to anyone else – at least anyone else who doesn’t want to see it – then it’s hard to see what the problem is.

Watching porn during working hours –  particularly when you are in the middle of meetings, for instance, or while sitting in a political debating chamber – is clearly a different matter altogether. But even then, it’s not so much the content of what you’re watching that is the problem but the fact that you are clearly taking the piss. Had our feckless MP been watching a sporting event or catching up on the latest Netflix show, surely that would be just as unacceptable. But the fact that all the fuss has been about what he was watching is telling – had he been catching up on the big boxing match, it might have been a tad embarrassing but not seen as disgusting or abusive or somehow or other an attack on every female MP in the way that we have seen the current case referenced over the last couple of days – two men punching each other into early dementia in front of a baying mob is considered much more morally acceptable than two (or more) people having consensual sex by people across the political divide.

Most of us would probably think twice before actually viewing porn while surrounded by other people, especially if they are work colleagues or complete strangers rather than friends and especially if they are the sort of people who like to take the moral high ground. At the very least, it displays a certain sense of entitlement – or perhaps a lack of social skills in understanding why other people might not approve. Both these factors are particularly prevalent in politicians, of course, and so it’s no surprise that some of them feel that they can do what they want, when they want to. As we all know, there is no arrogance like the arrogance of our elected (or unelected) overlords.

However – the reaction to this goes far beyond the idea that yes, this behaviour is a bit crass and inappropriate, and tells us a lot about the current public discourse and moral panic surrounding porn. Here’s a Twitter headline from the ever-dreadful Daily Mirror:

See what they did there? The fact that he was (apparently) sat next to a woman apparently makes it much worse because all women are delicate little flowers who not only must disapprove of porn but are also somehow ‘damaged’ by it – just by seeing it, just be being in the vague proximity of it. The inference is there throughout the coverage of this – that pornography is, by default, violence towards women in particular and harmful to society in general. That merely watching porn is an act of sexual harassment. It’s this moral indignation that makes me pause for thought because we are seeing this everywhere right now – righteous campaigners spouting bad science and fake stats as part of a new moral campaign against porn – and not just porn. Everyone from Radical Feminists to right-wing incels is riding into battle against sexual freedom in general and porn, as ever, is on the front line. Don’t for a minute think that these campaigners will stop at banning adult entertainment though – their end-game is the suppression of any expression of desire, however consensual, that does not exist solely for the purposes of procreation. For them, sexual pleasure, sexual education and sexual expression are all shameful and disgusting – porn is just the easiest target right now but just as we see them lining up against the ‘pornification’ of society (which translates as anything that doesn’t present the very idea of sex a bit icky), so we can see them girding their chastity belts to drive us back to the dark ages.

Leading the way in this campaign are, of course, the very politicians who wish to preach moral platitudes to the rest of us. There are many reasons to condemn Tory MPs caught watching porn, not least of which is the absolute shameless hypocrisy of doing so while being part of a government pushing through unworkable and repressive controls over online porn while also expanding the micro-management of sexual expression from sex shops to strip clubs in the hope of making life so difficult for these businesses to survive that they are effectively banned. In this though, porn just becomes another example of political double standards – that the rules we have to live by do not apply to those who make them. As we’ve seen with Boris Johnson’s lockdown parties, politicians tend to live by a ‘do as we say, not as we do’ motto and yes, we should absolutely condemn anyone who wants to restrict our freedoms to watch adult content while enjoying those freedoms themselves.

Of course, we don’t even know what the porn being viewed actually was – given that we live in a world where everything from lingerie advertising onwards is considered to be ‘porn’ by some campaigners and moralisers, we should perhaps have some more information before leaping to the finger-wagging. There is a major difference between someone briefly encountering a nude image on social media and possibly lingering over it too long and someone getting their jollies watching scat bukakke in a crowded public place. Given that people are talking about the MP being thrown out of Parliament – a sanction that, we might note, you don’t even get after being convicted of threatening to throw acid in a love rival’s face – we should probably at least know just what was being watched before reaching for the pitchfork.

More importantly – let’s not fall into the trap of seeming to condemn the content because we don’t like the consumer. Remember that despite what you are continually told, the evidence for porn being addictive or having a causal connection (direct or otherwise) to sexual assault and sexist attitudes is practically non-existent, especially when we disregard the ‘research’ of vested interest groups who have set out to find evidence at all costs and who fudge and bury inconvenient facts in favour of cherry-picked evidence and leading questions. And contrary to what you are constantly told, not all women are appalled by porn; not even most women, we might think, despite the relentless campaign to persuade them that they should be. In any case, no one says you have to like porn – but at least admit that it is a personal hang-up and stop trying to impose that hang-up on others with hysteria and lies. While it’s fun to humiliate politicians for their blatant hypocritical smugness and attack them for slacking on the job, let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that the porn – even the consumption of porn in public places – is the issue here, or else we simply give more fuel to the prohibitionists and the moral absolutists. By all means, punish the MP for pissing around watching stuff on his phone when he should be doing what the taxpayer pays him to do and pay attention during meetings – it’s not like MPs have especially strenuous work lives on the whole after all – but let’s not get suckered into agreeing that there is something inherently bad about sexual entertainment.

DAVID FLINT

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