In the desperation to find something to blame apart from the obvious, sexual expression is always a go-to distraction.
Mass shootings in America are now so commonplace that only the most exceptional – like the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas – even make headlines. So far this year, there have been some 214 mass shootings in the USA, ‘mass shooting’ being defined as anything from four victims upwards, and we’re only just in June. How many of these do you remember reading about? And that’s not taking into account all the shootings with less than four victims, which are so commonplace that no one even bothers to report them in the press. If someone gets shot and killed in the UK, I guarantee you’ll see it reported on the national news, but American shootings are so frequent that they often don’t even make the local news. As The Killing of America pointed out back in 1980, America has the violent death rate that you normally only find in countries at war.
Clearly, something is behind this. We can look at all sorts of social issues – clearly, America is a nation that in many ways is at war with itself, fighting a low-level civil war in the form of a cultural divide that widens daily and where the people you disagree with are increasingly dehumanised and hated. Culture Wars are not the route towards a civilised society. But while the US is a few steps ahead of the rest of the developed world in this particular division, it’s not something unique to the States. No, there must be some other reason why so many people in America are being shot; why pissed-off or alienated or unhinged people are deciding to commit mass slaughter as a way of expressing their dissatisfaction with life. I wonder what it could be?
Now, you might think that the fact that America is awash with guns – not just regular ol’ guns but military-grade assault weapons that pretty much anyone can buy and just leave lying around the house until that point when they or a family member finally crack – might play some part in all this. Clearly, guns are not the thing that causes someone to commit murder. As the saying goes, guns don’t shoot people, people do. But guns make it a lot easier to kill lots of people and they remove the level of intimacy, effort and absolute commitment that knives and other weapons require. The gun provides a certain emotional distance between the shooter and the shot. I’m not saying that gun control would prevent every mass killing (or non-mass killing for that matter) but logic suggests that if guns were just that little bit harder to access, we might see fewer of them.
If you are a Right-Wing American politician, though, any sort of gun control is anathema to you and your supporters, who not only want All The Guns but also the right to ‘open carry’, a sort of low-level terrorism act where the most unstable-looking individuals are allowed to wander the aisles of supermarkets or visit the bank toting machine-guns. For these people, the idea that mass gun ownership has any connection at all to the thousands of cases of people being shot each year is beyond the pale. There must be another reason. Something else – anything else – must be causing all this senseless loss of life. What might that be?
Well, according to enough pundits to suggest a campaign is brewing, it’s porn. Not just porn, of course – the op-ed writers for The Washington Times and The Epoch Times, as well as West Virginia Republican Governor Jim Justice, have dragged a collection of the usual suspects into their ‘anything but guns’ blame-game, including violent video games and movies, social media, drugs, abortion, transgender rights and the draining of vital male essences. But it’s all generally brought together under the ‘porn’ banner because, as ever, porn is the canary in the coal mine. No one will defend porn – not the media, not the politicians – and so it becomes an easy scapegoat that you can then drag everything else you don’t approve of along with. It’s not a huge step from banning sexual entertainment to banning other types of sexual expression and bodily autonomy, because a ban on porn only makes sense if we accept that sex is an inherently dangerous and corrupting influence that must be controlled. Once you accept that idea, why on earth would you stop at adult entertainment?
Countries that ban porn also tend to have the strictest controls on abortion rights, gay rights and sexuality in general. For all the window-dressing of combatting sex trafficking or supporting women’s rights, strict controls on porn are entirely driven by a religious fear of sex (and female sexuality specifically) so naturally, proponents of outlawing adult entertainment also want to control what we do with our bodies, from BDSM to body art, stripping to sexual orientation. The Right is at least more honest about the religious motivations behind this, quoting Christian values that include a fixation on the right to life than seemingly ends the moment someone is actually born – at which point the right to bear arms immediately takes precedence.
The Left is more duplicitous, masking its own moral determination with a concern for women’s rights that notably does not include their right to choose to do anything that our moral superiors disapprove of, including taking control of their own sexuality, bodies and lives. So we have the fascinating – though not entirely unexpected – scenario of this week’s revelations, where both Republican senatorial candidate for Ohio, J.D. Vance (author of The Hillbilly Elegy, which I haven’t read but rather doubt is a cry for liberal tolerance) and the PSOE – the ruling Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party – are pushing forward with plans for a complete ban on porn – in the latter case, a very real threat as the governing party is angling for cross-party agreement on a wide-ranging and ever-expanding abolition of all paid sex work, including porn production, regardless of how consensual it might be. Both the Christian Far Right and the supposedly-Feminist Far Left are – not for the first time – essentially singing from the same hymn sheet and reducing women to the position of victim (while happily victimising any woman who fails to fit into their moral ideal). It’s a hatred and disgust for female sexuality disguised as paternal protection, a belief that the only women who participate in sex work of any sort are either victimised or broken – the Madonna/Whore concept is alive and well across the political spectrum.
We might wonder how both sides define ‘pornography’ – I somehow suspect that it won’t be restricted to hardcore imagery, just as ‘sex work’ is most likely to be defined as ‘anything I find morally offensive’. But in the case of the American Right, it’s also fascinating to see just what they see as a threat to a safe and ordered society and what they don’t. In 2018, the Florida House of Representatives actually rejected a gun control bill – one that merely prohibited the sale of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines – and then moved right on to passing a bill that declared porn a public health risk. If ever there was a definition of political insanity, that must have been it.
Despite all the claims to the contrary, there is no independent evidence – absolutely zero – that porn causes any level of harm to society; all claims otherwise are based on iffy studies by vested interest groups. We might do well to remember that the only recent mass shooting with any proven connection to sex work involved someone who had been radicalised by anti-porn groups murdering a group of sex workers, and somehow shifting that killing to be the fault of adult entertainment is an extraordinarily crass bit of victim blaming. There is, however, an ever-growing pile of bodies suggesting that a lax gun culture has a direct and brutal impact. America’s gun problem is a complex one and I don’t actually think that mere prohibition will solve it at this stage. But the absolute obsession with controlling a non-existent threat while actively resisting even a discussion about a very real one shows just how empty and ideological this argument actually is.
DAVID FLINT
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