« December 1998 | Home | February 1999 »
Porn becomes the norm
My daughter watched a daytime lesbian porn channel
Being a libertarian isn't always easy. I don't expect sympathy; libertarians aren't supposed to. All libertarians expect is tolerance for what they think and do, when it doesn't harm the interests of others; in return they try to do as they would be done by, and to be tolerant of others. But it is difficult to tolerate behaviour that one finds incomprehensible and disgusting; it is hard to be a libertarian prude.
I dislike pornography. Nonetheless, I have always thought people ought to be able to buy and watch what they like. I have always believed that their sexual interests are none of my business, or yours, except where children or coercion are concerned. There is still no genuine evidence that pornography is harmful to the person who enjoys it. Even if there were, I believe he has the right to harm himself, so long as he doesn't expect much help from anybody else.
Yet I am tempted towards greater censorship. I have been asked to talk about pornography and prurience at a conference on "The Media and Public Confidence" on Thursday. Although I have quite often written about such matters, and although I am not often short of an opinion, I have genuinely been unsure what I think. The usual drill in the face of uncertainty is to ignore the problem and hope that it will disappear. However, in this case, with my mind wonderfully concentrated by the prospect of speaking in public to people who have paid for their seats, I have had to decide. And I now think that there is, even for an extreme libertarian, a powerful case for greater censorship, or at the very least, greater censorship of television pornography.
One of the difficulties of this subject lies in definition. There has been a great mass of confusing discussion on what pornography is; I think the only way to deal with it is to ignore it. We all know, broadly speaking, what we mean by pornography. It is any flagrant representation of sexual behaviour that deliberately arouses people's sexual responses, but serves little or no other purpose. The usual motive of the producers of porn is money, but it's not the motive that matters but the effect. Even more money or success is to be had out of flouting sexual taboos, though there are only diminishing returns in this, of course. Everything is complicated by the dust thrown in our eyes about art. I am thinking of Robert Mapplethorpe's more revolting photographs, particularly of a close-up of a man's arm up to the elbow in another man's rear end. It may be art - Mapplethorpe was hugely talented - but it is also pornographic, and prurient too.
Pornography, like the poor, we have always with us. What is new is that there is a great deal more pornography around than there used to be. The top shelf has become the middle shelf, and is fast becoming the child-level shelf too. I can remember the first time pubic hair appeared in Playboy. I was a student tour-guide, walking down the Via Veneto in Rome with two English rugger-playing colleagues: "Look," they said, shouting with glee and amazement at what they saw on a news-stand, "tufty!" Times are no longer so innocent. Today I suspect there is little my own young children haven't seen. At only six my daughter told me that she had watched a German cable channel with her little German friends, and seen a lot of women "doing funny things together in the bath"; they had switched to a German daytime lesbian porn channel.
Television, with the proliferation of channels, is forced further and further into pornography, soft and hard. Porn will boost flagging ratings. So we have a fast-rising tide of television porn, usually from across the Channel; Britain is, so far, unusual in its resistance to it, but Britain is in the position of King Canute. I think the real argument against it has not to do with its effects on the individual, but with its effects on society, on all of us; this is a class action argument. I know this is thin ice for the libertarian. But what we have seen in the past 25 years is - to use the ghastly neologism - the thorough sexualisation of society. Everything, everywhere on the media has sexual connotations, and exploits them; gradually more and more becomes permissible. Gradually porn turns into norm.
There are all kinds of evil consequences. One is the promotion of a public obsession with sex and sexual satisfaction, with the right to both. This creates hopeless expectations and unnecessary bitterness. It makes the yoke of marriage heavier to bear and easier to cast off. It also creates a tendency to see sex in everything, which is profoundly misleading and distracting.
Worst of all, has been the violation of the sense of privacy. When all kinds of hidden, intimate, private things become the casual, titillating tattle of lunch-time soap operas and confession shows, and when Jerry Hall, a mother in her forties, can flaunt her genitals for fun in a middle-shelf magazine, a young person growing up can only conclude that privacy doesn't matter. Intimacy and modesty and discretion are meaningless. Grown ups don't value them. How can this fail to trivialise relationships, and not only sexual relationships? It trivialises political relationships too, because personal responsibility and personal freedom have their roots in privacy and cannot survive without it. In this sense, pornography is a threat to freedom, perhaps even more than censorship.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, January 31, 1999 | Comments (0)
Unspeakably vile and well worth watching
South Park is a protest against political correctness. It is a liberation from dishonest, manipulative niceyniceness, which it lampoons.
It is a fair bet that if grown-ups start saying that a television programme is undermining civilisation as we know it, the programme is worth watching. I remember standing years ago in a supermarket in New England with a born-again Christian mother, who was pointing at a poster of some yellow-headed television cartoon characters and saying, sadly, that the series was undermining family values.
Somehow, though I don't watch much television and I don't often like cartoons, I knew I would love it. Sure enough, it was The Simpsons and it was wonderful. Soon afterwards The Simpsons arrived in Britain and millions of people - at least five million, according to the latest viewing figures - love them. They now appear on pyjamas at Marks & Spencer - there is no more significant cultural apotheosis.
I haven't the slightest idea what is shocking about them. It's true that Homer and his son Bart are far from admirable, that Marge the mother is deeply stupid, that Lisa the saxophone-playing daughter is a terrible prig and that most of the other characters are dubious in one hopeless way or another. But the family sticks together. The parents are married. They love each other. The dad sticks to his dead-end job at the nuclear power plant. The family eats together. One of the children actually does her homework willingly. And, of course, they're funny. If the Simpsons are a dysfunctional family, Western civilisation needs more of them.
The same rule applies to the American cartoon series South Park, which appeared in Britain last year. At first, it wasn't much noticed; it was just another cult cartoon. But recently the respectable have started to sit up and object. It is beginning to be denounced as unspeakably vile and depraved. Indeed, just after Christmas, the King's School at Ely warned parents to stop letting their children watch South Park. According to a school letter, it contains "obscenities, swearing, lavatorial actions, and filth of a most unsavoury nature". That is all entirely true. The series is absolutely vile. The characters are deeply unpleasant or silly. They say and do unspeakable things all the time; moments of tender feeling are ruthlessly ridiculed. All the same, it is one of the funniest, most intelligent things I have ever seen on television, and well worth watching. I let my children watch it, even my 11-year-old son.
There must be a great many people who would consider this irresponsible. I had a slight jolt myself at the New Year, when staying with friends and playing the dictionary game in which everyone has to write a preposterous definition of a strange word. One I remember, which seemed very funny at the time, was "disease likely to be caused by anal probe". This came from the very young South Park fan in our party and, I later realised, had been plagiarised from an episode I had not seen, about aliens who make contact with humans by means of anal probes.
That is the general tone of South Park and, however funny it is when you actually see it, it is not easy to defend. All the same, it should be defended. I think South Park is the best of satire, not so much subversive and scatological as liberating and civilised. It is not, as Americans have claimed, "a giant step in the coarsening of American culture", but a valiant stand against it.
South Park is a benighted hick town in Colorado. The main characters are four unappealing schoolboys, one of whom is relentlessly persecuted, just because his parents are poor. He meets a different violent death in every episode. There are regular appearances from a sex-obsessed chef, almost the only black person in town, a mad Vietnam veteran, a gay schoolmaster, a nasty lady mayor, a wimp of an English boy, a cross-dressing policeman, a daft genetic scientist and assorted gun-crazy dads and permissive moms, including little Eric Cartman's mother, who appears on the cover of a porn magazine and is described by Cartman's putative father, a Native American who is anxious to disclaim paternity, as a "bear with a wide canyon".
Jesus occasionally appears, in a white nightie, as some sort of marginal religious nut, and once there was Mr Hankey the Christmas Poo, a do-gooding piece of animated excrement. Then there was the starving African toddler that the boys call Starvin Marvin, who was delivered by mistake instead of the aid donor's watch they had ordered.
Chef has excited public attention here recently with his lewd Christmas hit, containing such lines as "suck my salty chocolate balls", but he is really the most respectable character and, in what is perhaps almost the only lapse of courage in the series, never says anything really unforgivable. The same can't be said of the rest, such as the two men watching a school baseball game. A little boy who has a Jewish name is running very fast. "God," says one, in the white trashy South Park drawl, "I haven't seen a Jew run that fast since 1939." Or the newscaster announcing an epidemic, who says: "Here with a live news report is a midget wearing a bikini."
The defence of South Park is that it has to be truly outrageous to shock us into recognition. The entire series is a long-drawn-out protest against - for lack of a better shorthand - political correctness. It is a liberation from dishonest, manipulative niceyniceness, which it lampoons.
It is a protest that has the straightforward, lewd innocence of childishness, which is why it seems childish in parts and appeals so much to children. In making the South Park people say and do all the awful things they really do mean and want, it is a protest against the way most adults say things they don't mean, and pretend things are different from the way they really are. It is a protest against insincerity and pretending, against adult hypocrisy.
Adults tell terrible patronising lies, and contradict themselves all the time about the poor and the starving and the gay and ethnic minorities; they go in for extraordinary pretences about excretion and reproduction and competition and, of course, about the nature of children. They're always - and I think now, with political correctness, more than ever - trying to manipulate people's responses and thoughts into what they think they ought to be.
South Park is very funny and very unusual because it exposes all these things without the slightest embarrassment. And it's safe, too, because it's a small, contained, unreal world; the characters are not us. It is a great relief for once - and a great comic relief - to be given this freedom. This is indignation which is not only savage, but also very, very funny. For grown-ups, even more than for children.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, January 28, 1999 | Comments (0)
They're loud and proud: make way for the elderly
The present generation of people in their fifties seems to have the money, and the power, to move the goalposts of our perception of ageing.
This year, according to some UN decision, is to be the International Year of Older People. I sometimes wonder who dreams these things up and whether, somewhere in Geneva or New York, there is a lavish suite of offices devoted solely to International Year Designation. The very idea of Years of this and that seems to me irritating and irrelevant. Still, the UN can't always get it wrong. In this case, we are in the middle of extreme and extraordinary change, and it is well worth thinking about Older People. Indeed, we will have to, whether the UN tells us to or not, since older people are forming an ever-increasing proportion of our population and since their needs are getting more and more expensive.
"Older people" is presumably a UN euphemism for old people. Now that our perceptions of ageing are changing so fast, now that people stay healthy for so much longer and now that the loss of youth is hedged about with so much dread, it is hard to say precisely what "old" means. But I suppose we must all agree that it applies to anyone past middle age and even, perhaps, to some still in it; an acquaintance of mine in his late forties went to see his doctor, complaining of aches and pains, loss of energy and general malaise. "Well," said the doctor heartlessly, "you've had three children, and you're losing muscle tone and vision - nature is through with you." He had served his genetic purpose.
Old people are those who fortunately evolve to defy nature. She may be through with some of us, but that does not mean we are through with her. In King Lear, Shakespeare wrote in the same brutal spirit "Age is unnecessary", meaning presumably that aged people have no function. There is a Chinese expression for the old which is even more brutal - "the useless mouths". Now, through science, that perception is being entirely reversed. Old people, staying fit and well for longer and longer, could well have all kinds of functions and find themselves necessary; as a result, "ageism" will begin to wither - indeed, it is just beginning to.
At the same time, the inescapable necessity of biological ageing is beginning to recede. The science of ageing is progressing at an astonishing rate. When I worked on a television documentary about ageing 15 years ago, a leading American gerontologist told me that the entire body of knowledge of gerontology doubled every year. I have believed, ever since, that it is a very good bet that, at some time in the 21st century, all the mysteries of ageing may finally be revealed and with them, perhaps, the mysteries of staying young and well indefinitely.
This isn't entirely wishful thinking on my part. Tom Kirkwood, a leading British gerontologist and president of the British Society for Research into Ageing, is about to publish a book called Time of Our Lives: "A world authority shows why ageing is neither inevitable nor necessary", according to prominent capitals on the cover. This seems to me to be a very optimistic note on which to enter the new century; while I'm all in favour of maturity, I can't see that there's anything to be said in favour of senescence. I also think, or at least I hope, that this sense of change and hope might help to take the stigma out of ageing.
I also think the stigma is now beginning to disappear for economic reasons. Many of the 1960s' pop stars whose anthem was "Hope I die before I get old" didn't die and now are old: like Mick Jagger, many of them are grandparents. The same applies to the large and powerful generation to whom they were singing, who have no intention of standing aside for younger generations if they can possibly avoid it.
Besides, apart from those who kippered their faces with drink and drugs, they don't look old. And, unlike the middle aged of the past, they have the power to avoid being excluded. Indeed, they seem to have the money and the power to move the goalposts of our perception of ageing. For example, magazines that, for so long, were obsessed with extreme youth are gradually beginning to raise the age of glamour. First, thirtysomethings began to be portrayed as young, then features daringly began to suggest that women could sometimes still be gorgeous at 40. Now the magazines are beginning to claim that women can be fascinating in their fifties: surely it is no accident that the 1960s' generation is now fiftysomething.
There's another economic reason for old people to be newly perceived as useful and desirable - there has proved to be no substitute for granny. For a time, people turned to the welfare stare, and to child minders, for the services traditionally offered by granny. But it is slowly beginning to be understood that the kindness of strangers is unreliable, in short supply and extremely expensive. As this newspaper recently pointed out in a leading article, when hospitals were besieged with patients suffering from nothing worse than flu, granny would have told them to stay at home and take some flu medicine; she would probably have nursed them through it, too.
A recent article in the British Medical Journal discussed the role of grandmothers in preventing unnecessary visits to casualty departments; a small study in Britain suggests that grandmothers have a beneficial part to play in supporting mothers and young children, and that, when grandmothers are involved in their care, children are less likely to come to accident and emergency centres with trivial complaints. Mr Kirkwood believes that the menopause is an evolutionary strategy to protect children by preserving the grandmother's childcaring role in the extended family. Come back, granny! We're all very sorry we thought you were obsolete and out of time (as the Rolling Stones song went).
This does not mean that granny (or indeed grandpa) should be paid to come back by the state, as the Government is now suggesting. It is typical of New Labour to take a good old-fashioned idea, claim it as its own, and then turn it into a statist directive. On the same principle, perhaps it should support families by paying husbands (including Cabinet ministers) to stay with their wives. All the same, it is a good idea. I don't know how far it can go. Many grandmas are nightmares. Many more have hotter plans than unpaid childcare. But all this does suggest, and not a moment too soon, a new way of looking at older people.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, January 14, 1999 | Comments (0)
Nurses are the problem
They arrive on the wards unable to take blood pressure
Over Christmas I decided to make New Year's Resolutions not for myself, but for other people. And one was for people to stop blaming the collapse of NHS hospitals on nurses' pay. It would be nice if complex problems had simple solutions, but they don't.
It is true that there aren't enough nurses. It is true that nurses are very badly paid. It is true that to public outrage and at great expense the NHS had to import emergency supplies of nurses from abroad, as it has done in the past. But none of this by itself explains the third world horror of NHS hospitals today - the old ladies dying on trollies in corridors, the filthy sheets, the overflowing urine bags. None of this explains by itself the malnutrition, the bedsores, the incompetence and the neglect, nor the request from two Portsmouth hospitals that family members should wash, feed and shave their sick relations themselves -nothing new in that anyway.
Paying nurses more is not the solution. It is not simply that we need more nurses or simply that we have a recruitment problem, though of course we do. Nurses themselves are part of the problem. So is nursing. I apologise to all those good nurses who struggle against terrible odds.
But as the winner of last year's Royal College of Nursing Nurse of the Year Award said herself to Tony Blair, when he presented her with her prize, there is a malaise at the heart of nursing. And what has gone so desperately wrong with nursing is not something that can be put right with money alone. It can only be put right by a radical revolution, or - rather - a radical reaction against the misguided changes that have helped destroy what was best about British nursing and made it the envy of the world.
What happened to nursing is what happened to many British institutions; it fell into the hands of the well-intentioned avant-garde of the Sixties. It suddenly began to be seen as very old fashioned. It was, of course, and I don't think anyone would like to see a complete return to the way things were: the ferocious matrons, the virginal seclusion of the nursing homes, the strict hierarchy of the wards, the constant supervision, and the extreme deference to doctors, the long hours, the unnecessary frills of the starched cap, the ugly black beetle-crusher shoes, and all this at a time of mini skirts and youth revolution - most of it seemed to the thoughtful and the thoughtless alike to be in need of change.
The result, however, was not reasonable reform, but extreme radical modernisation. Between the Salmon report on nursing structure in 1963 to the Project 2000 training scheme of the late Eighties, almost everything was turned upside down in a glow of misplaced egalitarian integrity.
Matron had to go - too authoritarian. The State Enrolled Nurse (SEN) had to go - her unacademic status and humble work was demeaning. Extensive workplace training on the wards had to go - exploitative. Nursing schools had to go - nurses now had to have professional status, with a diploma or even a degree, and from a proper college not part of a hospital. By 1995 all the traditional nursing schools had closed. Nursing training must include sociology, politics and race and gender awareness. Different uniforms and titles and hierarchies must go - unequal and therefore demeaning. Menial nursing jobs and simple bedside care must be done by unskilled or semi-skilled ancillary workers - they didn't matter, presumably.
The results were predictable, and we have got them. Intelligent nurses who squander half their training in the classroom, studying pseudo academic subjects such as race awareness, arrive on the wards unable to take blood pressure or insert catheters - "a liability on the wards", as one NHS manager described them to me. Perhaps it's as well that they tend to cluster round the "nursing station", ignoring the patients.
Unacademic people who would have made fine SENs in the old days now, if they want to nurse, have to apply for courses they cannot manage, but for which they get accepted; a young arts graduate I know, now training as a nurse, said that two of the women who passed with her out of their foundation course into a nursing course could barely read and write, still less follow the useless gender awareness arguments.
Of course we need high powered, highly qualified academic nurses, and they should be highly paid. But what we also need, even more, is nurses who simply nurse, and who have learnt to nurse the practical way, on the ward. Humble bedside nursing is too important to leave to underpaid and demoralised ancillaries. So many of the horror stories of hospital neglect today have to do with a shortage not of high powered high tech nursing but a shortage of low powered bedside nursing.
The Government may have some excuse for blaming the Tories for the current disaster, though I didn't notice the Labour party objecting to the new "structures" and the right-on Project 2000 training and all the rest at the time.
But it is no use for Labour to announce that it is going to offer 15,000 new places for nurses, if the concepts behind the training are all wrong, and don't produce the nurses we need. Nor will their hint of higher wages do much to help either. As I said, it's my New Year Resolution that they should think again about nursing, and think hard.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, January 10, 1999 | Comments (1)
