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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
