Porn-again government

Amazingly, the Prime Minister and his government want to ban access to internet pornography.

Yes, the politician who is best friends with Murdoch, The Sun and a range of unsavoury characters associated with that newspaper, most famous for a) accusing Liverpool fans of urinating on their comrades' dead bodies and b) running a daily picture of a young lady with her secondary sexual characteristics on display.

Clearly he's decided, à la Marshall McLuhan, that the medium is the message. Paper-porn: fine. Screen-porn: evil. And maybe there's something in this: printed material is easier to regulate and it's probably harder to acquire the vilest stuff if you have to run the gauntlet of a shopkeeper rather than simply lock yourself in the bathroom with an iPad.

You can see the attractions. Nobody wins votes by declaring that porn's fine, help yourself, relax. Not with the Daily Mail about, anyway. Let's not get into a discussion of whether the Daily Mail's constant diet of pictures of underage girls in bikinis is paedophilic (it is). That would just muddy the waters. Every government wants to be seen to oppose Filth. The more Filth you claim is out there, the more Filth you can claim to have cleared up in the face of Anonymous Offshore ISPs who Don't Care About Your Kiddies. The more Filth you clear up, the more votes you get.

This time, the Prime Minister has hit on a wheeze.



Previous governments have persuaded ISPs to instal filters which 'parents' (apparently the only citizens worth giving a flying one about) have to opt into to block pornography. They like it that way: no providers want to make their customers answer the question 'are you a filthy pervert?'. Filthy perverts make up a large proportion of the customer base and you don't want to alienate them. Especially if the filth they're downloading is perfectly legal. There are laws against downloading certain kinds of porn. And there are laws against ISPs making them available. Those intent on circulating or consuming illegal pornography are, I suspect, beyond Googling for their particular interest and won't be affected at all by the proposed tweak. There is an internet out there beyond Google and Facebook, you know. So what we have here is a crackdown against people who have tastes you and I (possibly) don't share.

So the Prime Minister's solution is to make open access the default, while allowing filters to be installed. This is called 'active choice'.

The Prime Minister's wheeze is both genius, and cynical. He's written to the ISP's demanding action. Sorry, not action but rebranding.

"Without changing what you will be offering (ie active-choice +), the prime minister would like to be able to refer to your solutions [as] 'default-on'"

I'll type that again in case you didn't get it:

"Without changing what you will be offering (ie active-choice +), the prime minister would like to be able to refer to your solutions [as] 'default-on'"

That's right. He's suggesting that the ISPs connive with him in a cynical attempt to garner approving Daily Mail headlines by actively misleading their customers, rather than actually do anything.

Sigh. We've been here before. Every three months or so, some Tory MP demands that all citizens be blinded by red-hot pokers to prevent them from seeing Filth. I have no doubt that the Pharoahs campaigned against Sick Perverted Hieroglyphics ('er, look, that one's having sex with someone he isn't related to') and under-the-counter papyri. I'm also reminded of one fact I took away from a class I attended on pornography: that it took a mere 7 years from the invention of photography before a man was arrested for trading mucky pictures featuring a lady with a Shetland pony. I'm not sure that adds to the debate but it's a mental image that you'll find difficult to shake off.

I think my main point is that moral panics always attend new technological developments. After a while, things settle down, but the intervening period is ripe for political exploitation. What's interesting about Cameron is the sheer cynicism of trying to make political capital while simply doing nothing. He clearly doesn't really care about the issue he's manufactured: it's just a stunt.

Filters don't work. Any child with two brain cells to rub together will be able to get round one. Any child with one brain cell will be able to Google for instructions about how to get round filters. These supposed technical fixes are a massive evasion of the real challenge. You don't put an electric fence round the tiger enclosure so that potential trespassers learn they'll get a mild shock if they cross the barrier. You make it clear that if you go into the tiger enclosure, you'll get eaten. A couple of years ago, I heard some Sir Bufton Tufton backbench Tory MP demand that the government protect his children from Internet Pornography. I was suprised to hear an instinctive small-state libertarian demanding state intervention: these are of course the people who don't want to outlaw smoking around children etc. etc.

So I wrote to him with a suggestion: instead of demanding that the state mandates some useless technical fix (the electric fence), how about he engage in some parenting? Actually educate his kids about what pornography is, what its social effects might be, and what healthy sexuality involves (and yes, for some people this might include some use of pornography). Then he could monitor his kids' internet use, or simply keep the computer in the drawing room rather than have one in every bedroom.

Obviously he didn't reply.

Every society generates pornography, and then argues about what constitutes porn. I can't help recalling that Jilly Cooper's Rivals breathlessly follows the sexual adventures of Caitlin O'Hara, culminating in her defloration a full week after she reaches the age of consent. That certainly makes me more uncomfortable than the idea that people are looking at pictures of consenting adults. The same goes for the Mail's obsession with the bodies of celebrities' children, encapsulated in the revolting phrase 'all grown up'. I'm not keen on pornography. I find it reductive, exploitative and often boring - though amongst my 4000+ books there are plenty are or would have been considered pornographic by previous generations. I don't necessarily oppose the production of texts or images that give people a sexual thrill: I just oppose the conditions of their production and the sexual politics of most pornography. And they're mostly rubbish. Then again, my experience with such stuff is rather limited. A few tatty magazines passed around in school; foreign Channel 4 films in the days when it wasn't wall-to-wall exploitation of the sick and poor; some novels recommended with nods and winks and that's about it. I don't have the internet at home (I know, I'm such a luddite) and my office colleagues would probably prefer that I didn't explore the web's sexier corners while I'm at work. Besides, I've enough novels left unread without adding to the pile.

My views are encapsulated by Pulp's creepy, exhausted, claustrophobic 'This Is Hardcore', the song that called time on the Carry-On lad culture of Britpop (sorry about the ads: I wish a government scheme would filter them out):



It would take a brighter person than either me or the Prime Minister to work out where the border is between the erotic and the pornographic. The difference between us is that I'm not chasing headlines, and I believe that most people, given the right education, are capable of sensibly differentiating between harmful and harmless use of erotic materials. Nor do I believe that governments should use moral pressure to end the use of material of which they don't approve but are too cowardly to ban. You can't legislate for culture – but you can encourage a more grown-up approach. The problem the Prime Minister has is that he's in denial. He's torn between the hypocritical conservatism of the Mail and its readers who hark back to a (non-existent) period of innocence and the conservatism of his free-market friends who will always find profit in the human body and the sexual act.

The Media Blog has helpfully pointed out how the Mail is reporting Cameron's announcement:

It's easy for me: as an anti-capitalist, I can say that capitalism will always exploit sexuality, will always reduce the body to the labour it produces. Without capitalism, perhaps a healthier sexuality will be possible, or at least a less exploitative and misogynistic pornography industry. Plenty of hard-left and libertarian thinkers believe that once exploitative capitalism and repressive hegemony are removed from the picture, we'll live in a poly-sexual paradise in which all sexual practices are demystified and equally fulfilling and respectable.  I'm not entirely convinced: plenty of sexual Utopiae (look at the 60s communes) lead to vicious harm.

He can't address the relationship between capitalism and pornography because his solution to everything from the NHS to nuclear weapons is that the market is good. To be consistent, he has to accept that individuals have the right to sell their labour – even sexually – for corporate profit. I simply don't accept this premise. Cameron's solution is sheer cant: avoiding his responsibility as a legislator and proposing deception to the market rather than taking a concrete position. The worst of both worlds.

When the 'debate' is reduced to cynical politicians reacting to the demands of cynical newspapers, all nuance is deliberately lost. That's why the Labour Party's response is 'OK, but that's not repressive enough'. I really wish they'd said 'stop mucking around with moral panics and improve school and parental sex education'.

As I said, we teach a module here which includes a session on pornography. It takes a cultural and historical approach and invites students (fully prepared and invited to opt-in) to discuss the shifting boundaries of taboo. We discuss the social contexts of forbidden texts, and explore the boundaries of what's acceptable in public discourse. There's a really simple reason for this: millions of people consume pornography. More than read Jane Austen, I suspect.* We need to talk about what people actually do rather than what they should do. Governments making it more difficult to access this stuff doesn't stop people wanting to access it. It's like I said to the Tory MP: fiddling with the technical stuff is an evasion of his public and private duty. It's much more mature to clearly delineate what's legal, then make sure adults and children understand the nature of pornography and its use within a civilised framework. Porn isn't going to go away. Fetishising it with technological obstacles isn't going to make it less attractive to some people: it's going to be more attractive. Whereas an education system which contextualises it might make porn less exciting.

But then we might have to examine the Mail's Sidebar of Shame, or Mr Murdoch's Page 3. And we can't have that.

And while we're at it, what's more pornographic than the world's media training its cameras and notebooks expectantly on a young woman's vagina waiting for the birth of another benefits-dependent child of workshy parents royal baby?

*For those of you who enjoy both Jane Austen and pornography, I can recommend Arielle Eckstut's Pride and Promiscuity: the Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen (as endorsed by the Jane Austen Society of America) and Szereto's Jane Austen: Hidden Lusts, both of which have considerably more respect for Austen's prose than P. D. James's execrable Death Comes To Pemberley.