Forget foodbanks, we've got another porn panic

Grande Odalisque, Ingres. It's Art – okay?

The latest brouhaha about pornography broke out last week, as the Daily Mail set its hypocritical sights on WH Smith.

The unfortunate retailer’s crime? It found itself in the line of fire after an online cataloguing error meant that pornographic or erotic ebooks were spotted near titles for children.

The Mail, which doesn’t include the titillation of its audience as one method of making sales; which doesn’t include and comment on as many acres of female flesh as possible on its own website, and which doesn’t – oh no, sirree – use creepy language to sexualise underage girls in that very same part of cyberspace, has apparently read every one of the naughty ebooks that were available to buy and announced that the subjects include rape and incest and beastiality and, and … well, won’t somebody think of the children (but not the way Mail hacks do)!

Lawyer Myles Jackman has adroitly dismantled some of the Mail’s inaccuracies, showing how it misunderstands – or misinterprets – the law, for instance.

But unfortunately, the Mail was not alone.

The Guardian, for instance, was in spectacularly disingenuous form.

First, it effectively admitted that it hadn’t bothered doing any actual investigation itself: “At least 60 pornographic ebooks – some featuring rapes and bestiality – were available on the company’s online store, and could also be found on Amazon, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble … according to the Mail on Sunday.” [my emphasis]

That’s cool: just rely on the always-reliable Mail family of newspapers to feed you the details of the story. After all, this isn’t the Mail that has a record of ‘exaggerating’ on such matters, is it?

It’s not the same Mail, is it, that published an article by one Amanda Platell, claiming that she had searched for and easily found images of child abuse online? It turned out that she had found no such thing and, if she had, she would have broken the law in attempting any such search.

But let’s move on. A few paragraphs later:

“The National Crime Agency warned on Sunday that books appearing to legitimise child abuse ‘might feed the fantasies of paedophiles and in some cases encourage child sexual abusers to commit contact offences’.”

Woah! Where’s the child abuse thing come from? Where is there even a suggestion that some of the ebooks – which are self-published, apparently – include anything “appearing to legitimise child abuse?

Of course, the mere mention of kiddy fiddlers is enough to send half the nation into a state that includes the shut-down of their reasoning skills.

Odalisque with Magnolias, Matisse. Not erotic. At all

As it happens, other sources say that some of the books do contain themes of abuse, but if that’s the case, let’s have it mentioned in the article, without the sudden jump to the subject of paedophilia, which simply looks like a conflation of child abuse and pornography/erotica.

But this is entirely in keeping with the sort of knee-jerkery that is increasingly coming to inform the debate on whatever someone or other decides constitutes porn.

After all, in what passes for that debate in the UK, claims of the untold harm to women and children caused by pornography dominate, without a shred of actual evidence for that. Yet it has become accepted unquestioningly by many that it is simply true.

Say something often enough …

And the Mail and the Guardian are among those publications that are culpable on this count. Which should tell you something.

Mind, since we also apparently live in a world where a convicted and time-served criminal can herself state that most women commit crimes because of men, perhaps certain people do need ‘protection’ from anything that might ‘deprave’ them?

Maybe the Victorians were correct in believing that only respectable men of a certain class (which class presumably ensured the aforementioned respectability) could be trusted to look at dodgy images?

After all, women are obviously so clearly weak, aren’t they?

Well, that seems to be the theme of Vicky Pryce’s comments, as she continues to look for ways to blame her former husband for her own crime.

After all, stealing a load of designer handbags is all the fault of men, isn’t it?

Or when a woman is guilty of animal cruelty to her dogs, which also kill a child, it’s obviously the patriarchy behind it.

Or when a woman enters the home of an elderly person and sexually abuses her, that’s the fault of the patriarchy too.

Olympia, Manet. Entirely respectable pic of a prostitute

All of this – every little bit of it – plays to a censorious, reactionary agenda on women: one that is entirely happy to see womankind as vulnerable and as a perpetual victim, and to shoehorn womankind as a whole into a particular and limited template for ideological reasons.

At its extreme – its logical conclusion, one might say – is the likes of the Taliban.

Unfortunately, many people who would claim to be progressives buy into it and blithely aid the growth of a culture of victimisation, which demonises men and happily portrays women as eternal victims of ‘the patriarchy’.

And then, in response, we get the victimised white male routine.

This is all at a time when the populace as a whole is under attack from yet another government that readily does the bidding of the neo-liberal supra-national corporatocracy – and in this case, uses the result of the 2008 financial crash to batter the majority and set them against each other.

Against such a background, playing at divisive politics is not even intellectual masturbation, but far worse, it’s utterly counterproductive in terms of rallying and uniting people around the key issues, which have sod all to do with sex/gender and what turns people on, and everything to do with economics and actual politics.

And if anyone starts spouting off along the lines of: ‘if we only had more women in Parliament’, respond with two words: ‘Margaret’ and ‘Thatcher’.

The idea that somehow there’s some sort of unified feminine niceness out there that’ll solve everything is, at best, a misguided fantasy.

Even a cursory glance at history would suggest that, when women have power, they behave no better or differently to how men behave.

But that’s okay – because if we take on board the narrative of a certain type of feminism, then women don’t have to take personal responsibility because it’s all the fault of ‘the patriarchy’.

Which brings us back to the point where, if you continue to argue that, then you effectively argue that women are inherently weak – in which case, why, rationally, should they be considered equal within society?

The porn ‘debate’ is just one part of a wider war being waged by a number of protagonists with some slightly differing perspectives.

James as Odalisque, Niki Grangruth. Still Art

Other aspects of this war include, for instance, the male-dominated campaigns against abortion and the right of a woman to control her own body.

But if we believe that a woman should be able to have complete control of her own body, then it is inconsistent to patronise, condemn or exclude women who, for instance, work in the sex industry.

Do those who do that condemn the rent boy equally? Or what about the female ‘escort’ who provides services for other women?

The ‘debate’ is so up it’s own metaphorical arse that you will, even now, hear spectacular claims such as the famous one that ‘all porn damages women’. What? Even the gay stuff?

It’s also indicative of that divisionism: conflating all womankind to a single version. There is no female or feminist consensus on these subjects, no matter how much Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has apparently allowed himself to be told by the merry little band of misandrists that he continues to give space to.

You don’t have to like porn yourself to see this. That’s not point. But get caught up in the rhetoric, without understanding that, and you become just like the Daily Mail itself or the Guardian.

And don’t forget: there is – as I’ve mentioned before – there’s also the small matter of class.

Ask yourself: would the campaign against page 3 exist if it wasn’t in a working-class publication?

Leather Crotch, Robert Mapplethorpe. Not sex. Art

If you think so, why is there no comparable campaign against odalisque paintings that hang in open galleries? Perhaps because visiting galleries is considered a rather middle-class thing to do? And, when it’s in a gallery, it’s Art anyway, isn’t it?

If there are issues about how availability of pornographic materials is affecting young people, then perhaps the answer is proper education?

However, given the generally parlous state of sex education across the UK – not least because governments still cravenly kowtow to religious groups, schools and parents in allowing them to opt out of proper sex education – it’s easy to see why a spot of ranting stupidity appears to be the preferred solution for some.

The thing is, porn’s a nice, easy target, because few people will defend it, so bound up are we ideas of sex as still rather dirty – certainly if it’s lust and not lurve – and because the moment the ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ soundbite gets bandied around common sense is bundled out of the room.

Now just imagine if the Mail in particular brought as much concern to the news that the Red Cross is now handing our food aid in the UK.

As I said: a useful distraction – and not for the good of women or men as a whole.