Daily Mail, December 15 2001

There is one fact in the disturbing history of Roy Whiting, convicted this week of the murder of eight year-old Sarah Payne, which has not received much attention. He had kept large quantities of pornography in his garage workshop.

Indeed, there is scarcely a sex offender who has not had an acute pornography habit. In America, the FBI has reported that 81 percent of sex killers have said their biggest sexual interest lay in viewing pornography and in compulsive masturbation.

Now, no-one would suggest that pornography alone causes such men to go and commit their terrible offences; and many men who use porn lead otherwise blameless lives.

But equally, as the British sex crimes expert Ray Wyre has observed, pornography creates a climate of thought and belief which influences attitudes towards women and children. What’s more, Wyre says, the more men masturbate to pornographic fantasies, the more likely they are to put those fantasies into practice.

In other words, porn has an effect on the behaviour of those who use it. Yet many think instead it acts as a safety valve. Unlike fantasies involving violence, sexual pornography is widely thought to be harmless. More than that, Tatler magazine now reports that porno-chic is the new fashion statement.

After all, our society now runs on sex like a car runs on petrol. TV, films, ads for everything from perfume to ice cream, are all sold on more and more explicit sex. So since sex is no longer taboo, isn’t it ridiculous to behave like Mrs Grundy over pornography?

After all, the argument goes, English culture has always been bawdy and debauched. Just think of Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale; or Shakespeare’s prostitute Doll Tearsheet; or, indeed, the pornography produced by the Victorians.

Who now would ban the works of DH Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, James Joyce or Henry Miller, all of whom were once considered obscene? Tastes change all the time, along with standards of acceptability. Pornography is a legitimate form of expression which may even do some good.

Such an ostensibly sophisticated view is surely naïve and self-deluding. It was fashionable in the sixties and seventies to believe that if people were freed from rules and constraints, they could be trusted to place limits on their own behaviour.

But as the doughty feminist Germaine Greer has observed, porn is nothing to do with freedom of expression. It is a ruthless industry which abuses not only those who furnish its imagery but also the men who pay for its product.

Today’s pornography is no longer a bit of full-frontal nudity and some explicit bumping and grinding. What was illegal merely eighteen months ago -- and could only be obtained by means of a package slipped out from the back of some tacky premises -- is now legally on open display in licensed sex shops and available through the internet. The spread of computers has hugely increased the availability of pornography which can be downloaded so easily from the web.

The illegal stuff amounted to cruelty, degradation and humiliation of women through close-ups of penetration, ejaculation and masturbation. Now such images are all legal.

The details are sordid, and will shock many. But it is surely essential that people are aware of what is being tolerated in the name of freedom of expression and of personal choice.

For these legal videos do not merely show loveless, sad encounters. They dehumanise sex altogether. There is very little view of faces or indeed any part of the anatomy apart from the genital region. Women and men are reduced to pieces of hydraulic machinery.

The action consists mainly of close-ups of anal and vaginal penetration, sometimes simultaneous. Sometimes the girl undergoes double penetration while practising oral sex on a third man, or with more than one man at the same time.

The female genital region is always shaved to produce a disturbing simulation of a child; worse still, it is often pulled back so the camera peers right inside it. The impression that fills the screen is of a carcass being rammed in every orifice.

What’s even more revolting is that in many of these videos the men ejaculate over the girl’s face. In one, as the eight or so men she is servicing do this to her, the girl’s expression is fixed in a ghastly simulation of pleasure -- but for one brief moment when she thinks the camera isn’t looking, the mask slips and you see her utter disgust and despair before she resumes her pose.

We are told that such girls are consenting adults. But so what? Has our society really arrived at such a pass that if a girl is so damaged that she allows herself to be treated worse than any animal -- in effect, as a thing -- this is considered acceptable because she is not doing it at knifepoint?

Do we not care about the terrible degradation not only of the girl but of the men buying this material, and of our whole society? Are we all now so de-sensitised that we have somehow persuaded ourselves that tolerating such monstrousness is in our interests?

Thanks to the internet, the sheer volume of pornography has exploded. Tapping in the word ‘porn’ to one server alone brings up 24,522 sites. These legal websites feature a huge amount of anal sex. This is all about pain and contempt. ‘Watch young teens bite their lips as they get it in the ass for the first time!’ invites one site. ‘Amazing anal – the world’s nastiest site’, boasts another.

Yet another promises: ‘It’s hurting time: home to extreme pain hardcore’. This displays hot wax poured onto and even pins stuck through women’s genitals, and asserts: ‘These wenches do it because they love it’, fuelling the murderous fantasy that women want to be hurt.

There’s also heavy emphasis on ‘teen sluts’. These are almost certainly older girls pretending to be children, but even so this shades into paedophilia since the pitch is the stomach-heaving fantasy that these are children who will be ‘split’ open. And all this is legal.

You look at these vile images and you wonder what kind of a man could possibly find pleasure or release in them. For it’s no longer just the denizens of sleazy Soho who are consumers of hard-core. It’s the banker or the teacher or the advertising executive sitting in front of his computer in his neat suburban house or up-market apartment, downloading this viciousness from the web and then going out for a nice meal with his wife or girlfriend.

These websites, however, are immensely repetitive and tedious. They invite a credit card subscription on the promise of more extreme material, but then deny access to it unless yet more money is paid. In this way they lead the man on in the hope of finding the ultimate forbidden thrill.

So when this doesn’t materialise, what could be more inevitable or easy for him than to get into an internet ‘chat room’ and download illegal paedophile pictures of penetration or oral sex with a child?

The illegal stuff on video and on the web is now confined to things like paedophilia, bestiality, torture or coprophilia, which involves bodily waste products. Yet such is the slide in norms of behaviour, the police expect that in due course these taboos too will disappear. So how is all this being allowed to happen?

The law controlling pornography is the 1959 Obscene Publications Act which outlaws any material likely to deprave or corrupt. The first problem is the subjective nature of this definition and the absence of any firm evidence of the harm such images can do.

But in May 2000, a decision by the courts dramatically undermined the restraint the law did offer. Mr Justice Hooper turned down a legal challenge by the British Board of Film Classification to a decision by its own appeal panel that the Board had been wrong to insist on cuts of explicit sequences before it would license a group of porn videos.

As result, the BBFC had to rewrite its own guidelines which until then had outlawed explicit penetration or ejaculation from the videos it licensed. When board members asked the public for their views, they were told – to their horror – that the public wanted to make their own decision whether or not to view such material.

The outcome was that the Board had no option but to issue revised guidelines which they feared would open the floodgates. Just as they predicted, they found themselves licensing the kind of highly disturbing pornography that had previously been illegal.

Moreover, these new guidelines rapidly became a benchmark for everyone. So porn sites on the web started to circulate equally explicit material; top shelf magazines stocked by corner newsagents started to include equivalent pictures; and TV stations such as Channel Four and Five are now also pushing to take advantage of this shift in practice.

The argument is that pornographic images don’t harm anyone as they are merely fantasies. But fantasies of what? Of hurting women? Of humiliating them? Of treating them as dehumanised objects?

As the philosopher Roger Scruton argues in his book Sexual Desire, fantasy has a tendency to remake the world in its own image. So the ‘harmless’ porn voyeur can turn into a rapist with a gun.

For his fantasy is governed by monstrous myths and illusions – that women wish to be raped, that children are waiting to be awakened to sexual pleasure, or that violence is a natural right.

Pornography objectifies women and reduces them to a commodity. Such dehumanisation affects the man’s behaviour, ranging from withdrawal of intimacy through harsh treatment of women to outright abuse.

Dr Trevor Stammers, a GP who has often written about sexual problems, says most women he counsels whose husbands are into porn claim this has destroyed their marriages. The husband prefers to find sexual release from a computer because this doesn’t require any personal engagement by him.

So he chooses physical sensation without love. ‘There is no doubt’, says Dr Stammers, ‘that as a result of using pornography such men become far more callous towards women. What they are seeking from porn is the illusion of power and control over them’.

Research studies back up the suggestion that using pornography badly affects behaviour and relationships. American academics Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant have shown that pornography can diminish a person's sexual happiness, that it damages beliefs about sexuality and attitudes towards women, and that it desensitises people to rape as a criminal offence.

An American survey last year showed that more than 200,000 people were effectively addicted to porn through websites and associated chatrooms. Victor Cline of the University of Utah has documented how men become addicted to pornography, begin to want more explicit or deviant material, and end up acting out what they have seen.

Isn’t that to ‘deprave and corrupt’ by any reasonable understanding of those terms? Yet far from being outlawed, porn is becoming mainstream behaviour. Sado-masochism has its own fashionable clubs.

Buggery was made legal for women when the age of homosexual consent was reduced to 16; what was once considered an intolerable assault on women from which the law should protect them has now become their ‘right’. And urination during sex – the ‘golden shower’-- is even discussed enthusiastically in teen magazines.

Not everyone, though, is sanguine about the reach and nature of pornography. The Home Office has become extremely alarmed about its accessibility to young people under the age of 18.

And the nature of this material is causing alarm even in some unlikely quarters. When the organisers of a festival of the erotic in London saw the BBFC-licensed pornography on display, they were so horrifed they insisted it must be screened off from the rest of the exhibition.

Yet Sophie Dahl sports a T-shirt saying Pornography Rocks; and the writer Toby Young declares that porn is good for women and that watching it hasn’t done him or his marriage any harm (one wonders what Mrs Young thinks).

What is so disturbing is that there seems to be no prospect of an end to this. The government doesn’t seem to care. The courts are intent on demolishing the protection of the vulnerable. The film regulators are weak and divided. The churches avert their gaze. Mary Whitehouse is dead. The question is whether there is anyone at all who will confront this escalating corruption and fight to stop this perversion of liberty.

Posted by admin at December 15, 2001