Was Mrs Whitehouse right?

Mary Kenny

Last week the Daily Mail brought us interesting news from the world of advertising and commercial promotion; the latest rage in the selling of clothes, the marketing of records and of glossy magazines is the rage for sado-masochism. The fashion is now for displaying human beings (mostly women) in various stages of bondage, violation and humiliation. One of the Most successful photographers on American Vogue likes to photograph women 'wincing in pain . . a man's fist ramming into a woman's breast.' French Vogue likes to show women being. violated in the bath. A British jeans manufacturer has distributed 3,000 posters of a naked young woman being dragged through the streets on her hands and knees. Record companies find it profitable to have pictures on the sleeves of discs which suggest (or even depict) gang rape, or women painfully enmeshed in the inner tubes of car tyres. A top fashion store in New York presently has a series of tableaux in its windows on the theme of suicide. The display manager of a Bond Street department store thinks this is =fantastic, incredible, marvellous ... nice to see display moving on,'

Moving on—to what? What comes after suicide chic? We shall only have to wait to find out, presumably, since the inexorable progress of the 'permissive society' has been to move on and on, stripping away one taboo after another, leading us forward' to

the realm where anything goes. The `snuff movies' which are now on the pornographic circuit in the United States (in which a protagonist literally snuffs it, and is actually disembowelled in the course of the film) seemed to some to represent the ultimate logic of such a progression, but there is no reason to believe that in this arena anYthing is ultimate. There is always something even more extraordinary to come, since the commercial impetus behind `permissiveness' depends on ever pushing back more frontiers, ever applying more of the same. Mary Whitehouse warned us in the early 1960s; she said it would come to this—that the discarding of traditional values and social controls would end not with freedom but with bondage. Even she could scarcely have foreseen how literally true her pro& ecies would be. And oh! how we laughed! We laughed when she stood up to say it, and we laughed even more when she sat down. We ridiculed her rotten, and almost the whole of the media joined in—caricaturing the respectable, middle-aged schoolmistress in her butterfly-rimmed spectacles in song and in story, lampoon and TV satire. The BBC deliberately (since she had had the temerity to criticise them) made her the butt of jokes. 'Festival of Light' acquired a sims: ter connotation, like `Moral Re-Armament before it. Lord Longford, who admittedlY went about his campaign against porno

raphy in the silliest possible way—allowing himself to be photographed in a Danish blue nightclub—was a gift to the forces pushing for the permissive society. And the bandwagon rolled on; pornography multiplied and filled more and more of the newsagents shelves. Violence crept more and more on to the TV screens and into the streets, the schools, the football pitch. It has become almost impossible to visit the cinema without emerging feeling offended and brutalised. And now popular newspapers begin to voice surprise that sado-masochism is being tised to sell commodities. It is not in the least surprising; on the contrary, it was inevitable.

A fashion for sado-masochism, however, is only the most visible effect of where permissiveness has led us. Other things have happened which are less apparent and which have been wrought by the same kind of !I-linking. Our perceptions of that which is normal' have been entirely dislocated, since the prevailing ethic now is that anything is normal, so long as it turns you on. Our understanding of cause and effect has been 'distorted, and in our rush to obliterate guilt' from any human action, we are coming near to exonerating anyone from any individual responsibility whatsoever. Take, for example, the current debate about rape. The anomalies in the law about raPe have been exposed to a good airing recently, and an excellent book, The Facts of lakie, by Barbara Toner, has been published about it this week. The cudgels have been

Well taken up on behalf of the victims of this horrible crime, and there has been some

scholarship, legal and otherwise, applied to

the problem of how to alter the way the law deals with it. The humiliations, the injustices of the law's approach based on social Prejudice and 'mythology' have been well Chewed over. The one patently obvious

claestion about rape has, however, remained conspicuously unasked : why is it on the Increase? Why are more and more men charged with violating women ? It would be unthinkable, wouldn't it, for anyone to c,laim that the increase in rape might just

have a connection with the proliferation of the Pornography that glamorises it? You'd be laughed out of court if you did make any such claim. Why, it's been proved, time and

time again (say the sexperts) that pornographyraphy is therapeutic. That is now the accepted wisdom so widely accepted that it simply never occurs to those who form the culture tn. question it. We are so blinded by 'perissiveness that we seem to be not even interested in the cause of rape; all our energies are taken up with the redress against it; change the law; instruct women in self-defence, in karate, in martial arts, or eaeunsel them, as the Americans do, to carry gun. 'They were going to rape her, one by ,une, says a poster advertising a current film. She Was going to kill them, one by one.' Do n,01 attempt to defend women by protecting t em against smutty exploitation; defend women by brutalising them in turn—by distorting woman's essentially tender and paci

fist nature and teaching her to be aggressive and murderous too.

Other social problems that have increased in number in recent years are approached through the same distorting mirror of everdecreasing personal responsibility. Take the problem of deserted and separated wives. Their number is going up all the time (there are 700,000 one-parent families at present) and the one most common factor present in the majority of these cases is—poverty. More than half of the mothers alone live on supplementary benefit and that is not much of a hedge against hardship these days. How can women in this position be helped? Those concerned, such as the Child Poverty Action Group, say that we must devise new schemes to prevent homelessness and dire poverty splitting up these vulnerable families even more. And so we must; every decent society provides proper welfare for people in need. But again, there is something else which might be said as well, and which again, is never said, and that is that people ought not to abandon their families in the first place. A man (or a woman) who has a spouse and dependent children owes a duty of responsibility towards them. It is wrong to turn your back on them, and a little social odium towards people who abandon their families in this way would not go amiss. But that is not how the permissive society thinks; the permissive society advocates personal liberation, not personal responsibility; 'fulfilment' at all costs. All the agony columns, all the sexperts put the message across unremittingly; an unhappy marriage and -sexual repression is the damaging element for the personality. It is incumbent upon people to seek first the kingdom of happiness, and if that means leaving a wife and six children behind, well, we'll devise better laws, new benefits, some great social improvement which regulates that.

Cause and effect in individual behaviour has been thus discontinued as a form of logic. We have washed away original sin and with it free will; we are consequently swept along on a tide of circumstance. Even people who plant bombs with the intent of killing other people are not simply terrorists; they are 'victims of an unjust society.'

And so we try to cure our ills by resolutely never looking at our responsibilities, but in the fashion of the permissive society, by applying more of the same. An alarming increase in the number of men having sexual intercourse with girls under age? Then lower the age of consent. Gonorrhoea on the rampage? More VD clinics are required i

—in schools f necessary. Too many abortions among schoolchildren ? More birth control for twelve-year-olds. Too many battered wives? More power to the authorities to intervene in the home. Too much family breakdown? A Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Never, God forbid, utter it that social controls might be necessary for social order or even, extraordinary thought, help human happiness in the long term. Look how we treated Mrs Whitehouse when she said that. And look at us now.