Seduction of the people
David Holbrook
What, I wonder, will the Labour Government do, about the deliberate debauching of public taste, by pornography and sadism, in commercial culture? In the GLC, the Labour Group have been active in committees, seeking to obtain the release in London of films like Oh! Calcutta! and Blow-Out. Will this now be the national policy? Fear that it might be, made it impossible for me to vote for them. Is it true that Mr Wilson has given an assurance to the Retail Newsagents that he will not bring in an Indecent Displays Bill? Certainly, it seems impossible to get the Labour Party to come clean on this issue, while debate in all the left-wing papers is still heavily suppressed, and merely slanted in favour of more and more permissiveness.
However, there is also now a quite clear change of attitude on the left itself, especially among those who are students of culture. When I took part recently in a television debate on censorship with Stuart Hood, the well-known left-wing expert on film and television, he said that he had changed from being a total permissive, to taking a more doubtful line. He had seen a London audience laughing at the rape scenes in Straw Dogs, and he believed that these scenes should have been censored. Stuart Hood is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the Royal College of Art, and was once director of BBC1: such views as his can surely not be ignored — and he evidently believes that there is a problem. None of us yet knows the solution.
Mr Charles Parker, the left-wing ex-BBC producer, who gave us the Radio Ballads, has said that the permissive society is not really permissive at all, "but one ruthlessly controlled in the interests of a hedonistic consumer capitalism." David Boadella, the
Reichian, has said much the same, pointing to the way in which, by "repressive desublima tion," people are being manipulated, by the exploitation of violence and sex on the screen — the effect of which is to distort their atti tudes to sex. "Such a mass conditioning," he says, "amounts to a progressive prostitution of culture, and involves a hidden control over people's feelings that is more insidious than the old repressive system, because that was fought as an enemy, while the new threat is welcomed as a friend." The new oppression of the people, by a pornokitsch culture, is still welcomed, as a friend by Hugh Jenkins MP and Mrs Wistrich — and by Labour activists who believe the people must have the 'right to choose' — just as they once, presumably, had the right to choose whether or not to eat adulterated food, or whether or not to work in dangerous and insanitary factory conditions.
When the Longford Report came out, a trade union denounced it as 'underresearched', while the pro-pornographers demanded 'evidence.' In the eighteen months following the publication of the Longford Report I have not, in fact, seen one comment by any left-wing critic, on my own contribution to the Report, discussing the harmful effects of pornography from the point of view of dynamic psychoanalytical theory and existentialist philosophy. During this period several left-wing journals have maintained a total silence on my own books on problems of cultural nihilism, while there has been no reference in the New Statesman to the symposium, The Case Against Pornography, which contains both conservative and radical warnings of the dangers.
I have also circulated an article by a Dr J. H. Court, an Australian psychologist, who argues that the rape rate has gone up in every country in which pornography has been 'freed.' This, again, could not find a home in English journals, and today even serious 'quality' papers seem reluctant to publish even straightforward facts which might raise this debate in a more responsible way. For instance, there have been recently a number of reports of crime figures, which show clearly that sadistic behaviour is increasing, almost certainly as a consequence of the new media education in barbarism.
Figures were given for the first threequarters of 1973: despite an overall fall in crime figures of 3.5 per cent cases of violence against the person rose by 19 per cent, while sexual offences rose by 11.5 per cent — but the Times gave the figure for violence, but not for sexual offences. Later, figures were given for the whole year as an increase of violent crimes against the person of 20 per cent, and an increase in sexual offences of 10 per cent. Both these increases, directly contrary to the overall crime rates, were the biggest increases ever: yet I could find no reference to them in the Times. The report also said that a great deal of violence was "senseless" — by which. I suppose, is meant 'fun violence,' or violence which can only be explained by it5 psychological symbolism. There has been nn left-wing discussion of these grave facts. WhY not?
At least the Times report (March 6,) that in Kent alone rape, indecent assault an° other violent crimes increased by 14.6 per cent There were twenty-six cases of rape as corn' pared with eighteen in 1972. What can the permissives say? Eight women raped, for the sake of glorious cultural sensations is accep. table? 1972 was, cf course, the year of Clock , work Orange, and Straw Dogs, in both of which films rape was shown in a context in which, as an American reviewer said, "a man' could only prove himself a real man when he, had won his combat badges in rape ann murder." A number of commentators expressed disquiet about these films, which the believed might encourage the acting out 0 primitive fantasies. Now they have: A Clock' work Orange was mentioned in at least sill court cases last year. Masud Khan said that Kubrick's film taught people to deny all care and concern for others, and taught that thi5 was a way of asserting an authentic identitY for themselves. Yet today we hear that the are twenty films in the pipeline showing rape that "rape turns men on" and is good poN' office. It has something to do, said a dis" tributor over there, with the fantasy life of the producers. In my symposium, Professor, Robert Stoller argues, from apsychoanalytic% study of masculinity and femininity, that a"! pornography represents a kind of visual raP,e — a taking from others of what they wouiu not give voluntarily. The reason for this in.'. pulse in that men have some difficulty Ill asserting their masculinity in the face of the burden of feminity imposed upon them b3/„. their mothers. They thus enjoy triumph1n6 over ,woman, and subjecting her to humilifi' bon. But, of course, to trample on women in this way is to seek to humiliate the female, emo' tional, creative element in oneself — one's essential humanity. The women's liberation movements are beginning to wake up to thiS and it is by no means irrelevant to point out that the massive increase reported frorti America in mental illness among women WI a good deal to do with their problems, 0, competing increasingly in a world in wh01' women, though nominally 'freer', have t°
compete as sex objects with the bitch goddesses implanted in men's minds by pornography and sexual fascism.
I have already predicted in my books that the new savagery in culture will escalate, because it is caught up in the dynamics of hate, which require ever-increasing mental rage. We already have requests in America for the legislation of cock-fighting, while Mr Alan Brien is already writing about this in a 'cool' Permissive tone in the Sunday Times. We move towards bear-baiting with the film Immoral Tales, which shows a girl copulating With a beast, by courtesy of the British Film Institute (whose president, Lord Lloyd of Hampstead, refuses to reply to me on the subject). Dr Alex Comfort has published a sex Manual which tells readers, in a section called 'Sauces and Pickles', how to tie up the partner, and beat her with carefully chosen birch twigs which you wet first. As Gershon Legman, the long-established writer on sex, has said. reviewing this book, "such things give a shooting ticket for all the old degeneracies Which every rational person was hoping to get rid of." The left seems now totally aligned behind developments which enable 'the People' to ' choose' which degeneracy shall be used to exploit them.
A headmistress tells me all her first year went to Clockwork Orange as a 'dare'. If The Exorcist is released, and children go to that, some may actually be driven mad. As Canon Pearce-Higgins, a church expert in psychical studies, has said, "there is a real danger that We will have a new crop of schizophrenics — and a small number of cases of genuine possession." I have myself, from psychological evidence, been saying for some time that
recent exploitations of intensely sadistic paranoid-schizoid fantasies in film are likely to cause mental illness in some. Indeed, I believe the whole pornography explosion is a schizoid illness, and that it is causing emotional damage, especially to children. This problem, however, remains hidden because of the treachery of the left. The left-wing NUT rejected the Longford Report (although it claimed that it was only rejecting the sex education section, its press hand-out makes it clear that it was the whole report that it was rejecting). This union should have investigated pornography in schools at once. But the Advisory Centre for Education had commended the Little Red Schoolbook, which proclaimed pornography was 'harmless', and advised children to 'try' anything that 'looked interesting in it.' Suppose children influenced by this deplorable publication then read Mind-blower, published by Girodias, which depicts the seduction of two little girls of six, with full intellectual vindication?
Today, opinion is changing rapidly. In a new edition of Tract the educational journal, Denys Thompson, the well-known author and expert on English reading, writes, "We must offer a healthier aim in living to our pupils, who are the victims, than just to be permissive (i.e. exploited) and consume pornography and other products of commercial interests. The exploitation of children now starts so early that children are being robbed of their . childhood. All this, one might think, would have engaged the attention of bodies like the Labour Party and the National Union of Teachers," But will it gain the attention of a Labour government?
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