Pornography
Tango malady lingers on
David Holbrook
What kind of a game is the press Playing, today, over the question of scopophilia, and its commercial exPloitation?
Scopophilia is the name Sigmund Freud gave to voyeurism. It means a "sexual Perversion in which the subject's preferred form of sexual activity is the looking at the sexual parts or activities of Others " (Charles Rycroft). The fantasies 91 scopophilia have their roots in infantile curiosity about the parents' sexual acts, and their fascination is in the dangers felt to be in these. To the child, sex is a form of eating — and, in eating, things disappear. The voyeur's IMpulse is to invade the relationship of the parents, and to exert a control over It: in doing so he invades the privacy of Others, and exerts his power over them. His activity is an exploiting one — and has elements in it of a cruel impulse to deny the humanness in the subjects of his sickness.
The word ' sickness ' is important here. There are a number of us who believe that scopophilia is a sickness and that, While it needs to be tolerated in a few unhappy individuals, it can also be spread. But what has happened to the sense of CoMmunity concern, in England, over the last ten years? And why has the press so largely sought to destroy it, over the question of pornography? In journals like trl,le Health Education Journal, the 'rittsh Medical Journal, Socialist Corn'nentary, the Observer, and Universities Quarterly, there have been articles which have pointed out that scopophilia may Possibly be a socially harmful disease — as the cinema and other cultural media Spread it. Yet the press goes on, glibly and with a certain kind of flip tone, urging on the sadist revolution, as if it were a benefit, beyond criticism.
Take the latest notorious film — which shows an act of sodomy and other Perverted acts on the screen, and in Which a woman is humiliated without any tenderness or love. To me and my riends in medicine and, psychotherapy watching this film is perverted — and harmful. Ours is only a point of view. But if there is doubt about such things — there ought, surely, to be a debate: as there must be about public torture, cockfighting and such barbarisms as birching? But debate has been squashed.
The press has given Last Tango in Paris extended free publicity. There were news items from Paris; releases from the studio; gossip in gossip columns. Then there was a photograph of the producer; an interview with the producer; a glowing review (hardly any time given to sexual activity at all, really — nothing to worry about); cartoons; more gossip — about (how amusing!) how much money was being made.
The flip tone of some of the cartoons itself has the effect of making grossly obscene displays step by step seem socially acceptable. For instance, in the Times there was Marc's Hampstead couple, the woman saying, "Are you keeping your trousers on to show you've 3een Last Tango?" In the Daily Mail, "1 suppose Last Tango in Paris will be followed by First Gang-Bang in Bootle?" The psychopathological sexual behaviour of a group of youths, in a deep offence to a woman they exploited, is made fun of, alongside an equally sick film, in which sexual perversions and cruelties are given ' artistic ' endorsement, Every sexual antic — however vicious — is fun.
All this might have been doubtful enough. But no newspaper has published one protest from the public, at this evident watershed — of showing an act of sodomy on the screen. (I know from things sent to me that there were protests — but they were not printed). The public may as well not exist.
What game is Fleet Street playing? It is bad enough trying to resist the tide of scopophiliac depravity. It is worse to have to do it when endless endorsement of sickness is poured out of even respectable newspapers. The review of Last Tango in the Daily Telegraph (" delightful " . • • "• . . satisfactory orgasms ") seemed to me to be itself obscene.
Does Fleet Street not realise how much anger, dismay and frustration is rising in the country, as this degradation goes on? Today I heard from a teacher in Kenya who says, "When I was visiting Britain last Easter I was very struck by 'something in the air' which I could not pin down, and which I found was imperceptible to people who lived there all the time. I went to see A Clockwork Orange and I wondered how it was that critics could write so complacently about it. I presumed that they had seen many films leading up to it and so were unaffected by what struck me very strongly as sick. . . ."
Anyone coming home from abroad has a similar experience — of seeing how much we have gone corrupt, degree by degree, in what we will stomach, of sexual displays of the kind once only found in a few brothels.
I now have a large file of letters, largely from ' left ' and ' liberal ' people, teachers and such, representing the voice of the 'silent majority. They speak continually like this: "My own teenagers now are as sickened as I by much of what purports to be entertainment or information, in previously reputable Life in Fleet Street is no doubt pretty grim today — as the spectre of not surviving confronts every newspaper. But I often hear now from people who say, "I had just finished reading the film reviews . . . and was very depressed," or "I just couldn't read the review of Last Tango in the Observer . . . I had to turn my eyes away ". (This latter was a college lecturer in the Humanities.) Should public discourse in print be so sick—and one-sided? And press-ganged in favour of the defence of sickness?
Is Fleet Street sure that it isn't, by becoming so brightly destructive, sinking itself? Is it sure that, in ruthlessly bulldozing us into the 'new freedom' — which many think now has gone sour, with buggery and the rest in full flood — that it isn't breaking down that mutual respect in discourse that sustains the press as an institution? And is it sure that, by preventing debate — as, to my knowledge it certainly has — it isn't cutting its own throat, in the service of the New Gangsters of Liberation, and their private fortunes, made out of promoting collective infections — in what used to be a reasonably healthy society, before it was 'liberated '?
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