PORN IS A YAWN
Martyn Harris argues that the campaign to save
the Obscene Publications Squad is based on a wilful distortion of the nature of pornography
TWENTY YEARS ago, when I was still a student, I was browsing in W.H. Smith when I noticed a man behaving oddly. He was standing in front of the angling papers, snatching furtive glances at the porn mags on the top shelf. Eventually he seized a Hustler or a Rustler; folded it with the booze ad outwards, paid the cashier with the exact change, and bolted, head down, from the shop. So far, so normal, except for me — because the man was my bank manager, the same tweedy and fatherly figure who scolded me every end of term for my L25'overdraft. It was one of the epiphanies of life: a flare of under- standing which lit a dozen miserable, guilty corners. Everybody did it! If my bank manager bought Hustler, then so must the butcher and baker and Kwik- Kopy maker. I was ordinary after all.
Men become more honest with each other as they get older, and there has been plenty of confirmation of my belated ado- lescent insight over the years. One friend (a physics PhD and now a Treasury civil servant) kept an enormous stack of Pent- houses under his bed. A liberal and femi- nist art lecturer preferred Rustler for its pioneering work with readers' wives. A financial journalist eschewed pictorial P0111,, for the literary variety: with half a Oen, filled with A Man with a Maid, The StorY Oj 0, Emmanuelle, and even, heaven help Us; The Adventures of a Window Cleaner. I make these squalid revelations because they are an essential preamble to any hop' est discussion of pornography. Almost all men have used it, in times of loneliness or unrequited lust, and a surprisingly large proportion of women too. Nobody adiruts to it but everyone does it. Porn magazines sell 20 million copies a year in the United Kingdom: the curious thing is that nobodY ever buys them. I have written about the porn industrY several times. When I worked for Nem: Society in the early 1980s, I became Oa' magazine's man in the dirty raincoat for a while, scouring Soho for prostitutes, rat boys, nude encounter parlours, rubber fetishists, swing clubs, hard porn merchants and the like. It was dirty work but some' body had to do it, and my reports front rllei front line of filth seemed to go down Wc.1, in the senior common rooms and soon' work departments where New Society Os, read. My main conclusion from that exPerl' ence was that, for all its fervid atmosphere and lurid reputation, there was practically no sex to be had in Soho, certainly not compared to the 'massage' parlours which Operate in every town in England — never far from the local police station. Most of the pornography, too, was a con: pirated Pages from Dutch and Swedish magazines With coloured blobs stuck over the inter- esting bits, and the whole swindle sealed U p in clingfilm. Quite early in the career of any aspiring dirty raincoat journalist, there comes an invitation to the offices of the Obscene Publications Squad in Scotland Yard. There, a nice Dixon of Dock Green-type °P per will show the reporter a row of fil- ing cabinets full of magazines and a room full of videos that will mist his glasses, freeze his blood and 'turn his hair white. 'This is the sort of thing we have to -deal With, you see,' says Dixon, patting our reporter's trembling shoulder as he comes tottering out of the viewing suite. 'Kiddies, grannies, gerbils. Now if only we had the Proper resources ... adequate budget • • . decent staffing levels . .. faster cars • • • nuclear assault rifles .. . unlimited Powers . .. a change of government • • . then we might be able to do something about it.' And off the reporter goes to his nffiee to write a piece which comes smok- ing off the typewriter, demanding a ban on ey erYthing from paedophile porn to the girl in the jogging bra on the back of the Kellogg's Cornflake packet. The Guardian, of all newspapers, ran a series of articles of this type last week — though I don't know why I should affect surprise at this, since it is the left-wing papers at the moment which vie to outdo each other in illiberal and repressive social a. ttitudes (see Melanie Philips, any week, In the Observer). But the author of this series was the normally level-headed Nick Pavies, who specialises in sympathetic investigations of 'underclass' issues. His Justification (and you need justification for dirty raincoat articles, which are always Partly designed to titilate the readers) was
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that the porn debate had been caught in a sterile controversy' about the effect on ,CiMsnmers. British pornography is now bizarre, violent and very easy to obtain. Looking at the material it becomes easy to see • • The real issue with pornography — the real reason why it might be outlawed is • . the damage it obviously inflicts on those involved in its production.' One of these was 'Sally', who talked of being multiply raped and abused since the age of four as a player in her father's porn movies. Her last scene, at the age of 18, was with 'a little boy of five or six, a boy of there fifteen, a little girl of two or three; h _ere was another girl the same age as me. My father was there with a friend of his and a couple of women, not my mother this time • • •' The children were tied up, blindfolded and whipped. The little girl Watwo s penetrated anally and vaginally. 'The Older men and women were involved, sometimes several of them on one child, sometimes serial . . 'There is a great deal of this kind of detail in the articles, partic- ularly a series of vivid montages compiled, presumably, from videos Davies has been shown: 'Here are the women trussed and bound, while men fill them with dildos, telephone receivers, hair-dryers, knives, guns . . . Here is sex with with pigs, sex with eels, sex with midgets, sex with amputees. . . '
It being the Guardian, of course, there were immediate letters of protest from vari- ous amputee and midget activist groups demanding to know why they were not enti- tled to rich and varied sex lives too. (If it had been the Telegraph the letters would have been from animal lovers protesting on behalf of the eels.) The serious point is that Davies is using these images with intent to shock and disgust, and then managing to suggest that they are in some way typical of the pornography available on the high street. The corroboration for the story of 'Sally' above for instance, which has a dis- tinctly suspect ring, is 'widely distributed, easily available, for sale to anyone who would like to look — the images of pornography in Britain in 1994 . .
Now this simply is not true, as the tide of technicolour filth presently spread out on my desk will testify: Penthouse, Rustler, Knave, Men Only, Readers' Wives — all the mainstream top-shelf soft porn — and what a yawn it is. Orange people with spot- ty bottoms, idiot grins, inane puns and fee- bly fictionalised photo captions. Both of my boyfriends are stationed on sub- marines," 20-year-old Lani from Hawaii states proudly. "They both say they miss my torpedo tits".' Har, har. There is, as Davies points out, a recent trend towards disgusting phone sex adverts along the lines of 'Piss on my tits' and 'Tied, bound and gagged for pleasure' etc., but I wonder if he bothered to phone any of them up, as I did. 'Hi, my name is Lola, and I'm gonna take you on a wet and wild sexual odyssey, but before I do, let me tell you about our other phone sex services . . . but before I do that, why don't I . . . ' blah, blah, blah. They are as much as a con as the Soho near-beer bars, and as much to do with sex.
All the same, the phone ads are a vital link — really the only link — in Davies's attempt to conflate the criminal activities of paedophiles and torturers with the top- shelf stroke mags, which, however shoddy and asinine they may be, cannot be con- vincingly damned as evil. And so 'the pornography industry in Britain has been riding on an escalator and, as Soho and the illegal dealers have moved upward towards more violent and bizarre material, so the legal top-shelf dealers have moved up behind to take their place . . . far from being different and distinct the two mar- kets — the respectable and the hard core — have been intimately connected. And as time goes by the distinction is increasingly hard to spot.'
One interesting parallel is with the cam- paign against Aids, where there has been the same attempt to create public alarm (awareness if you prefer) by insisting orl the widespread and imminent nature of the threat even to heterosexuals with no intra: venous habits. Another is with the alltl" drug campaign which always insists on the ratchet effect of soft drugs leading to hard drugs. 'The open supply of hard core pornography,' says Davies, 'has raised the threshold of frustration for consumers, so that they are moving up a kind of spiral of depravity, looking for more and more bizarre material.'
These large assertions deserve a corre- spondingly large dose of scepticism. Where does the material come from? Are the quotes attributed? Are the names real? Who are the pictures of? And above all' who benefits? The pictures of gagged and battered women which decorated the Guardian articles were from a book called Against Pornography: the Evidence of Hann by Diana Russell, published by Russell Publications in California, so this may indi- cate that images of porn are not as eastlY available as Davies asserts. The 010 attributed source of data is the CampalP Against Pornography (whose phone nual- ber is printed at the end — so we are hard- ly in non-partisan territory). The three female victims of porn-makers are not properly identified. In fact, the only fallY identified source is a woman police officer' This is not necessarily to impugn Davies. It is hard to get witnesses in this kind of area to give their names and harder still to tak.e their pictures, but on the other hand it is not impossible, and you have to weigh the almost complete lack of direct testimony and specific detail against the sweeping nature of the argument. The key question, though, is cui bono? The answer lay in the third instalment of the series which consisted almost entirely of a sympathetic portrait of the Obscene Pub- lications Squad, which has recently been threatened with severe cutbacks, and with good reason. The top shelf is nowadays effectively policed by the wholesale distrib- utors themselves — such as W.H. Smith, who recently pulled a perfectly inoffensive Page from Playboy. The crimes against the Person involved in paedophile and sado- masochistic pornography, on the other hi and, are arguably better dealt with by '°cal, specialist squads, such as the Child Protection Teams, who can treat offences as straightforward matters of assault rather Man obscenity, which has always been prob- lematic in legal and civil liberties terms. The American journalist, Heywood Broun, once wrote, 'Obscenity is such a tiny kingdom that a single tour covers it completely and this is a fair description of P, ornography in Britain, for all the apoca- lYptic invocations of the new Left Puri- tanism. Of course there are mail order Video companies selling horrible films; spe- cialist clubs distributing disgusting books; vile people who exploit women and chil- dren. But it is fantasy to pretend they are typical of pornography in this country, which is already the most tightly controlled in Europe, and correspondingly the most vulgar, most silly and most tasteless. There might be genuinely wicked Pornography, based on real pain and exploitation for those who want it, but I don't believe it is the taste of more than a tiny minority, or easily available. For all The years it has been rumoured, for exam- ple, nobody has yet produced a single example of the 'snuff video, and I doubt if they ever will, when common sense demands why any pornographer would h. other to make something so risky and incriminating when it would be so much easier to fake it. Pornography has always been around, Pd always will be, as a consolation to the I°11ellY or as a harmless alternative to Promiscuity for the married. My own com- plaint is that, with rare exceptions such as The Journal of Erotica, to which so many Spectator readers subscribe, British Pornography is almost all of such embar- rassingly low quality which, I am sure, is another result of the current regime of censorship by the aesthetes of HM Cus- toms and Excise and the Obscene Publica- tions Squad. As a final footnote I would just like to mention a piece in the London Evening .anclard last Friday, three days after the Guardian series ended, which reported that the Obscene Publications Squad had at the last minute been spared from the Home Secretary's axe. So public relations really does Pay.
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