Pornography
Sir: I am delighted to answer Mr George Martelli's questions to me (April 6) on pornography, arising out of my review of Lord Longford's The Grain of Wheat (March 23). Here are his five questions. One; is it true or not that pornography is ugly? The answer is surely that ugliness, or beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and that many things considered pornographic are ugly to some. Pornography is really only the term used for the erotica one does not personally happen to like. When John Ruskin burnt the erotic paintings that Turner, Britain's greatest painter, left to the nation when he was Curator of the National Gallery, his reasons for doing so were that the works were of such great beauty that they must be evil; such beauty could only come from the Devil, given the content of the paintings. Two: does pornography offend against good taste? Of course it does and so do half the commercial advertisements we see in the streets and nearly all modern buildings. I know, however, many people of respectable, impeccable good taste in their manners and appearance, who are not averse to reading a little porn on the quiet. Three: it degrades the human personality? I think not Mr Martelli. The individual may think himself degraded, but then he does not have to indulge. What does degrade is the presence and continuing necessity of poverty, disease, ignorance and the like, which do not enable people to lead dignified lives. Four: pornography reduces women to sex objects? Pornography may do this to fictional women on a film or in a book. A prostitute is a sex object by her own choice, but that is in real life. In any case, women like to be sex objects, but not only sex objects. So do men, come to think of it. Five: pornography is a dreary substitute for normal sex. It is indeed, and those who indulge in it are those who, for one reason or another, cannot have normal sex. Why deny them a substitute?
The problem is that it has alwaYs proved impossible and unworkable to draw any kind of line between the pornographic and the erotic. The price of allowing freedom to the serious artist is to allow commercial exploiters to also put out a lot of rubbish, whose only justification is to make money. It is up to the public to be adult enough to tell the difference and ignore that which is shoddy. We cannot do this if one is stuffed up with a built-in prejadice against anything which offends against conventional and usually long-outmoded standards of decencY. Calder and Boyars Ltd, jot Street, London WI h8nBCreawldeerr Sir: Your correspondent George Mar-, telli refers to Oh! Calcutta! as a show "which in no other capital city, with the exception of New York, could be seen outside a brothel." This is false on two counts. Firstly, New York is not a capital city. Secondly Oh! Calcutta! has also been publicly staged in three European capitals (Stockholtn, Belgrade and Paris) and one former capital (Berlin). Kenneth 7),nan 20 Thurloe Square, London SW7
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