Erotic principle
John Mortimer
In all the tedious, tendentious, overemotional, under-intelligent, lip-licking, hypocritical, keyhole-peeping arguments about contemporary pornography no one has paused to ask 'Is it any good — as pornography?' The answer I can tell you, after a good deal of professional experience, is a resounding 'No'.
Nothing, not the public wrist slapping of Mrs Whitehouse, the agonised doubts of Lord Longford or all the magistrates' destruction orders which can be obtained by Manchester's porn-conscious Chief Constable Anderton, will ever stem the tide of what its marketeers prefer to call 'explicit sexual material'. Alleged pornography is on the rack in every friendly neighbourhood sweet shop. It peeps coyly out from behind the Milky Ways and Bounty bars, it nestles between Vogue knitting patterns, comics, the Spectator and Sir James Goldsmith's Now!. Each magazine will cost you two pounds or four copies of Now!; 'stronger' material in adult sex boutiques can run you up to £25 for a ten minute film. And if you are looking for any sort of erotic experience I have to tell you you would be far better off travelling from Oxford Circus to Marble Arch on the Central Line, or sitting alone with your thoughts on a damp bench in the municipal gardens, Walsall. Indeed, the only statute under which modern pornography could be properly attacked is the 'Trades Descriptions Act'.
If all this sounds like complaining of an excess of talcum powder in the cocaine obtainable at the local roller disco, perhaps we should start with a few basic principles of eroticism in art and letters. No one can seriously maintain that turning to thoughts of love ever did the young, or the old mackintoshed man's fancy any particular harm; and whether such thoughts are stimulated by print, paint or other human beings may depend merely on what is available at the time. The greatest writers, the most supreme painters have produced works of an erotic voltage which makes Penthouse and Playboy, Forum and Whitehouse look like flat torches on a rainy night. Shakespeare and Mozart, Cranach and Botticelli, all produced works which are brilliantly and unforgettably erotic (indeed it's the absence of such effects in the masterpieces of Milton, Brahms, Vermeer, or Delft which makes them seem, by contrast, so extraordinarily dull). And when you ask why Shakespeare with a wooden platform, a few men and boys and the old story of Troilus and Cressida could produce scenes of dizzying eroticism quite beyond the scope of Mr Hugh Heffner and all his millions, the answer is not only that Shakespeare was a genius and Mr Heffner is a bit of a silly, but that Shakespeare had the enormous good fortune not to have been born into the permissive society.
'Permissiveness', if there is such an unpleasant word, has not only put an end to farce, it has absolutely killed pornography, and for the same reason; neither art can flourish except in an atmosphere of extreme sexual restraint. Feydeau could write perfect sexual comedy when it was a domestic disaster for a respectable bourgeois doctor to lose his braces; not even his genius could get a laugh out of a group of sexually liberated Swedish teenagers. In the same way the Victorian age provided that best quality pornography; when the piano legs had to be clothed there was at least some pleasure to be got out of mental undressing.
So pornography is strongly dependent on the Puritan ethic, and it's noteworthy that some of the most potent sexual sparks in the theatre are struck between an antisexual nun and a judge who firmly believes that fornication merits the death penalty: Angelo and Isabella. Orlando doesn't even realise that Rosalind is a girl, but their scenes together are erotically far more powerful, because they are more comic, than any encounter between Lady Chatterley and her lover, or Linda Lovelace and her vibrator. Every dramatic writer knows that the way to raise sexual tension is to keep the couple fully dressed and, if possible, frustrated. Once they start to disrobe the scene will acquire all the magical mystery of Unisex Night at the North London Municipal Sauna.
But even given the modern pornographer's unhappy social situation, does his work have to be of such an appallingly low standard? When I go to see allegedly 'blue' movies at New Scotland Yard I am compelled to remove my spectacles, so the screen becomes an Impressionist blur and I am spared the less attractive clinical details. I was there one day, condemned to watch Toilet Orgies (a genuine title, I promise you) when counsel for the prosecution approached the sergeant in charge of the projector with a can of film, and asked if he'd be so kind as to put it on. The officer agreed and we spent a happy quarter of an hour looking at shots of my learned friend's herb garden. As the bees flew lazily by, pollinating the borage, I have to tell you that the effect was genuinely erotic.
There is, of course, one hope left for por nography. Mrs Whitehouse, Captain Blackburn and Lord Denning may finally succeed; the Victorian age may return in all its glory and it may be almost worthwhile buying the stuff again.
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