There are two proper responses to pornography it: to condemn it, and to ignore it. There are two other responses. One is to use it. It doesn’t bother me too much if some men are enriching internet prostitutes while debasing themselves, as long as everyone shuts up about it. It’s the final possible response to porn that concerns me: giving it air-time.
Para-porn takes very different forms. One form of it is the reality show that’s all about casual sex
Lots of media activity claims to be reflecting on porn in a thoughtful way, but is actually promoting it. News stories about porn, and documentaries about porn, and interviews with porn stars are not healthy reflections on a serious issue. They are the servants of porn. And this is the real problem of our day: not porn itself but para-porn. It spreads the menace of porn, brings it into the mainstream.
Of course this is typified by last week’s Channel 4 documentary about Bonnie Blue. But it goes far wider. The week before, Janice Turner helped to publicise the documentary by interviewing Ms Blue for the Times. The tone of course was neutral, knowing, a bit disapproving in a calm, witty, above-it-all way. That’s not the right approach to porn. The right approach, as I have said, is either to ignore it or to condemn it strongly.
The enlightened media person of our day prides herself (it’s almost always a her) on being so liberated and independent-minded that she can discuss porn without hang-ups, without judgement. But neutrality, in relation to porn, is complicity. If you report on it, reserving judgement, you serve it. It is a strong force – a strong god I almost said. But maybe seeing it as a sort of demon is more enlightened than the normal secular view. It subtly subverts neutrality to its own ends.
Para-porn takes very different forms. One form of it is the reality show that’s all about casual sex, whether swinging or watching virgins get laid. These programmes are obviously titillating in a porn-adjacent way, thought they have the nerve to present themselves as therapeutic.
But in a sense the most insidious form of para-porn takes the form of journalistic hand-wringing. As I wrote earlier this year, Newsnight was guilty of this when it interviewed the other internet prostitute of our day, Lily Phillips. Victoria Derbyshire did a sort of kind-mum-of-a-difficult-teen act, wondering whether poor Lily had herself been damaged by exposure to internet porn. She should have represented the average viewer by saying, ‘What you do is utterly foul, why aren’t you ashamed?’
Unless there is explicit condemnation, there is complicity. Turner and Derbyshire are doubtless very decent people, and it might seem over-the-top to suggest that they are in any way complicit in the porn industry. Surely they are just doing their best to report and reflect on a tricky issue? But this is not a normal topic or issue. If there is not condemnation, there is complicity.
Journalists attempting neutrality are either cynical morons, like the makers of that documentary and the commissioners at Channel 4, or out of their depth.
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