by Sam Fowles
“Opting in” to porn is a band aid for a cancer. If our leaders truly care about the next generation they must forget about ineffectual pseudo censorship and tackle the underlying issues: a dearth of proper sex education and a public discourse that treats women as little more than wax models.
Conservatives are migrating home for the summer, or at least returning to political home ground. David Cameron’s “war on porn” is, from this perspective, a PR coup. Convincing his more swivel eyed party members, aghast at the imminent prospect of gay marriage, that he’s just as rooted in the social values of the 1950s as he is the economic values of the 1930s.
But, as so often happens in public policy, in all the cacophony of (male) politicians and (male) tabloid editors reminding us all that they don’t like porn, two important questions have been ignored: What is the problem we’re trying to solve? And: Will our proposed solution be effective?
Unfortunately it seems like the answers are respectively: “Not sure” and “probably not”. There is a problem with sexual morality in this country. One in three girls report inappropriate sexual touching at school, 750 000 children per year witness domestic violence and a third of teenage girls have experienced sexual violence by a partner. However, it’s unclear whether the PM actually wants to tackle this incredibly significant issue or whether he just thinks porn is a bit icky. If it is the latter then he’s about to perpetrate a fairly serious affront to civil liberties in the name of a morality that Elizabeth Bennet would find constricting. If it is the former then his proposed solution just won’t work.
In terms of the practical aspects of how internet filters will actually work, Alex Hern gives a thorough overview of the problems in the New Statesman. In essence, the generation that this measure aims to prevent accessing porn highly internet literate. It’s virtually inevitable that a way around the filters will spread throughout the country in a matter of days.
In addition a significant amount of porn is user generated. This has a more insidious social effect than the stereotypical badly lit, excruciatingly scripted, commercially made porn. While one may make women feel like they must objectify and demean themselves in order to satisfy or get attention from men and men feel like they must demean and objectify the women in their lives in order to “be a man”, the other is the manifestation of that actually happening. Yet an “opt in” porn filter will have absolutely no effect on the social media sites through which this content is shared. Unless David Cameron wants to ban Facebook, Tumblr and Snapchat (in which case he can probably wave a merry goodbye to the Generation Y vote) an “opt in” mechanism for is essentially useless.
However, even if porn filters were to be 100% effective, they still wouldn’t solve the problem. Because the problem (the real problem, not the problem of the PM and Daily Mail acting like they’ve never seen naked people before) is not porn. Porn is merely a symptom. The disease is that we, as a society, treat each other (mainly women) incredibly badly. The cure? Education and a better public discourse.
The fact is that sex education in this country still boils down to a Mean Girlsesque parody of itself. Children are taught contraception, STIs and, most important of all, not to have sex. As a society we completely fail to present or disseminate any alternative model of what sex can be like. There is no middle ground between abstinence and porn. Children are given sex education on all the dangers of sex but none of the positives. In addition, the new National Curriculum encourages educating children in a variety of dead languages but not in how to have a positive relationship.
If we really want to combat porn then we must deal with the reasons why children watch it and are influenced by it. This means sex education that deals with both the positives and negatives and is accompanied by relationship education.
But the process of education involves much more than merely school. Children are inherently and profoundly influenced by the society and culture in which they grow up. If one half of the tumour is (lack of) education, the other half is our public discourse.
We live in a culture where the largest image of a woman in the nation’s most popular paper is a half naked teenager. Our leaders think it’s acceptable to patronise female members of parliament in the House of Commons and the media vilifies pretty much every woman who dares do anything other than smile placidly and pop out babies (unless she’s poor, in which case she definitely shouldn’t have the termity to reproduce).
The paradox of Cameron’s position is encapsulated in the timing of his declaration of war on porn. He announced a policy which should have been about reducing the exposure of children to rampant misogyny in the same week that his own backbenchers proposed that teenage single mothers should be punished by being forced to live with their parents (the fathers are presumably absolved of all blame by virtue of being of the same gender as those proposing the legislation).
The fact is that we live in a sexist society. Porn is a symptom of this but banning it isn’t the cure. The cure is a culture of respect. That means respect for all of our fellow humans and this culture must be promulgated everywhere, from primary school to the House of Commons. This means sacrificing political capital, newspaper sales and speaking out against a fairly significant swathe of pop culture (and probably not telling people to “calm down dear” in the House of Commons). I suppose the question is: How much is it worth to you Mr Cameron?
Sam Fowles is a researcher in International Law and Politics at Queen Mary, University of London
Tags: Daily Mail, David Cameron, exploitation, opt in, porn, Sam Fowles, social media
“If we really want to combat porn then we must deal with the reasons why children watch it and are influenced by it. This means sex education that deals with both the positives and negatives and is accompanied by relationship education.”
Sorry, but education will not turn testosterone into oestrogen no matter how much you feel it should. Especially not in teenagers.
The internet has proved that unlimited porn is eagerly consumed when access is anonymous and free/cheap at the point of use. Porn was/is a major driver of the internet (much, much more than anyone would publicly acknowledge). Porn meets a powerful demand that people rarely admit but demonstrably have.
Technical measures and “education” are both ineffective. The only “solution” to porn is moral consequence and the absence of anonymity. And the only practical way to achieve that is religion, through the judgemental eye of a watchful God. In a secular society there simply is no realistic answer.
“That means respect for all of our fellow humans and this culture must be promulgated everywhere, from primary school to the House of Commons”
But, not at Birmingham City Council I presume?
As for the rest; yes, we need to stop human nature in its tracks. The idea that a person could find another attractive does no favours to further human-kind. We need to stop seeing attractive people as, attractive people. If we write it into law that attractive people are no longer considered attractive, problem solved.
As for the “lads mag” debate that’s currently ongoing. Lads mags view women as tarts who they’d like to sleep with. Ladies mags view women through a microscope picking every flaw, amplifying it, and shouting how bad it is for a middle aged woman to have cellulite or wrinkles. Both equally bad at objectifying women and demanding perfection, but only one up for consideration. I’ve yet to hear a defence of ladies mags that engage in this behaviour, mainly because no-one has ever questioned them.