Free Pornography

The problem with pornography is not that it is obscene or degrading to women, degrading women and obscenity are issues of free speech, the problem is the money. It is money that drives the industry that churns out huge numbers of images of people degrading themselves. Everybody loses, all concerned lose their dignity, their self worth and the respect for themselves, their bodies and their sexuality. The models, the distributors and the users, all rendered grubby by the lust for filthy lucre.

I would remove the copyright and other intellectual property rights from sexual images. That way all the millions (hundreds of millions? Billions?) of pornographic images around the world would become public domain at a stroke. If you had such images in your possession you could share them with anybody. I would also make it an offence to charge to show sexually explicit images. You would be free to show them for free, to express yourself freely in a sexually explicit way but it would become an offence to charge for access to material which was largely of a sexually explicit nature. The largely clause would allow people to make a two hour movie and include a four minute sex scene in it and charge for admission as normal or to have an admission charge to an art gallery which contains a proportion of sexually explicit material but would make striptease, pole dancing, lap dancing and movies with more than a third of their action taking place in sex scenes into something which professional trade was effectively prohibited. You could still be a lap dancer for the art but to take payment on the door or down the bra would be an offence.

If you object to the phrase four minute sex scene I suggest you think long and hard about the subject. Four minutes is quite long enough to be watching somebody else have sex. Any longer and you would be bored stiff. Seriously, if you think I'm wrong you time the sex scenes in notoriously explicit but mainstream films and see if I'm wrong, I bet the scenes are shorter than you imagine. Also I can't get my head around the idea of tantric sex, why would you want to spend any more time scratching an itch, wouldn't it be more convenient simply not to be so bloody itchy in the first place? Who longs to want to sleep longer and longs to be more hungry? Surely the sensible thing is to want your urges satisfied in a reasonable way rather than trying to increase your urges to take up an even greater proportion of your time.

Oh but what about the children!

Children that are too young to understand sex generally are not that curious about it and are not likely to be damaged by that curiosity. For large parts of human history and still in large parts of the world today children sleep close enough to their parents that they can't help but know what is going on. You can't bring up twelve children in a caravan without the children learning about sex. My thinking is that if you are a thirteen year old boy with access to a computer you will have a collection of pornography, or at the very least will have seen dozens of pornographic images that your friends have collected. There is nothing to stop you getting hold of it at present. The huge number of pornographic sites, the existence of “free sample” pages in which all you have to do to prove your age is to click a link and now the widespread availability of CD and DVD writers and pen drives means that I would doubt the IQ of any teenager who could not get hold of thousands of hardcore pornographic images and movie clips if they had a mind to. For the slightly more savvy computer nerds there are hundreds of places to find passwords to porn sites that can be hacked in a couple of minutes. A colleague of mine has done it several times for the buzz of defeating the minimal security, apparently the trick is to use a common boys name as a screen name then run a list of girl's names against it as the password, so obvious that I barely feel guilty in passing it on. So my suggestion would hardly increase the supply of such material, it would remove the incentives to produce more. With no chance of selling images of sex who would do it? People who enjoy sex. People who have sex for pleasure and want to share that pleasure with others. Strange people perhaps, but infinitely nicer people to share a planet with than the current scum who run the industry.

Pornography does degrade people but it isn't depiction of nakedness and sexual acts that is the problem but the commercialism. I see no great moral or legal problem with the idea of stopping the profiteering from sexual imagery without stopping the imagery itself. Sexual imagery should join the list of things which we should not sell along with babies, wives, slaves, public office, academic qualifications and our own organs. Nobody says the prohibition on slavery is a terrible and unpardonable block on our economic freedom. At least nobody has put that idea across with a straight face for over twelve decades. It is reasonable to prohibit certain trades and it does not imply that you will be wanting to prohibit another trade the next week, then another and another. Slippery slope arguments are bogus. Present the case against the proposal I'm making today, don't try to make out that tomorrow I will be asking for something totally unacceptable that is somehow not possible to object to at that time.

It does not follow that a black market will emerge just because there is a prohibition. Children are not allowed to buy lottery tickets but there is not a huge black market in children buying lottery tickets for the simple reason that the potential supply is huge, the rewards are small and the risks (although actually quite small) are too high compared to the potential benefits. The simplest way to end the commercial distribution of pornography is to attack the so called intellectual property rights. Seldom does that phrase ring so hollow! If all sexually charged imagery is declared to be by definition in the public domain then the market for it will disappear. If you made a two hour film and tried to sell it on the basis of a ten minute sex scene you would be able to enforce the copyright on the entire film, but not the sex scene, anybody would be free to distribute copies of that section of the film. This would not stop anybody using sex and nudity in an appropriate way in a film to tell a story that required such nudity but if the sole reason for the nudity was exploitative this move would shoot their fox.

If you wanted to sell something with sex you would be undercut by other people freely able to trade the images you created but without the costs of paying the immoral earnings of the “actors”. So who would want to produce such images? People who wanted to for reasons other than material gain. Voluntarism is good. People don't respect politicians if they think they are only doing the job to make a lot of money, that's why laws to limit personal gain from public office exist. In politics it is called corruption. Money is corruption. Lucre corrupts. There is a world of difference between a politician who votes for a new law because he believes it is in the best interests of his country and his constituents and one who votes for a law because it is in the interests of the people who are paying him to vote that way. One is moral the other is thoroughly immoral, although the vote may well be the same! In my mind the same distinction should exist in regard to distributing sexually explicit images. If that's what you want to do then go ahead, if you only want to do it because you are being paid for it then that is immoral, sordid and degrading.

If you want to give a kidney to that nice rich man then go ahead, good for you, I thoroughly admire your humanity and selflessness, but if you are only doing it because he's paying you then he is exploiting you and the world as a whole is diminished by allowing such a transaction to occur. This is exactly the same when Hugh Heffner pays thousands of dollars to some pretty girl to show off the tan lines under her bikini. If she wants the world to see her body and Mr Heffner has a magazine with a wide readership then good for them both, but we know they are not doing it out of altruism or artistic expression or anything else noble or uplifting. They are doing it for filthy lucre and nothing more. Sex and beauty and the aesthetic appreciation of the human form are all demeaned in the process. Why should we put up with it?

Child pornography is illegal so it already acts as a bit of a model as to what will happen if intellectual property rights in sexually explicit material is abolished. If you get hold of a sexually explicit image of a child nobody can sue you for stealing it or publishing it without permission. This results in a situation in which most people have no such images, several people who might have been interested in having some are put off from having any but those who have taken the risk of owning one have nothing to lose in having all of them. When police announce the seizure of computers filled with hundreds of thousands of images it is obvious that most of those images were “stolen”, swapped, rather than either bought or made. Once a person has decided to take the risk of possessing a single illegal image of a child they have little or nothing to lose from owning any image they can find and trading them with others, and even giving away copies of all they have on the understanding that the recipient will reciprocate. If you try to sell illegal images they will not be protected by any court and you have no way of tracing them or protecting them short of using violence, which would be counter-productive as it would run the risk of having the entire criminal operation busted by police. Despite the hysteria aimed at consumers of child pornography surely no jurisdiction anywhere in the world would give the priority to busting users of pornography ahead of those who produce it or those who try to sell the stuff. In certain circumstances being an amoral entrepreneur isn't a good thing apparently.

I would not support any change in the law on child pornography with the exception of removing the anomaly that a sixteen year old can consent to engage in any sexual act and yet anybody with a copy of The Sun newspaper from the early 1980s wrapped around breakables in their attic featuring a topless image of a sixteen or seventeen year old Samantha Fox could face a lifetime on the Child Sex Offenders Register. That is absurd. As sixteen is the age of consent for sex (with a partner of any age, sex and sexual orientation) surely somebody who is interested in a sixteen year old in a sexual context cannot sensibly be defined as an incurable dangerous sex offender. Come on, which is it to be, proud bridegroom or filthy sex beast? If that causes problems with Americans having a different age that is an American problem. It would not cause any problems with Britain's children being prostituted for the lusts of criminal Americans for the simple reason that selling images of nudity would become impractical as well as illegal. How can you sell snow to Eskimos?

Of course the situation with images of adults would be very different. Removing the protection of intellectual property rights would not make a difference to the legality of possessing such images. If the images did not depict criminal actions and the people in the images were 1] of age and 2] aware the images were being created with a view to publication then they would become public domain at the moment of publication if they depicted sexual activity or sexualized nudity. So once you had got hold of such an image, got it on your computer screen or in your hand, you would be legally permitted to republish it in any form, this would extend to you being able to take the entire content of a pornographic website and republish it all (after removing any text or logos, we mustn't infringe their intellectual prioperty) in your own website, magazine, blog, newsgroup or email newsletter. Of course those people who are currently producing pornography would have a fit. Why pay people to act in a porno movie if the moment you sell it some sixteen year kid in his bedroom, with the full protection of the law, will republish it all and give it all away? Who is going to pay for porn to be made? That's the key to this proposal. It would not be worth anybody's while to make pornography for money. The only money in the industry would go to pay for the bandwidth and the ink and paper. The images would be free.

At the moment there is a huge amount of money in pornography. This would change. Just think about what has happened to the music industry and multiply that effect a hundred fold. Think what would happen if the latest Madonna album was being given away for free, legally, on a hundred different fan sites. She wouldn't be very happy, would she? Imagine now that her lawyers told her that these people were in the right and she had no right to sell her music but anybody could give it away. That is exactly what would happen to pornography. It would become universally available at no cost, and the producers of the material would not get much if any financial reward for it. The back catalogue of the world's pornographers would also become available for free distribution and redistribution. If you make a pornographic DVD with adverts on it and give it away (charging for it would be illegal) you would likely be undercut by somebody else putting out all your material plus some more, and fewer and less obvious adverts. How could you make money from pornography? That's the point. You couldn't. Think about all those scare stories they tell you about pirate DVDs killing Hollywood. The difference here is that this would actually happen. Pornographers would have to go and get a proper job.

There would be no money left in the industry to create more of the same material. What you would be left with is the stuff people actually want to make even if they don't make any money from it. That is surely going to be stuff that is less likely to degrade women and make sex seem nasty, sordid and exploitative. While some women might enjoy the thought of having a video of them being humiliated sexually passed around the world it is hardly likely to be hundreds and thousands of them. We will be spared the spectacle of midgets, dwarves, goats, dogs, horses, amputees, grotesquely fat people and men with absurdly large and unwieldy penises, blacks and blondes coming together just to make money. Sexual depiction would become about the sex, maybe even about the love, not about the money.

Hard and soft pornography

The market for pornography ensures the availability of pornography. To that extent it is good. Pornography fulfils a purpose. It is a masturbation aid for many men. Pornography can be divided into two kinds, hard and soft. Soft core pornography is the pornography of lust and desire. Hard core pornography is the pornography of jealousy. Both work to achieve the desired result, focussing a man's mind on sex. With soft core pornography the man imagines having sex with the woman in the image. With hard core the man is stimulated by the thought of the activity depicted, his imagination then includes himself in the scene: OK, it's my turn now.

There is more to this hard soft dichotomy than just the categorization of pornography. I think it is also helpful in determining sexual orientation. Are you really homosexual because the thought of homosexual sex, the actual physical acts, make you aroused? I suggest no, that isn't a good definition. What matters in defining sexual orientation is what attracts you to think about sex in the first place. I suggest many men would register increased bloodflow in the penis if they saw a couple of heifers mounting in a field but they would not if they just saw one heifer in the showring, even a world class specimen. The same must surely go for men, I can't see that being aroused by seeing two men engaged in sex means you are homosexual by orientation, men can get aroused by stick drawings if they are explicit enough. No, to determine whether somebody is actually attracted to members of a particular sex requires a sexual response to images which are not overtly sexual.

If I look at a beautiful woman I often think about sex because I am heterosexual in orientation. I don't get aroused by soft gay porn and beefcake because I am not attracted or oriented towards men. But I don't feel any great need to pretend that depictions of sexual acts between men are not sexually stimulating to me. Sex turns me on. I can recognize beauty, grace and perfection in men, women, children, animals, cartoons and inanimate objects but it is only women and girls which evoke sexual thoughts in non-sexual contexts. Occasionally I will notice a young man in the street and the briefest of thoughts may pass my mind about how attractive he is but the idea that I might go as far as having a nude male statue or painting around the place to encourage such thoughts is quite laughable. Soft gay porn and beefcake doesn't do anything for me, in fact it is far more repulsive to me than hardcore. I would rather see two men making out than blowing kisses or showing off their chests or mincing across the room. I do feel repelled by camp men, but that feeling is mild, it is something I feel a need to keep my distance from. It does not disgust me or provoke hatred, fear or a desire for violence. I regard homosexual men and camp things with a repulsion which is similar to that I feel to the colour pink, morris dancing or celery, not to the repulsion I feel to vomit. I can watch somebody eat celery I just don't want to eat it myself. I can appreciate the skill in morris dancing but I don't particularly enjoy watching it or want to join in, which does not imply I want morris dancers put into concentration camps or hounded out of their jobs. If you're into Kylie, show tunes and felching then OK, that's fine by me, but it isn't my idea of a good time.

Does this work for you too? Maybe it's a man thing, I don't know. Do you find hard core pornography stimulating even if the people in it wouldn't stimulate you in soft core porn?

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