These FoolishThings . . . (1996)

The Scavenger column from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pornography

W.H. Smith admitted it had inadvertently sent Mr Shaheen copies of a magazine called Lipstick, unaware of its adult content. The spokeswoman added: “We stock far fewer of these titles than others, and they are a small part of the market. There is a limit beyond which we will not go, but we have to balance commercial and moral obligations.” Sales of adult magazines have risen by 10 percent in the past year. Guardian, 11 April.

Why BSE?

The deep reason for BSE and CJD is that the modern world has lost sight of what agriculture is for . .  In the Western world agriculture is designed to make money . . . About half the grain and more than half the pulses grown in the Western world feed livestock . . .  We could just eat less meat. It is produced in such vast quantities only for profit . . . Meat is sold and sold again because it is more profitable to feed 10 kilos of wheat to cattle and pigs than sell one kilo for papadoms. Colin Tudge, Independent on Sunday, 24 March.

“He loved Big Brother”

Job hunters face a new hurdle in their search for work—the value test. Increasingly, employers are checking candidates values to see if they fit the organisation’s goals and way of working. A candidate’s technical expertise and key competencies are almost taken for granted. Values represent the spirit of the company and are increasingly seen as the key to rising profits and maintaining a motivated and cheerful workforce. Financial Mail on Sunday, 26 May.

We said we’re sorry!

Shell mounted a robust defence of its activities in Nigeria yesterday, ruling out withdrawal from the country, and calling for an atmosphere of “reconciliation”. Chairman John Jennings attempted to draw the sting from attacks on Shell’s policy in Nigeria at the group’s annual meeting, agreeing to shareholder calls for a moment’s “quiet reflection” in memory of writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, a long-time critic of Shell who was hanged by Nigeria’s military government last November. Mr Jennings admitted publicly for the first time that Shell had bought around 100 handguns for police guarding the operations in Ogoniland, the Nigerian region where it had been accused of damaging the environment, and where Mr Saro-Wiwa’s campaign was based. He also admitted that Shell’s drilling standards in Nigeria were not as high as those applied elsewhere and that Shell had suffered more oil spills in Nigeria than elsewhere. Guardian, 16 May.

Fair shares

Share options and compensation pay-offs are set to earn West Midlands Travel bosses millions of pounds, it was revealed yesterday. The share options— agreed before the takeover of the Birmingham bus giant by National Express last year—entitled ex-chairman Don Colston to pay only £385 for shares in WMT’s new owner which are now worth almost £1.2 million. Former managing director Joe Duffy, who will receive almost £400,000 in compensation when he retires at the end of this month [April), paid about £562 for shares valued yesterday at £1.75 million. Evening Mail, 10 April.

Bleeding workers

Until now, employees at the Mechctronics plant in St. Helens Auckland, County Durham, have been allowed to donate blood at a nearby working men’s club every six months on the firm’s time .. . (Now) they have been told they can still go to give blood but must work an extra 45 minutes to make up for lost productivity. Evening Mail, 30 April.

The Scavenger

So They Say: Light the Blue Paper and Retire (1973)

The So They Say Column from the December 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Light the Blue Paper and Retire

When war broke out in the Middle East, the leaders of the Great Powers all spoke of “deep regret”. Newspapermen enlarged on the horror and futility of it. In the Sunday Mirror on 15th October Jon Akass wrote:

A pity, really, that technology is not yet up to bringing the smell of war to our living-rooms, because that would finally remove whatever romance is left in human combat . . . The best that Israel can hope for is that the Syrian army will be eliminated and the Egyptian army in Sinai routed. And perhaps another year or two of peace. It will not be enough for the price that will have been paid in blood.

It was as if sons of a good home had been caught housebreaking, to their parents’ grief. But on 16th October The Guardian gave an account of the military background.

The Israeli air force was then [in 1967] predominantly French until De Gaulle placed his embargo on the Mirages. President Johnson supplied the first Skyhawks and Phantoms to Israel in 1968 but the bulk of the $1,000 millions of arms sales to Israel since the June, 1967 war was made by the Nixon Administration.

. . . [The Soviets] arms shipments were designed to enable Egypt and Syria to do exactly what they have done in the last nine days, which is to defend themselves against Israeli air power while making limited incursions into occupied territory.

So the sorrowful parents are shown as a Fagin family — teaching the art, supplying the tools, and then lamenting the consequences. Capitalism calls this hypocrisy “diplomacy”.

Lord God of Property

Talking of hypocrisy, the Church of England springs to mind. Its finances were reviewed in the Business section of The Observer on 4th October, with two writers advising how the Church Commissioners’ “£600 million-plus assets” might produce a higher income. Their chief criticism was of the Commissioners’ unadventurousness in holding on to house-property with a relatively low return:

Margaretta Terrace, SW3, provides a good example. This street contains about 40 houses, with an average rent of around £1,000 a year: as the houses are worth a minimum of £40,000—and probably much more—the ‘true’ yield is thus only 2.5 per cent.

Their suggestion was to sell, and to require a down payment of £5,000:

The balance of the consideration would take the form of a 25 or 30-year mortgage: and, at the current mortgage rate of 11 per cent, the Commissioners would receive £154,000 a year.

Eye of a Good-Sized Needle

The Church Commissioners have had this sort of advice before and — no doubt for equally sound business reasons — chosen not to follow it. But an interesting question is raised here. “The current mortgage rate of 11 per cent” has taken on the status of a social problem in recent months. Its rise to that figure was a financial vicious circle: to get more money to lend, the building societies had to offer higher rates to investors, which meant charging a higher rate to borrowers.

But the Church Commissioners do not have that problem. Selling the houses in question, they would not be advancing money but simply taking deferred payments. Using the Observer calculations, if they charged a mortgage rate of only 6 per cent, they would receive £84,000 a year from those houses — which is still more than twice as much as they are said to be getting now in rents. The Commissioners would not only do what the writers want them to do, i.e. make more money; they would be Giving a Christian lead to the Nation, etc.

Is it likely that they will? No. It will not enter the Commissioners’ heads, any more than it did the Observer writers’. As the Good Book says: “Where a man’s treasure is, there shall his heart also be.”

Beggars Cannot be Choosers

And talking of borrowing money. Newspapers have given a good deal of publicity to the Consumer Credit Bill published on 2nd November. It is designed to check “abuses” in hire-purchase, moneylending, second mortgages, and so on. The provision which was asked for most persistently is the one requiring that borrowers shall be told clearly what they are letting themselves in for:

Borrowers required to put up their homes as security for loans and those who obtain loans by mail order will have to be informed of their right to back out before finally signing the loan agreement; and all borrowers will have to be given a copy of every agreement they sign.

(Observer, 4th November)

The Observer writer on "Family Finance”, Paul Wilson, thinks this is inadequate:

Why not lay down a formula by which loan interest rates are calculated, so that all advertised rates are comparable? Why not define what constitutes an extortionate rate of interest, so consumers will know when they have cause for complaint?

This talk is as fatuous as the Bill itself. People go to moneylenders and second-mortgage companies when they have no alternative, and therefore no choice but to accept the terms whatever they are. Can you imagine a loan company’s client, with creditors breathing down his neck, exercising his “right to back out”? Every rate of interest is extortionate. The only way to end problems like this is to get ride of capitalism and, with it, money.

What Makes Great Men ?

People, particularly those who think themselves mentally superior, are often reluctant to accept our contention that intelligence is a social concept. The acclaimed genius of one set of circumstances can be the blithering idiot of another: it depends what society is looking for.

There is an example in the balance at present. Harold Bate is a retired engineer who runs a car on methane gas made from pig and chicken manure. He has done it for seventeen years, and has occasionally appeared in newspapers and on TV as a comical curiosity. Now, suddenly, it is being taken seriously and he has had to take production to a Walsall firm. The Sunday Express on 4th November reported his growth:

“At the moment I am receiving around 150 orders a day from the US and Canada. They are coming in shoals from all sorts of sources—even oil companies. Two major American oil companies—I agreed at their request not to name them—have already used my conversion kit to convert a fleet of oil delivery tankers to run on gas."

Is Harold Bate a genius or a crank? We have yet to learn. What will decide is the world fuel situation. If there is a world shortage of oil, he may well go down with Edison and Stephenson and his story be told to every schoolchild. If it doesn’t happen, he will have been nobody of note.

Gaiété Mancunienne

The magazine calls her Marie-Helena. a model born in Lyons and now living in Paris. But Paula, on a commerce course at school, lives with her parents in a council house at Wythenshawe, Manchester.

(News of the World, 14th October)

The magazine is Men Only. The cream-bun fantasies it sells cannot be set in Manchester or anywhere else the readers may actually live. How sad.

Robert Barltrop

Tiny Tips (2023)

The Tiny Tips column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The owner of OnlyFans took home a hefty paycheck last year. Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American businessman, received more than $338 million in dividends in 2022, according to financial statements filed by the adult-content platform’s parent company, UK-based Fenix International Ltd, and obtained by PEOPLE. Radvinsky’s nine-figure bonus equates to roughly $1.3 million for each of the 260 working days in 2022 (tinyurl.com/7kax535y).

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It is no good targeting isolated faults within this society and attempting to fix them one by one. Many of its core structures, procedures, assumptions and values are mistaken and the focus must be on replacing the system with one that does not generate the present range of problems leading us to destruction. A satisfactory alternative must be some form of simpler way. We will get nowhere unless and until this is widely understood and willingly accepted (tinyurl.com/2tkr49fx).

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A harsh custom courses through rural China. If a woman marries a man from outside her village, she becomes a waijianü, or “married-out daughter”. Tradition deems married-out women can be stripped of their rights to land that legally belongs to them. The Communist Party came to power promising to emancipate women from feudalism. Today, the collective financial losses suffered by married-out women are growing (tinyurl.com/bdfkrjre).

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Almost thirty years after the end of formal apartheid ANC rule has come to a point of economic devastation with unemployment at over 40% and youth unemployment at over 70%. There has been no significant land reform. Hunger is endemic, there is pervasive violence, crises in schools and health care, collapsing electricity, water, rail and port systems, corruption on a staggering scale and ruthless political repression of struggles for urban land (tinyurl.com/4sz7kah7).

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Danish film-maker and provocateur Lars von Trier has defended himself from backlash after writing a social media post that criticised Denmark’s donation of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. “Russian lives matter also!” he wrote on Instagram on Tuesday after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s visit to Denmark, where he and Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, inspected the F-16s to be delivered to his country. Von Trier addressed his post to “Mr Zelensky and Mr Putin, and not least Mrs Frederiksen (who yesterday, like someone head over heels in love, posed in the cockpit of one of the scariest killing machines of our time, grinning from ear to ear)” (tinyurl.com/3fj7k4x5).

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More than 1,300 people died while homeless across the United Kingdom in 2022, marking an 85 percent increase since 2019 (tinyurl.com/3ftb3y66).

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Ryan Knight @ProudSocialist •The cruelty of disaster capitalism on full display in Maui: “We can’t get aid yet they are serving evictions” (tinyurl.com/nj5favbp).

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As Staughton Lynd’s speeches, writings, statements and interviews demonstrate, there were coherent and persuasive arguments against the war in Vietnam based on U.S. and international law, precedents from American history, and moral and ethical considerations based on conscientious objection to war and an internationalism embraced by American radicals which said: “My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind” (tinyurl.com/bdtdr2t2).

The Mind in Chains: Censorship and Society (1958)

From the July 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

Perhaps the commonest of all traditions in a parliamentary democracy is that a law can be passed to put anything right. “It ought to be stopped” is the expression of most people's belief that somehow a statute can be got up that will check greed, prevent cruelty, or end any of a thousand kinds of nastiness. There is remarkably little evidence for this; only a few months ago Sir John Wolfenden’s committee reported the impossibility of making laws to deal with prostitution, and modern history is full of unsuccessful attempts to put down social problems by law.

Even where laws do seem to have succeeded, usually the real factor has been something quite different. The decline of gangsterism in America was due less to legislation than to a change from the social climate which produced so many gangsters; similarly, the probable suppression-of fox- and stag-hunting in this country will barely anticipate the death from natural causes of what have ceased to be the upper-class sports.

In the last few years, attention has been repeatedly drawn to the censorship laws. They were in fact extended three years ago by the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act—the “Horror Comics” Act; now there is the report of the Select Committee on Obscene Publications, making recommendations for the consolidation and extension of existing laws.

Most of the Committee's proposals reiterate those of the draft Obscene Publications Bill which had its first reading in Parliament in 1955 and now awaits further presentation. Briefly, they aim at clarifying the law and removing anomalies so that first, "serious" works may be better distinguished from others, and second, things may be made hotter for the others. Because the emphasis has been on the possible benefit to works of art, the proposals have been viewed favourably all round; the fact remains that they are for an extension, not a relaxation, of the censorship.

Is there any harm in that? The "considerable and lucrative trade in pornography" of which the Committee speaks is a pretty squalid business, and few people would be sorry for its disappearance. The basis of censorship lies much deeper than that. Its function is to suppress anything which seems potentially harmful to the established order. In our society, it concerns itself with three main threats to the régime: subversion of the state, of religion, and of the monogamous sex pattern.

Apart from the legal prohibitions imposed directly by the state, there are a number of subsidiary censorships to the same end: for example, the exclusion of non-régime views by the broadcasting and television monopolies, the film censorship, and the with-holding of news by the press. There is, too, the simple censorship of price: statutes are scarcely needed to restrict the circulation of five-guinea books.

State censorship in this country dates from the granting of the Stationers' Company's charter in 1556, giving the Company a monopoly of printing and charging them with the suppression of seditious and heretical works. Under this and the various other licensing acts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the censorship was concerned with religion and the state, and hardly at all with sexual morals.

"Obscenity” did not enter the Common Law until the eighteenth century; even the attack on the Restoration comedies was political much more than it was moral. The first moves towards censorship in this direction were made as the middle-class reading public grew, and its real establishment came with the Industrial Revolution and the puritanical religious movements which followed the new-born industrial working class into the towns.

The big drive was promoted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, an offshoot of the Evangelical Movement founded in 1802 (Sydney Smith called it "a society for suppressing the vices of persons whose incomes do not exceed £500 p.a.”). Among its members were Shakespeare’s "collaborator" John Bowdler, Hannah More, Dr. Wilberforce, and Keate, the flogging head of Eton. Its chief concerns were profanation of the Lord’s Day, blasphemy, disorderly houses, fortune-telling and obscene books.

The pornography trade did rise and thrive in the nineteenth century. Its centre in London was Holywell Street—then by the Strand, now demolished—where, according to contemporary accounts, the sale of all kinds of pornography flourished openly. Apart from the flood of books and pictures there were several magazines explicitly given to homosexuality, flagellation, and so on: some with such innocent titles as the Rambler's Magazine and The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine.

The first major legislation on the subject was Lord Campbell's Obscene Publications Act of 1857; this, in fact, together with supplementary items from various other statutes, is the law under which the censorship works today. On its introduction it was vigorously opposed in Parliament by members of the upper class who believed „ enough in laissez-faire to hold that morals were a personal matter (including some who had erotic libraries of their own: see Cyril Pearl’s Girl With the Swansdown Seat).

The legal application of Campbell's Act was given eleven years later by Chief Justice Cockburn. In his judgment of an over-zealous anti-Catholic pamphlet called The Confessional Unmasked he uttered the famous definition of obscenity which has been accepted by judges ever since: “The test of obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.'' 

In this century'a number of factors have given novelists reason to assume a wider scope than they had before. The spread of psychological teachings that emphasise sex as a mainspring of behaviour; the decline of the family from the Victorian ideal; the effects of two world wars (war novels, indeed, seem to enjoy impunity in laying on the sex and the swear-words). The result has been a series of prosecutions extending from Wells's Ann Veronica in 1909 to the recent crop involving Julia, The Philanderer, September in Quinze, The Image and the Search and The Man in Control.

The lawmakers' dilemma now is to re-frame censorship so as to admit the changes in morality and, at the same time, keep out the undesirable. The difficulty of doing this is obvious. It means, in effect, that some kinds of frankness and even obscenity are useful to our society (both The Philanderer and The Image and the Search are, in fact, heavily moral books) and some harmful: the trouble is finding a yardstick.

Several people pointed out the same thing in the “horror comics" agitation—a Daily Mail editorial, for example, remarked that the news pictures of Mussolini hanging rivalled anything Dr. Wertheim had found. And on the point of obscenity, the News of the World on May 25th had an interesting paragraph in the report of a photographer's case: “Asked . . . if he had ever taken an improper photograph, he replied : ‘ Yes—once during the war for the Foreign Office. I believe it was for propaganda purposes'.”

An enormous amount of pornography, and stuff that is very near to it, does serve the interests of Capitalism. How about the nasty dreams of sexual irresponsibility that have been the films’ great stock-in-trade for thirty years, and have helped replace religion as the opium of the people? Or the dirty fantasies that are provoked to sell anything from sedatives to soap? Or the pornography of wartime, sanctified because it spurs on our gallant boys and shows what beasts the other side are?

That does not condone the back-street pornography trade, of course. Apart from the stuff detailed in the police statement to the Select Committee—a good deal of which is sold openly at shop counters, despite what the police say about the difficulty of obtaining evidence of sale—there is a considerable trade in near-pornographic books and pictures. The vital part of the near-pornographer’s art is to accurately assess the changing wind, and much of his business is done by post and advertized in likely magazines: “Young Lady Photographer can supply unusual studies to private collectors, send s.a.e.", etc.

What all this shows is the need, not for more censorship, but for something to be done about the world in which these stupid trades can flourish. Most of the matter in question is miserable rubbish, but its real authors are the people to whom Capitalism must be doing something bad: how frustrated must one be to pay the pomographer's price for a second-hand sexual thrill? Here is the condemnation of censorship—that it aims to protect and perpetuate the social order which causes so much of frustration and unsatisfied need.

There is little to show, as the Home Office officials had to tell the Committee, that anyone is “depraved and corrupted" by pornography. Indeed, it becomes harmful when it is legalized and used for economic and political ends like fomenting hatred in wartime. The censors, the magistrates, the policemen and the members of the Public Morality Council do not seem to be transformed into satyrs by all that they see. This is one case, in fact, where those who do not care need not be affected. Most people go through life without ever seeing a dirty book or picture, and the common effect on those who see involuntarily is not corruption but revulsion.

On the other hand, the everyday world is full of well-established means to “deprave and corrupt" on which there are no prohibitions. Few things deprave more than the sight of money, or corrupt more than a little power over others. Empires and businesses are built on depravity, and exposing the young to its influence is a statutory requirement under the Education Act.

Whatever one thinks about obscenity, the extension of laws against it means the extension of the State's domination over what people may read and think. And, always, the concern is to secure conformity in the working class. In a prosecution in 1935, a main question which helped lead to suppression was whether the book was “fit and decent for people of the working class to read." The proposed new Obscene Publications Bill has the same regard in asking for, as evidence of obscenity, “ evidence, if any, as to the persons to or among whom the said matter was, or was intended, or was likely to be distributed, sold, or offered for sale." And N. St. John-Stevas, in his Obscenity and the Law—largely an advocacy of the new Bill—is explicit on the point:

“Publishers certainly act on the presumption that a high-priced book will not be prosecuted, and sometimes produce editions of the same book, one bowdlerised at a low price, and the other unexpurgated at a high one . . . the protection of the mass of the people from the corrupting effects of pornography is not so much class prejudice as a realistic recognition that the present educational level leaves them open to victimisation."

In other words, the mass of the people don't know what is good for them: an argument which is unfailingly used to support taking away any freedom of choice or expression. Incidentally, Mr. St. John-Stevas devotes six pages immediately following this passage to showing that pornography has no "corrupting effects," and so leaves one to wonder if it isn't “class prejudice" after all.

All censorship should be opposed. Bernard Shaw called it “the intolerance of the community," but he mistaken: it is the necessary intolerance of rulers towards any apparent threat to the security or stability of the society they rule. It is not expressed like that, of course —it does not have to be, because while the ideas of the ruling class are dominant most people see them as the "natural” ones.

Nevertheless, it is a weapon against knowledge and thought. In a free and sensible society it could have no place; in the meantime, censorship can be nothing but an impediment to progress towards such a society.

Robert Barlrop

Censorship and Freedom: the Longford Report (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

It used to be said of certain parliamentary constituencies that a sheep or a scarecrow would be elected by them if it bore the rosette of Conservative or Labour, whichever was favoured there. Likewise, it is predictable that the direst rubbish will be acclaimed by sections of the population, so long as it is rubbish supporting Christianity and seeking to put more fetters on people’s lives. And that is the essence of the Longford Report on pornography, whose long-awaited foregone conclusions appeared at the end of September. Despite the adverseness of reviews such as Bernard Levin’s in The Observer, one has actually to read the Report to find how low it is: a methodological mess, a rag-bag of contradictory allegations given the name “evidence” and ulterior motives called “conclusions”.

One example will show what the Report is at. In the general introductory section, the third chapter is headed “Violence and Pornography”. A lengthy paragraph associating social revolution and the “underground” with violence leads straight into an account of Julius Streicher and Der Stürmer. Streicher, it is said, collected pornography. The counter-information that Hitler did not is given backhandedly: “very little is known about Hitler’s own interest in pornographic materials” — i.e., being wicked he must have had some even though we’ve no evidence for saying so. However, Hitler was “probably” impotent, and his mistress (a contradiction there, surely?) Eva Braun "may, it is thought” have practised lesbianism with her sister. Over the page, and we are back with hippies and “peaceniks” playing sexual perversions.

Making Dirt Stick

The Longford Report is the dirtiest book in town, throwing and smearing mud in all directions. Some of it is hair-raising in crude audacity. The special sub-committee on advertising which finds “We are satisfied with the disciplines that the advertising industry has voluntarily imposed upon itself” comprised four members—of whom two are Chairmen of advertising agencies. The sub-committee quotes from and recommends the British Code of Advertising Practice, and points a special finger at one publisher refusing to observe it: curiously enough, Paul Raymond, proprietor of Men Only, which was raided by the police shortly after the appearance of the Report. Note should be made, too, of the nature of censorable books proposed in a chapter by Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard: “Not unsuitable because of anything: just unsuitable.”

The conclusion of the Report is a draft “Obscenity Bill”, with two prime concerns. First, a new “test of obscenity” is laid down:

For the purposes respectively of the Obscene Publications Acts 1959 and 1964 and of section 2 of the Theatres Act 1968, an article or a performance of a play is obscene if its effect, taken as a whole, is to outrage contemporary standards of decency or humanity accepted by the public at large.

The second object, with particular reference to the theatre, is that the sections of existing Acts allowing for “public good” as a defence against prosecution “shall cease to have effect”. As stated in the 1959 Act, this defence is

that the giving of the performance in question was justified as being for the public good on the ground that it was in the interests of drama, opera, ballet or any other art, or of literature or learning.

Lord Longford has denied that these changes attempt to extend censorship. Of course they do. What is the Report about, except to demand that what Longford, Mrs. Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cliff Richard (and eleven ecclesiastics, and Moral Rearmament) disapprove of should be banned?

Who Constrains Whom?

The Socialist attitude to these questions can be simply stated. We are against all censorship, and in favour of unrestricted expression of opinion and sentiment by everyone. There is no reservation in this statement. “All” does not mean all except that of obscenity, etc., and “everyone” includes our opponents (those involved in the Longford Report, for instance: atrocious as it is, no Socialist will deny or impede their right to say any of it). Nor is the argument one of artistic merits and the interests of the higher things in life. The position is that while any one section of society has the power to regulate what others may see, read or know, the minds of the majority are held in chains.

Part of the Longford case is that the minds of many need to be chained. Mrs. Whitehouse is quoted as saying “it has nothing to do with taste, it has everything to do with the kind of world we are trying to build”. A “senior consultant, F.R.C.P. and former Dean” refers to “the necessary function of government in preventing mental pollution by the mass media”. Masud Khan, editor of the International Psychoanalytical Library, proposes that pornography (but not censorship, however) is “inherently fascistic”. Lord Platt is recorded as having visited the Study Group to say that the Bible — “on sale in children’s bookshops, in school libraries” — contained disgusting pornographic material and was likely to corrupt children; but perhaps that is not what the Study Group wanted to hear.

Thin Air

Yet, for all the laborious efforts here to prove a case for banning pornography, it remains unproven. David Holbrook cites psychiatrists, philosophers and biologists. The American President is quoted pronouncing the non sequitur that if the mind is elevated by great works it must be lowered by bad ones. The only decently-researched item in the Report is the Appendix by Maurice Yaffé, summarising the voluminous findings of the US Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970, and other recent enquiries. This Appendix is referred to several times in the main text of the Report, making one wonder if any of them (apart from Holbrook and Mary Miles, who add a disapproving paragraph) read it. For the conclusions on page after page are that no evidence exists for connecting pornography causally with anti-social behaviour or sexual crime, or for claiming any effect on children.

Indeed, there is one factor which is treated altogether curiously by the Report. Notwithstanding the impression given by phrases like “widely sold” and “big business”, the fact is that pornography is expensive and hard to get. How many of the newspaper readers have ever seen, let alone bought, it? The Report tells how Mary Stott of The Guardian went to the Study Group’s office “simply anxious to see her reactions to hard pornography”. If it were as over-accessible to the public as Longford’s crew represent, why did not Mary Stott pick up a bundle at the corner shop long before? The cheapest price for a pornographic booklet is about £3 (the same as an agency ticket for Oh, Calcutta!, with which the authors of the Report seem obsessed). In those terms, the talk of easy availability to children is a monstrous red herring. The pious question asked, “Would you like your child (or godchild) to read this?” needs a supplementary: If you would, can you afford it?

Propaganda & Capitalism

The point is not at all frivolous. Most people’s views on pornography are founded not on what they have seen of it but on what they have heard. The first chapter of the Report speaks of “the influence of literature on behaviour, with special reference to the Bible, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf”. If one grants that these books have been widely influential, the influence has not come through reading them. The first and the third have been pressed on populations among which it is difficult to find persons with more than vague knowledge of what is inside them. The number of people who have read Capital is, even today, relatively small. The influence has come from their presentation for propagandist purposes, in directive renderings to which independent reading would be an antidote. This is another side of censorship where the censor seeks to form his subjects’ conclusions for them, laying down the reaction which makes reading unnecessary and imposing social and political penalties on whoever reacts otherwise.

The purpose of censorship is to support the rule of class-divided society. Thus, though Socialists oppose it, we do not campaign for its abolition: the belief that any class government anywhere can permit this is unrealistic. Politically, the reasons why capitalism needs its Official Secrets Acts, libel laws and prohibitions on incitement to this or that are obvious enough. In the field of what is called morality, the purpose is simply to ensure that the working class gives no trouble. In this regard, the hypocrisy of the “establishment” should be seen for what it is. Despite all the talk about art and humanity, the authorities stiffen or relax censorship on strictly practical grounds and only to a marginal extent because of theoretical arguments. Considering all that goes on in our world — supported by the contributors to the Longford Report — it is the depth of cynicism to speak as if seeing a dirty book were the worst thing that could befall a child. If only it were!

Exploitive Society

Of course there is no case to be made out in support of pornography, any more than there is one for football or detective novels or jig-saw puzzles or a thousand other recreational phenomena. The condemnation that large sums of money are made from pornography comes strangely from supporters of capitalism, which exists by making money out of every human desire and need. Much bigger profits are made out of “just” wars, housing shortage, and taken-for-granted activities which poison the environment. Presumably the Hodder company will make profit from the publication of the Longford Report; Malcolm Muggeridge is paid for writing and speaking against pornography and birth-control; but no-one suggests that the viewpoints presented are thereby disqualified.

However, there is one comment on most pornography that is not made in the Report. Its nature is, above everything else, exploitive. Its subject-matter is seduction, humiliation, infliction, indignity — people persuaded or made to do things for other people’s gratification. Far from violating the values of present-day society, this picture of personal exploitation accurately reflects them. That is the real difficulty for the censors in defining pornography. Its forms may be elusive, but the content is no different from that of the allegedly respectable functions of a society based upon the exploitation of man by man. Perhaps the indignation of the Longford Study Group is Caliban’s rage at his own face in the glass. One can see in it also, however, the bitterness of disappointed Fabians. A lifetime’s social reform was supposed to turn the working class into sober, moral, acquiescent people: and here they are, as recalcitrant and randy as ever.

Freedom, not Humbug

Don’t be taken in by the Longford Report — or by the majority of its opponents. Censorship can never be in the interests of any section but the ruling class. It is not stated like that, so the arguments for it have to be specious ones invoking illusory menaces and the welfare of the young and “vulnerable”. On the other hand, most self-styled “opponents” of censorship are seeking not its abolition but its transfer — themselves to have freedom, others to be shut up. Socialism means the freedom to say, see and know without restriction. It is worth saying also that this includes not being forced to accept what one does not want; but that is a freedom capitalism won’t give us either.

Robert Barltrop

Educating our sons (2021)

From the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In the last few years the abuse of women and girls has been prominent in the news and on social media. From the ‘Me Too’ movement which started in 2016 but gained momentum with the Harvey Weinstein affair, to the highlighted significant increase in domestic violence in the current lockdown, to the Sarah Everard protests where at least one placard read ‘Educate your sons’. Well, it seems our sons have been getting the wrong kind of education.

Soma Sara is a 22-year-old young woman and founder of the Everyone’s Invited website set up in 2020 and where she shared her personal experience of what she describes as ‘rape culture’. In a few days there were over 10,000 posts, testimonies of abuse, harassment and assaults in schools and universities from pupils and ex-pupils. The majority of reports were from girls and young women but a few from boys and young men.

‘Rape culture’ is the normalising and trivialising of sexual violence, from inappropriate sexual language, misogyny and non-consensual touching through to assault and rape. Many of the posts were initially from posh private schools and mainly in London but reports quickly showed the problem to be country wide and equally prevalent in state schools. Heads have been accused of covering up the problem regarded by some as an ‘open secret’, and even some teachers have been accused of sexual harassment.

Most incidents of a more serious nature occur outside of school, at friends’ houses or at parties, and the stories make disturbing reading. Date rape is not an uncommon experience especially in universities. The vast majority of assaults are not reported for various reasons, embarrassment, not wanting to cause trouble, not being believed or simply accepting that these things happen. Inappropriate sexual behaviour towards others has even been observed and reported in primary schools.

How did we get here? Sex sells. It is a cynical and manipulative exploitation of a basic human need. Pre-teens are targeted and sexualised by cosmetic and clothing companies and dumbed down and mirror imaged on social media. The porn industry is a multi-billion-dollar concern and its most violent and degrading content is readily available to young boys on their smart phones. Gone are the seemingly innocuous images of the 1940s pin-up girls and gone are the porn mags on the top shelf of the local newsagents, embarrassingly purchased and packaged in concealing brown paper. Most likely young boys wouldn’t have been able to afford too many and would probably find it harder, with an eagle-eyed parent about, to keep it secret.

Parents who have or have had teenagers know that they are online almost constantly. A 2018 Ofcom report revealed that more than 450,000 children aged 12 to 15 spend between 6 and 8 hours a day online at weekends. A survey commissioned by BBC3 of over 1000 young people aged between 16 and 21 showed that one in four had seen online pornography by the age of 12. Gender differences were clear with one in five of the young women questioned saying they had never seen internet pornography, but only 4 percent of young men saying the same. A common response given in the survey was that young men expect young women to behave like porn stars and that porn also gave young men unrealistic ideas of women’s bodies. Often a young person sees online sexual images by accident or through natural curiosity looks it up for the first time, however, thanks to internet algorithms it’s not long before sexual content will just pop up without initiation and gradually get more explicit and violent as it goes on.

The online world is giving boys some very clear but misleading messages about women, sexual violence, feminism and sexism. Anti-feminist jokes, memes and videos on social media can be extremely unpleasant, and peer pressure from messages from online forums perpetuate dangerous assumptions, such as that women are lying about sexual assaults. The boundary between online and offline becomes increasingly blurred.

How are young men supposed to develop healthy, loving and consensual sexual relationships when women are objectified and abused? Trying to choke a girl while having sex, as described by one young woman on the Everyone’s Invited site, is shockingly not the way to do it. How far removed is a desensitised attitude to abusing women from the explosion in global domestic violence? Pornography on smart phones has been cited as a contributory cause of rape in countries like India, named the rape capital of the world though cultural attitudes towards women and girls are doubtless also responsible. Despite national poverty most young men there have or have access to smart phones where they can share often violent images.

Sex and relationship education is still not compulsory in all schools and plans to introduce it will give faith schools an opt-out. Hopefully it is not – or will not be – restricted to the mechanics of sex and contraception, but will include education on sexual attitudes to the ‘other’ and mutual consent. It would seem something is going horribly wrong. A report into the issue of sexual harassment and violence in schools, and overseen by Conservative MP Maria Miller was published in 2016 by the Women and Equalities Commission, but it appears nothing has been done since. Instead we are continuing to see peer abuse in schools with the authorities either ignoring the problem or trying to cover it up.

These issues reflect a systemic power structure whose hegemony filters down and becomes part of our culture almost as if we invented it ourselves. We live in a violent world and a society where everything is for use or sale including men and women. Instead of co-operation and empathy we have competition and exploitation and women and girls seem to be at the bottom of the pecking order. Gender stereotyping and sexist attitudes can start young, boys being seen as stronger and more technical, girls being the weaker and more caring sex. We’ve all heard the jokes about the mother-in-law and women drivers, and women’s aptitude for housework. It seems harmless but it’s a drip-by-drip reflection of the power men often have over women in capitalist society.

Until all power structures are dismantled both social and economic, until we live in a world as equals, where buying and selling is obsolete and respect for the ‘other’ is universal, these problems will not go away. Men and women have to work together but as long as there is distrust and disrespect between the sexes, as long as there is sexism and fear of the ‘other’, women may not always feel totally included in the struggle for socialism and as women make up over 50 percent of the working class that could mean no socialism for anybody.

Carla D.

Education and Sex (1972)

From the January 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard 

There is an old story about the teacher who, perhaps desperate for something to liven up a dull lesson, asked the kids to tell her exactly what they were thinking about as she showed them a picture of St. Paul’s. All went well until she got to one little boy who said he was thinking about sex. Now really desperate, the teacher asked him why he was thinking about that? Because, he said, he never thought about anything else.

Now every adult who was ever a child knows there is a lot of reality in that old joke — perhaps too much reality for the comfort of some parents who deceive themselves that, whatever the neighbours’ children might do, theirs would never defile themselves with anything as messy and abandoned as sexual activity. There are certainly elements of fantasy and self-deception about the current outcry over sex education and about what is called pornography — about magazines which admit that we have pubic hair, about films which agree that human beings take part in sexual intercourse and about shops which sell devices claimed to make the experience more excruciatingly enjoyable. All this, need it be said, at a price — sex is one of our growth industries and there is some shrewd money invested in it.

This money might be thought to be pretty safe; sex, as Marilyn Monroe is supposed to have said, is here to stay. The question is, how should we deal with it? It seems like a dirty trick of human development, that the urge is strongest when we are young, in our earlier teens. But any teenager who indulges the urge and becomes a parent as a result faces severe economic problems; a worker does not expect to reach his peak earning power until he is in his forties.

This does something to explain the theory popular with psychologists, educationalists, and indeed with almost everyone else, that youngsters are emotionally unprepared to have children and that until they reach the magic age of emotional readiness they must control — that is, suppress — their sexual drive. This opens up a gap, between desire and fulfilment, which of course most youngsters try to bridge. Usually this is by masturbation which, they are warned, might cause a vicious circle of loneliness, depression, consolatory masturbation, loneliness more acute, deeper depression . . . (This is a modern, more refined version of the old hell-fire and brimstone stuff about masturbation stunting your growth, or making hair grow from the palms of your hands. Who can dispute that the more knowledge on this matter the better? Who can wonder, that youngsters are restless, in revolt?)

One fact which has not been adequately faced by the Lord Longfords of the world is that the suppression of sexual drives can itself cause powerful emotions, which are often more difficult to control than is a mere sexual urge. Sometimes suppression may mean fairly minor problems like feelings of personal guilt which, however unpleasant they may be for the individual, do not usually extend far beyond himself. But there can be worse; the search for substitute virility symbols in aggressive behaviour — the big motor bike and the black studded jacket, uniforms in the fight with chains and knives. And at the extreme there is the chronic sex offender who can deal with his guilt and frustrations only by unloading them — by shocking or damaging or even destroying other people.

It is tempting — and it may not be entirely unfair — to guess that the vociferous denouncers of sex education are themselves pretty strong on guilt and probably confused by the fact that sex is so eminently marketable. Capitalism, they should realise, does not spurn the chance to make a profit. A lot of the porn which can be bought freely in most newsagents is rather clever, mixing fact with fantasy, titillation with discussion, all on a delicate implication that the reader is virile enough to satisfy every one of those gorgeous, naked girls and to outdo in performance all those kinky letter-writers. More probably the reader is desperately deprived, paying his furtive money in an unhappy attempt to idealise feelings which he cannot manage in any other way.

This is another reality too painful for many people to face. The tragedy is, that there is no reason to feel guilty about sex, any more than about eating or sleeping. Yet the guilt is often instilled in childhood, by parents who extend their property relationship with their children to the point of neurotic possessiveness and who fear sex as a private, exclusive act which separates their children from them. Sometimes the end result of this relationship is the sexual offender, going his lonely way in the public park.

One wonders what valid objection these parents can have to sex education which, after all, takes on a job they feel themselves unable to do, suppressed as they are in the stifling privacies of the family under capitalism. Perhaps they too, on the trim housing estates, sheltering behind the beloved car at the kerbside, fearful of their job and of their standing with the neighbours, need help. But private property society does not give priority to such needs; wage slaves can exist, and be profitably employed, without anyone probing their deeper emotional deprivations. In any case, among the innumerable indignities which capitalism imposes upon human existence, which should have priority for therapeutic attention? Martin Cole, maker of the famous, controversial sex education film Growing Up, obviously thinks that sexual neuroses should be pretty high on the list: “I think,” he said in an article in The Guardian (1/5/71) “teenagers should be promiscuous.” Any more, we might ask, than they should be well fed, secure, healthy, happily creative instead of uselessly employed?

It is worth dragging out the fact that sex is a necessary human function, which must have been performed with some degree of relief and enjoyment by the parents of Mrs. Whitehouse and Lord Longford. Sex can be a uniting factor but it can also be divisive, even destructive. Capitalism puts pressure on us to confine sexual activity to the marital situation (there is little reality in this, of course — even for the working class and less for their masters, who can afford any number of affairs and of children illegitimate or otherwise.) But monogamous marriage is an extremely complex relationship, formed upon many expectations which the partners have of each other — social, economic, sexual and the rest. In rare cases (and whatever the women’s magazines might say they are rare) all these expectations reach some level of consistent fulfilment and the marriage as a result is tolerably stable. In most cases the impossible is not achieved; if the couple are honest enough or rich enough they go to the divorce court.

In this situation it has been difficult for sex under capitalism to be treated as other than a matter of private, almost furtive, shame. This neurosis has been bolstered over time with propaganda of varying degrees of crudity, like the good old theory of original sin and the fallacy that the Roman Empire came to an end, not through any discernible historical reason but because its inhabitants were crazy libidinos and perverts. Then there is the boy-meets-girl theory in which sex and marriage is like a jig-saw puzzle, a matter of waiting until the right shaped piece comes along to fit in with us. (This was once very popular in those women’s magazines and they have always sold as well as any porn.) As the market for pornography develops and as sex education spreads, these attitudes should break down and a newer set of neuroses, probably going under the title of sexual freedom, may flourish and will be twisted and used to justify and bolster the inhumanities of capitalism.

And what will be the end of it? The idea that we stop feeling guilty about sex and simply enjoy it can be extended — should we not also set out to enjoy all types of intercourse and the satisfaction of all our appetites? For example, the vast majority of people spend nearly their entire life doing jobs which they detest and which degrade them to an inhuman level of boredom and servitude. An education which attacked that situation and the damage it causes would be a direct, explicit attack at the basis of capitalism. Yet if the sex educators are to be consistent, if they are to fulfil their professed aim of human happiness and harmony, they should settle for nothing less.

What holds them back? The simple answer, which also applies to so many other reformers whose ideas are superficially sound and attractive, is that they accept the basis of capitalism while they reject some of its effects. Sexual activity is bound up with some extremely powerful human emotions which might be usefully investigated, but only if this is in human terms. The psychiatrists can scrape around on the surface for as long as they are able but they are doomed to failure as long as they remain blind to the fact that only a free, humane society can respect human feelings.

Ivan

What is obscenity (1971)

From the August 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Lord Longford,

On learning that you wish to investigate the pornographic and the obscene in our society, might we respectfully suggest some relevant fields of enquiry? So far you have only apparently investigated the obscene in relation to art and entertainment, such as books, films, plays and peep-shows.

This however is too superficial an approach! The Soho growth industries are merely a pimple on the very warty nose of an extremely nasty way of life.

Is it not obscene that millions of men and women have no roof over their heads and with their children have to queue in refugee camps for a bowlful of stodgy rice? This is obscenity.

Is it not also obscene that one class of men lives in poverty and misery, whilst producing all the wealth owned by that other class, the class of affluent parasites? This, too, is obscenity.

Is it not also obscene that in every country the wealth spent on armies and police, with all their inhuman paraphernalia of napalm and H-bombs, gases and coshes, that this wealth is produced by the very class of people who will find these weapons turned against them ? This surely is obscenity.

Is it not also obscene that this once beautiful world in which we live is being so polluted in pursuit of quick profits that society now has to pay the polluting class to make profits from de-polluting the places they themselves have polluted? This paradox too is obscenity.

Is it not an appalling and filthy obscenity that man throws food into the sea rather than give it to his starving and impoverished fellows? This, Lord Longford, is obscenity.

Poverty is obscene: will you investigate this?

War is obscene: will you investigate that ?

Capitalism’s sordid cheating, squalid exploitation and phony values are all obscene: will you investigate them?

Capitalist society is an obscene and filthy thing: it has been investigated. Will you join us in destroying it, Lord Longford, or will you continue to damn the effects while defending the cause ?

Charmian Skelton

Material World: The Porn Business (2012)

The Material World Column from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chatsworth is a leafy district of Los Angeles, home to various Hollywood film stars. Many famous movies and TV series were shot in the area. It is also the centre of the porn business, with 200 production companies employing some 1,400 performers (and a few thousand other workers). Here too is the office of the trade magazine Adult Video News, which sponsors an annual convention in Las Vegas.

Most performers are poorly educated women aged 18 – 21. They are attracted by the pay, which seems good compared to other jobs open to them. Rates for a scene range from $200 for a blowjob up to $2,000 for a double anal or gang bang.

Much of the money goes to support drug habits. Ex-porn star Shelley Lubben, whose Pink Cross Foundation helps performers trying to get out of the business, explains why they need drugs: without them they would be unable to bear the abuse the work entails. “Guys are punching you in the face. You get ripped. Your insides can come out of you. It’s never ending.”

Besides drug addiction, another perk of the job is sexually transmitted diseases. Only some end up dying of AIDS, but few escape the discomfort of herpes, which is likewise incurable.

Explosive growth

Porn is very big business. Worldwide revenue in 2006 is estimated at $97 billion. Revenue in the US rose almost 2,000-fold between 1972 and 2006 – from $7 million to $13 billion. Market expansion through the internet has fuelled this explosive growth, though other media – videos, films, TV, magazines – have also done well.

With growth comes political clout. Like other capitalists, porn makers pay lobbyists to promote their interests. One is Bill Lyon, head of the so-called Free Speech Coalition, which represents 900 companies. Besides passing porn off as free speech, Lyon plugs its contribution to California’s economy: 12,000 jobs and $36 million annually in state tax revenue.

Porn versus religion?

Opponents of porn have different and often conflicting motives. Many condemn it in the name of religious morality. Yet the same people support conservative politicians who are totally beholden to corporate interests and hostile to any restrictions on business, including the porn industry.

Porn promoters use the religious anti-porn movement to portray all their opponents as puritanical and intolerant – a false stereotype designed to silence anyone who does not want to be regarded as a killjoy. It’s quite possible to be against porn while valuing erotica – the artistic celebration of sex as a source of joy and beauty.  

Besides the suffering of those used to produce it, porn can have a dehumanizing effect on its male consumers. It has been argued that it distorts their perceptions of women and undermines their ability to engage in satisfying real-life relationships. Especially serious is the impact on teenagers ­ the age group that views the most online porn. The average age at which American boys first download porn is now 11 years.

Opening up new markets

As many consumers become desensitized to milder kinds of porn, they seek out more extreme varieties in order to sustain the same level of stimulation. The remorseless drive of capital to expand also impels porn makers to break down taboos and open up new markets. So porn grows more extreme, violent and abusive.

One barrier to expansion is the illegality of using children’s bodies in porn. But it is a weak barrier. Even those porn makers who take care to remain within the letter of the law press hard against the barrier by using “childified women” – a concept introduced by sociologist Gail Dines (see her 2008 interview with Citizen magazine). Young women are made to look like children by wearing children’s clothes and braces on their teeth, holding lollipops and shaving their pubic hair. So while these porn makers don’t abuse children directly some would argue that they incite their customers to do so.

Porn goes mainstream

Despite its increasingly violent character, porn is becoming more acceptable socially and culturally. Characters in popular TV sitcoms joke about it.

This is because the porn industry is no longer a disreputable enterprise on the fringes of the business world. “Respectable” business has merged with the industry as major corporations, observing the high rates of return offered by porn, have invested in it in a big way. Porn has gone mainstream.

* Media and telecommunications companies rely heavily on profits from porn. They have acquired porn-making subsidiaries and offer cable subscribers hardcore porn channels.

* Over 95 percent of new Hollywood films are “adult movies”.

* Some big hotel chains now make up to 70 percent of their profits by feeding porn to TVs in guest rooms on a pay-per-view basis.

* The most profitable parts of General Motors are no longer its auto plants but the porn channels EchoStar and DirecTV, owned by GM subsidiary Hughes Technology.

Consumer goods manufacturers are also linked to the porn business through their use of “soft porn” in advertising cars, clothes, shoes, cosmetics, etc. Fashion modelling, in particular, has close links with the industry.

The political implications of this development are discussed by D.A. Clarke, a contributor to the volume Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography (Spinifex Press). Now that the industry has gone mainstream, she argues, opposition to porn challenges the interests of capital as a whole. So anti-porn protestors would be up against formidable odds. If we want to decommercialize and humanize sex, we need to take the next step and build a broad popular movement to overthrow capitalism itself.

Stefan

Proper Gander: Porn and Real Life (2014)

The Proper Gander Column from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

For some reason, porn films don’t tend to get reviewed or discussed on the telly very often. This gap in the market was recently filled by The Golden Rules of Porn (More 4), a pornucopia of x-rated movies. In this show, Grace Dent and some talking head porn stars, comedians and viewers, give a knowing, tongue in cheek guide to pornos from the last forty years. The clips sourced from VHS tapes are so grainy that the editors at More 4 hardly needed to fuzz the genitalia out.

100 seminal porn films were surveyed, from Flesh Gordon to I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight. Not-so vital statistics were gleaned from the films’ 573 sex scenes, including how many featured steamy shower scenarios (5 percent), whips (8 percent) and men with moustaches (more than half). 42.23 percent of chat-up lines involved puns and innuendos, although in real life an opening gambit based on fixing plumbing isn’t likely to have the same outcome as in a skin flick. And few people meet and ‘get it on’ as quickly as the 72 seconds of the average porno pair-up.

The programme highlights the gulf between porn and reality, but there’s also a gulf between how the programme describes porn and porn in real life. Porn is presented as something kitsch, made by enthusiastically happy stars whose sexploits have afforded them luxury pads with their own swimming pools. The other side of porn – how it exploits and cheapens those pushed into it – isn’t mentioned. Some statistics not cited by the show are that 37 percent of women in porn films were child victims of forced sex, 33 percent met the criteria for depression, 50 percent had lived in poverty within the last year (California Women’s Health Survey) and 88 percent of porn films feature physical aggression (US Department of Justice report, 2004). The long-term impact of pornography on its consumers was also ignored by the programme. The average age at which Americans first watch hardcore porn is 11 (internetsafety101.org), and this can lead to distorted views on self-esteem and relationships. The role which pornography has in society should be discussed more often, but not as trashy clip shows like The Golden Rules of Porn.

Mike Foster