Samizdata

One of the really nice things about sex is that you can completely loose yourself in it for a while. But what is it about sex that makes people lose their reason even when it is someone else who is doing it?

Our conservative friends may stand with us regarding economic freedom and capitalism, but as soon as I slip into something interesting and make a seriously risqué suggestion, I rarely have a problem separating the libertarians (or Eastern-communists for that matter) from the conservatives and Western-socialists… not that they actually have different urges, just that one is open about it and the other only admits it if no one else is listening.

In some ways, I think many conservatives have accepted the Western socialist-feminist attitude to women, and think we are these poor hunted things that need to be protected from men. This attitude, coming from a strange mixture of Christian prudishness and Western-socialist identity politics, is particularly hilarious to me as I grew up in a communist country in which men were men, women were women and everyone understood the implications just fine thanks.

So when I read something like a sad little article about a 15 year old boy in Australia who was provided with a prostitute before he died of cancer, I cannot help but wonder at how some people have reacted to what was nothing less than an act of kindness and charity.

Conservatives fume about ‘immorality’ and people who fondly imagine themselves to be feminists fume about ‘sexual objectification’, but fortunately in that hospital there were people who realised that what mattered here was not the views of others but rather that a dying boy wanted to experience what all 15 year old boys want to experience before he died.

Some people argued “[it] demeans women and reduces the sexual act to being just a physical one.” Yet what gives those people the right to impose their moral theories on this boy? Clearly he was never going to have the chance to form a lasting or deep relationship, given that he was dying, so how dare these people try to deny him such a basic human experience?

How can a woman be ‘demeaned’ by engaging in her chosen profession with a grateful dying boy? It makes me so angry sometimes when I read of such cruel stupidity and self-righteous dogmatism. I am so very glad that more compassionate souls were there to make the only true moral decision or this story would have reduced me to tears.

The reality is that people have sex for all sorts of reasons, such as love and respect and caring and lust and attraction and curiosity and too much alcohol and it-just-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time. That is reality. Sometimes ‘the sexual act’ is ‘just a physical one’ and sometimes, just sometimes, that’s just fine by me too.

In a couple articles in The Spectator, two female writers deplore pornography. One of them, Tania Kindersley, does so in spite of saying she is a believer in free speech, and the other, Rachael Jones writes as a sexually threatened irrationalist who deduces that her obvious personal neurosis indicates the sickness of the society in which she lives.

In fact, I would venture that of the two of them, only Rachael Jones is actually honest, in a pathologically disturbed sort of way. Certainly one thing that galls me about both of them is the implied supposition that all women essentially agree with them. Camille Paglia and I certainly do not.

Tania Kindersley writes in her article The Degradation of the Species, that she believes in freedom of expression and in an unfettered sexuality, but “in this frank and disturbing investigation shows why hardcore pornography is repulsive, demeaning and dangerous”. Well it certainly is a revealing article but not the way she thinks.

Porn isn’t about sex, it’s about money. It doesn’t sate the appetite it feeds it, but increases it: the palate stales quickly, so the industry finds more and more freakish acts and genres and combinations to keep the punters hooked.

Well sorry Tania, but 99% of the sexually oriented things I look at are via the Internet and are completely free. People post things on the Internet for the sheer unremunerated thrill of knowing that somewhere in the world, what they did is turning someone else on. Some of us just happen to like our experiences spiced differently. Also I sometimes like to think about things I would not necessarily do. Is it so terrible that I can find pictures of those things to look at? What is more, does she apply the same logic to cars? Is the fact people tend to buy progressively more elaborate cars with ever more features somehow evidence of sinister manipulation by the Mercedes Car Company Gmbh?

Censorship isn’t the answer. The free market and the Internet would make any attempt at control look like taking on an elephant with a pea-shooter. A war on porn would have the same pompous pointlessness of the war on drugs

So it now becomes clear that far from ‘believing in freedom of expression’, Tania Kindersley does not want to resort to censorship for the purely utilitarian reason that it will not work. With only a few exceptions I find that people who are conservatives and say they support ‘free speech’ will suddenly start equivocating when it comes to pornography if you only dig deep enough and find something they really don’t like.

The only weapon of any potency against the tide of market forces is, paradoxically, fashion: tell the kids that porn is cool and groovy, that the performers really love what they do, and you breed an eager new generation of consumers. But if the rock chicks and movie icons and rent-a-crowd celebrities were bold enough to proclaim that sitting in a darkened room with a can of lager and a copy of Latino Sluts is a pitiful substitute for the real thing, then it might be a start.

Oh Tania, what a sheltered life you bourgeoise English women must lead. I read fashion magazines, skydiving magazines, skiing magazines, hunting magazines, travel magazines, cooking magazines and political magazines. I also buy nice clothes, skydive, ski, hunt, travel, cook and have real life face-to-face political debates. I also read things like Skin Two magazine. Yes, Tania, I do that for real too.

Thanks to Perry de Havilland for editing my article, doing the html black magic and correcting my sometimes confused English. This is my first English language blog post so please be understanding.