The Labour party's acceptance of a ?100,000 donation from Richard Desmond, proprietor of Express Newspapers and a range of pornographic magazines, has been presented as morally repugnant. Three cabinet ministers-Harriet Harman, the solicitor general, Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary and Clare Short, the international development secretary -have objected. They all claim to speak for women, whom they say will be affronted by the party being in debt to a pornographer.
The gift's acceptance was wrong, not because Desmond is a pornographer but because he owns newspapers. Newspapers are in the same arena as politics: increasingly, the media defines politics. If there are to be rules in the arena, the two should not be subsidising each other-or where they are, as when a party publishes a newspaper, it should be clear for everyone to see.
But pornography is not in the same arena, at least not in a public sense. Naturally, sex and eroticism gets everywhere, and the power which is part of politics has always had a sexual charge. But for the most part they play by separate rules. A pornographer cannot offer anything of advantage to politicians, and there is not much-unless he is seeking to buy off a puritanical government-that he can expect from a governing party in a liberal state, other than to be left alone. In a political sense, for a party to be given money by a newspaper proprietor is dirty: by a pornographer, clean.
Thus the reflex to condemn is a nannyish but decent impulse, which tends to perpetrate the hypocrisy of our and other societies about pornography. Labour, by being embarrassed about it-as party chairman Charles Clarke was on Today early in June-pays the tribute of vice to virtue, and thereby confirms that pornography is vicious. But if it is vicious, it is only in the ironic sense Shakespeare uses in King Lear-"The Gods are just, and of our pleasant vices/Make instruments to plague us." In fact, pornography is either good for society, or neither good nor bad, but always irrepressible.
Consider the following six theses on pornography in modern Britain.
One. The ministers who objected to the gift owed a good deal of their political development and success to 1960s and 1970s feminism. To that body of opinion, it is axiomatic that pornography leads to rape or at least to the more general sexual harassment of women. The concentration of feminism on sexual violence and on the need to take it seriously had mainly benign outcomes: it is now taken seriously, and the defence that "she was asking for it" is now barely possible. But feminists of that generation got it wrong about pornography. Rape flourishes when men are encouraged to be animals, not when they are invited to look and read.
Two. Pornography is a fairly loose affair these days, in more senses than one. Rich and famous actresses, sportswomen and female violinists are now photographed in soft pornographic poses-and say in interviews that they enjoy the act of display. Even politics has been invaded: "La Cicciolina," a porno film star, was elected on the Radical Party list in Italy in the 1980s. (The party was making the point that the sex industry should be able to produce MPs from its ranks, like any other profession or job-though Cicciolina seemed to treat her status as merely another stage for show). Women now run profitable sex industry companies. There are too many testaments and memoirs of strippers, porno magazine models, erotic dancers, prostitutes and madams which admit to enjoyment of the power exercised and money earned to any longer see the sex industry-at least in developed countries-through the eyes of a latter day Gladstone.
Three. Pornography is used for stimulation between couples, but is more usually a means of resolving sexual desire in a closed loop of one. Rape is an expression of bestiality-man as an animal using his strength (and often his possession of a weapon) to brutalise and perhaps kill or wound women. The pornography-devouring man is, by contrast, a thinker. Eroticism is a mental activity-subtle, rapid, inventive, calling on the deepest personal fantasies, playing with and confounding inhibitions-including the connection of death with sexuality, which our societies tend to cover up.
George Bataille, the early 20th century French writer and critic-who wrote much about sex and death, especially in his reflections on de Sade-wrote in his Eroticism that "human eroticism differs from animal sexuality precisely in this, that it calls the inner life into play... eroticism is the sexual activity of man to the extent that it differs from the sexual activity of animals. Human sexual activity is not necessarily erotic but it is erotic whenever it is not rudimentary and purely animal."
The rapes by the Red Army on German women in the last months of the second world war, or the rapes of Tutsi women by genocidal Hutus in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, were expressions of hatred by men licensed, indeed encouraged, to be bestial. Eroticism is the enemy of rape, except when the "rape" is play. Bataille wrote pornography, including a novella, Madame Edwarda. In the preface he shows a generous awareness of the need for humans, who have to think sex more than do it, to respond to sex with a wide emotional range-by laughter, mockery, embarrassment and disgust. The power of sex has to be coped with somehow.
Four. Desmond's most famous title, Asian Babes, is famous because it is sexually pioneering. It capitalises on indigenous (white) men's realisation, in the past decade, that young Asian women are sexually attractive, and are so in a different way from British and European women. It is analogous to the delight that privileged British men must have had in discovering the different sexuality of French and Italian women in the 19th century (another reason not to condemn Desmond, or Labour: pornography of this kind is democratic). Because many cultures within Asia emphasise female submissiveness, non-Asian men can have enhanced sexual fantasies using submissiveness as a theme. It may be that this is an aid-not one likely to be recommended by the Commission for Racial Equality, to be sure-to better cultural understanding. By bringing a minority group into the erotic play of majority males, one is breaking taboos which plagued the British throughout their imperial and much of their post-imperial periods. Feminists who object wish to end or reduce women's inequality, but ignore the fact that in the erotic realm (as opposed to the rapist's, sadist's or chauvinist's realms), equality and inequality are roles and disguises, not moral categories. Camille Paglia, the academic, writes in Sexual Personae that "pornography is pure pagan imagism. Just as a poem is ritually limited verbal expression, so is pornography ritually limited visual expression of the daemonism of sex and nature... is pornography art? Yes. Art is contemplation and conceptualisation, the ritual exhibition of pagan mysteries. Art makes order of nature's cyclonic brutality. Art... is full of crimes. The ugliness and violence in pornography reflects the ugliness and violence in nature."
Five. The real objection to pornography is not a female one (except on grounds of taste, which is why it is right to place it on the top shelf) but a male one. Pornography can absorb a sex life-especially in one with little self-confidence. To use pornography to pretend, even if one is never convinced of it, that one can have beautiful and sexually voracious women at the flick of a switch or a page is to compulsively fool oneself. The closed loop effect is good for the peace of women, who suffer less harassment, but bad for the activity of some men-the man is encouraged to become a bedsit Narcissus, with Asian Babes as the limpid pool into which he gazes forever.
Six. What has all this to do with Mayfair and Penthouse, with "Hot Teens who Love to Fuck" on the internet or with Suburban Neighbours' Wives on the hotel video ("your video selection will not be listed by title on your bill")? Merely that, however narratively uninspiring or repetitive they may be, pornographic magazines, videos and websites are fields for the male imagination. A poor imagination will be satisfied by these images: a rich one will use them as a starting point. These are aids to masturbation: and if that means that lots of men are wankers, it means that fewer of them are rapists.
Naturally, the Labour party cannot say any of this. Maybe they will return Desmond's money. But it will be the right deed for the wrong reason.
