When I was a child in the 1950s the only pornography, at least that I was aware of, consisted of magazines showing naked women, which would have been furtively perused by inquisitive schoolboys and no doubt by what were then called ‘dirty old men’.
But that was innocent and tame by today’s standards. The ‘enlightenment’ of liberal ‘progress’ has led to real pornography available on mainstream TV - and on the internet which has some real horrors. Mainstream viewing includes a series of programmes on Channel 4 called Naked Attraction, in which men and women (and latterly ‘trans’ people) are treated to a to a line-up of possible partners who sequentially display gradual segments of their naked bodies to help them choose, and of course to invite the audience into the Peeping-Tom experience.
But auntie BBC went further and wanted to desensitise adolescents to porn. In 2021 there was a tweet from Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour asking “what is the best way to inform teenagers about porn?” - which caused a bit of uproar because it suggested showing porn to teenagers. Sex ‘education’ in schools is now pornography and, in addition, pseudo-scientific “sexologists” reduce sexual interaction to little more than the level of animals.
But the real question to be explored here is what precisely is wrong with pornography?
It is now fashionable to believe that, if it is to be condemned at all, it is only on the grounds of its potential to corrupt the future conduct of those who expose themselves to it. Further, that those consequences will amount to some kind of objectively determinable or purely factual state of affairs, such as the committing of indecent acts in public (as though in private nothing is wrong) or the committing of crimes such as rape, incest, child-molestation, or sex-crazed killings.
To my mind that does not go deep enough. For a start, if it could be shown that pornography does not cause such crimes it would follow (to the liberal mind) that there is nothing wrong with pornography. Secondly, the idea of a strictly causal relationship would be as problematic as the leftist dogma ( a la Tony Blair) that social conditions cause crime, as though criminals have no personal responsibility for their actions and have no choice in the matter.
I am not suggesting that there is no relationship between indulging in porn and subsequent behaviour (though there are other features in our modern culture which encourage bad behaviour, which I will not pursue here) but we need to look much deeper into why pornography is so abominable and dehumanising. Instead of restricting ourselves to the question ‘does pornography lead to depravity and corruption?’ we should consider the more penetrating observation that pornography is depravity and corruption.
There is something misguided about what is to count as depravity as though it were purely a factual matter. We cannot say what is to be counted as depravity any more than we can specify what is to count as human harm (apart from physical harm) without thinking in evaluative terms, such that what is to be regarded as degrading, debauched, sordid and unnatural is to be seen against a conception of human life , and indeed of the human body and soul, which it violates and offends.
As Anthony Savile argued in his book The Test of Time, pornography or obscenity in what purports to be a work of art is essentially negative and aggressive in its attitude. For the desire to destroy or deform such objects of reverence (e.g. sexual love, the sanctity of the body, the respect for the dead) is “not just an attack on the object itself but through the object on those we whom we think enriched by it”.
Once we think of the matter in that way there is a moral shallowness in asking such questions as “is pornography offensive or harmful?” in utilitarian terms, as though our moral concern is only with some actual or possible events or state of affairs lying beyond the pornography itself. Indeed, we could say that not to be offended or violated by pornography is already to be depraved and corrupted, for it is tantamount to a loss of ability to recognise such depravity when it stares us in the face.
Before I go further with that, consider Roger Scruton’s argument in an article he wrote for The Times in 1983, entitled ‘Male Domination’ in which he explained why rape differs from crimes such as burglary:
“..the rapist, unlike the thief, does not so much deprive as annihilate his victim. He is indifferent to the other’s consent, since he is indifferent to the other’s existence. His rage is the rage of lust which is fired by the sight of the human body but dismayed by the presence of the human soul. His victim is therefore forced to suffer an act that expressly severs her from her body, and which causes her to see her own body as alien. The rapist plunders not property but life itself. For it is only on the premise of an identity between soul and body that human life is liveable.”
With pornography, even when it shows or depicts heartless and needlessly graphic sex between consenting participants, the viewer (or reader) is presented with and invited to share in the experience of lust rather than desire. For with desire the sexual act involves tenderness and responsibilities to the consenting participant who is seen as a person and not a mere body.
In his book ‘The Survival of English’ the literary critic Ian Robinson provides a powerful illustration of the intrinsic evil of pornography, rather than locating it merely in its effects. He quotes this letter from The New Statesman:
“He showed a group of children, aged between 11 and 18, films depicting violence and sex, including one called 491 which showed a girl being raped by a group of intoxicated louts and forced to have intercourse with a dog. None of the children were frightened either during or after the film … curiously enough two adults, who saw the experiment, one a grandmother and the other a mother, were so upset that they needed psychological treatment for a month afterwards! In 30 years experience of treating patients I have never seen anyone who proved to have been corrupted by pornography.”
Robinson’s comment on this is: “The writer has ‘never seen’ because he doesn’t know corruption when he sees it; the shock to the women suggests they were far better judges than he was “. (Though one can take Robinson’s point while questioning the need for the women to have psychological treatment of course!)
The real point is that it is not so much individual conduct as such, but something much wider, which Robinson calls “the common language of sex” which pornography demeans and corrupts. By “language” he doesn’t simply mean a sprinkling of individual (naughty) words, but rather a whole way of being, which includes our experience of true art that fosters and celebrates romantic love - a state of being “in love”. As the philosopher Rush Rhees puts it in his book ‘Without Answers’: “Of course the love of a man and woman depends on sexual impulses too. But what we call being in love, in the way that Chaucer’s Troilus was or in the way Romeo and Juliet were in love, is nothing we find in animals, and more than we can imagine it in animals “.
I doubt whether romantic love, being ‘in love’, would have been possible for human beings without the legacy of ‘the language of love’ in the arts - in literature, music, and painting, in which mere attraction is transcended by yearning, respect, and the old idea of courtship (different from the meat-markets of today) which involved careful negotiation and respect for the mystery of the beloved.
“What is your substance, whereof are you made
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”
begins Shakespeare’s sonnet 53. And in a number of his sonnets Shakespeare does not so much describe love as create love on the page. Even a popular song from the 1960s, sung by Matt Munroe, celebrates the respected ‘mystery of the desired lover, as opposed to reducing her to bodily parts:
“There could never be a portrait of my love
For nothing could paint a dream.
You will never see a portrait of my love
For miracles are never seen.
It would take, I know, a Michaelangelo
And he would need the glow of dawn
That paints the sky above
To try and paint a portrait of my love.”
(But contrast that with the possessiveness of the Cliff Richards song ‘Living Doll’ which has the line “lock her up in a trunk so no big hunk can steal her away from me”).
In his argument about the demeaning of ‘the common language of sex’ Ian Robinson is pointing to this line of thought : since our language (and the kind of values it contains) reflects and helps to determine our powers of discrimination, once infiltrated by pornographic conceptions of the sexual response - divorced as such conceptions are from the serious and important part that the sexual response plays in our lives - our very perception of human life becomes impaired.
As does the distinction between pornography and art. Apologists for pornography frequently attempt to ridicule and silence their critics by pointing to accredited works of art, such as Shakespeare’s plays, which can be violent or to some degree sexually explicit. (“Does not Romeo and Juliet begin with a series of obscene jokes about sexual organs and having maids up against the wall?” etc.). The crucial difference however is that such scenes and images are controlled by the writer’s handling of the representation. The sexual undertones of Othello’s strangling of Desdemona are not put there to pander to our sexual and sadistic, or indeed voyeuristic fantasies. An artistic representation is not concerned with the mere display of an object or situation, but with an understanding of it. The depiction of a fictional world in literature, or indeed in a painting, guides our perception of what is presented to us. That presentation allows a contemplative attitude that provides a distance between ourselves and what is represented.
With pornography that distance is not preserved , and the sexual or sadistic content, instead of remaining a fictional object of contemplation directed to our understanding, transmutes itself into reality such that it seeks to provoke and engage our ‘real’ violent or sexual feelings - even if, debased and impersonal as pornography makes them , the feelings also merge with our sense of disgust and perhaps self-disgust.
One aspect of that transmutation may for instance be that our attention in that kind of play is not now absorbed by the characters but by the actors. As Robinson puts it, “We want to know how far they’re really going and what they feel like doing it. And are they really doing IT? “ All this to my way of thinking is a deeper analysis of why and how pornography is an abomination because it is an attack on what should be our cherished values. It is an attack on art and an attack on life in its deepest sense.
Dr Frank Palmer is a philosopher and author.
His last book was Literature and Moral Understanding (Oxford University Press).