On Sexual Shame and Damian Green

I've just written a book about, amongst other things, how frighteningly easy it remains to ruin a public figure's reputation by alleging, well, pretty much anything to do with sex in connection with them. The allegations don't even have to involve illegal activities, they just need to have a faint whiff of sex about them, and that's pretty much all the scandal-hungry British media needs to go apeshit with the story. That is exactly what I believe is going on with the current Damian Green furore, and I'm so disappointed that no one in the left or right wing British media has been sensible enough to say this. Why can no one else see that this is a NON-STORY, borne out of nothing other than an antiquated attitude towards adult sexuality and a far-too-easily stirred shaming mob?

If you think that the 21st century media are all open-minded and groovy, and would never use sex as a cheap pretext to rake a public figure over the coals like they did in the age of Profumo, consider the 21st century case of Simon Walsh. In 2012, this talented young legal professional lost his job as an aide to the Mayor of London and had his private life as a gay man dragged through the courts and press--doing permanent damage to his reputation, employability and I'd imagine mental health--for simply receiving an email with five images depicting urethral sounding and fisting in them.

Now, neither of those acts may be your cup of tea, but they are entirely legal to do, and as the jury in R v Walsh quickly concluded, they're not illegal to look at (despite the best attempts by the misguided 2008 Extreme Pornography law amendment to make recording or watching consensual kinky and gay activity a crime). It's important to note that neither is the vast majority of pornography watched by consenting adults in the UK.  It's merely images and videos of sexual activity between adults; nothing more, nothing less. It's not anything to fear.

Yet a Member of Parliament is fighting to clear his name over an even less extreme allegation than the ones Simon Walsh was fighting; simply, that he had LEGAL pornography on his work computer.

Why is this being treated as news?

Seriously, I really want to hear someone give a credible explanation for why an Adult doing a Legal Adult thing on a work computer--when adults regularly misuse their work computers to spend all day on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and send each other cat memes and videos of raccoons washing mobile phones--is a story. Even before smartphones meant everyone now spends their workday glued to apps, I saw some audacious two-fingers-to-productivity behaviour in offices; one guy used to go into the loos and have a nap for an hour, the woman sat opposite me openly used the office phone to sort out her mortgage, and the guy who sat behind me was forever tapping me on the shoulder to show me videos of fat people passing out on rollercoasters. Is it really news that an adult might use their office computer for something other than work? And can any of us claim we're not guilty of doing the same?

Sorry folks, but if you've watched the above video on your work computer, you have no right to judge Damian Green

Am I expected to believe that we hold Members of Parliament to a higher moral standard than the rest of us? In which case, the only thing at issue is the MP doing something inappropriate in his workplace--note, STILL NOT ILLEGAL--and deserves no more attention than the average questionable shenanigans that our MPs get up to. Personally, I'm more interested in the fact that my local MPs racked up millions of pounds in travel expenses in the course of a couple of years. Because that's yours and my money going up the spout because an entitled politician refuses to struggle on public transport with the rest of us Great Unwashed and so spunks public money on taxis and First Class tickets for nothing other than their own comfort.

Having lived with the British press and legal system for 34 years I'm not surprised at the way Green's story has unfolded, but I am dismayed that this sort of shit is still happening in twenty-fucking-seventeen. Are we not long past the point of getting our knickers in a twist when an adult man is found to look at masturbation material? Because we really bloody should be. It is unconscionable that our dominant media is still so hell-bent on shaming consensual, legal expressions of adult sexuality, and boxing people into a corner that they feel they have no option other than to deny the whole thing.

One thing I found when researching my forthcoming book To Deprave and Corrupt is that thousands of British people plead guilty to charges of possessing Extreme Pornography each year--not because they necessarily deem the charges accurate, but because they know that going to trial will entail so much ruinous publicity that they would rather throw money at the problem and hope it goes away quietly. I can understand that; even as an author of a book on kink who is pretty upfront about what I get up to behind closed doors, I'd still think twice about having my fetishes read aloud in open court in front of my family, especially when I know how, if you want to discredit someone, making public their "alternative" sexual preferences is the quickest way to do it.

I'm no fan of Max Mosely, but I do approve of the fact he pushed back against the prurient hypocrisy of the British tabloid media--one that is happy to publish soft porn as long as it's aimed at the male gaze and is heteronormative, non-kinky and sells papers, but which condemns a man for enjoying bossy women shaving his backside and spanking him. Their attitude was depressingly transparent: How DARE Mosely have a sexual preference that grossed out straight male newspaper editors, and how DARE he use his own money to pay adult women to act out this entirely legal, actually pretty mild, sexual fantasy?!

Of course, the News of the Wank tried to make out that their concern was over Mosely's private party being possibly Nazi-themed, but I don't believe for one second that was their actual motivation for dragging him over the coals so publicly. Faux-concern over fascist imagery in Mosely's kink play was just another grenade for them to lob; what they were really banking on was the power of sexual shame being so great that Mosely wouldn't fight back. Wonderfully, the NOTW was left with major egg on their face when Mosely denied the Nazi-theme charges, sued for libel and--cue Nelson-from-the-Simpson's HA HA!--won massive damages.

This is the crux of the current scandal, though; people will try to sidestep the fact that all Damian Green is really being accused of is inappropriate workplace conduct by pushing the "It's not the porn, it's the fact he LIED about it!" line. Again, I just don't buy that explanation. If Damian Green was accused of nicking a few hole-punches from the parliamentary offices, I doubt it would even make the local news, let alone the national papers or the BBC. Even though that would ACTUALLY BE THEFT, AN ILLEGAL ACTION. That's because it would lack the failsafe component that propels a story straight on to the front page. Which is sex, closely accompanied by the notion that looking at wanking material is morally degenerate, something that must be excused or explained away or acknowledged with a sombre face and a promise to go to Porn Addicts Anonymous (don't even get me started on how shoddily constructed a concept porn addiction is--suffice to say I do not accept its existence has been proven). The thought that releasing endorphins, lowering your blood pressure and feeling less tense/randy is actually beneficial to adult physical and mental health is never even considered, even though we all know it's true!

Damian Green would be a brave man indeed to stand up and say "Yep, I did it, I had thousands of porn images on my computer," because of a climate where adults remain incapable of admitting that most of us have active sex drives. Which in 2017, is bloody RIDICULOUS. It also elides legal pornography with the darker types of image, such as those of child sex abuse, animal abuse and non-simulated sexual or physical violence. This is no accident, especially when the term "child pornography" is still used by so many media outlets. I know that "Non-consensual images of child sex abuse" is a bit unwieldy, but unless we get really strict about the language we use here, we run the risk of placing images of child rape in the same category as images of consensual adult sex. The two do NOT go together. Yet no one is pointing this out.

So, I'll stand up and say it. I don't care what Green had on his computer as long as it did not depict or entail the abuse of an adult, child or animal. As far as all the news reports go, none of the images met this criteria. Therefore this is a non-story, and I can't help but think the fascination with it merely draws the public's attention away from things we could be getting angry about: the constant quiet dismantling of the NHS, the explosion in homelessness and food bank use, the fact my severely disabled friend has just had her weekly care hours cut by another 2 even though her condition is no better, shit like that. Stuff that actually AFFECTS British taxpayers, y'know?

tl;dr: I DON'T CARE IF AN ADULT MAN LOOKED AT WANK FODDER. MANY ADULT MEN DO. MANY ADULT WOMEN DO. I HAVE. YOU PROBABLY HAVE. AS LONG AS WE HAVE NEVER HARMED ANOTHER HUMAN BEING IN ORDER TO EXPRESS OUR SEXUALITY, I DO NOT GIVE A FLYING FRIG.

Saving women who didn't ask to be saved isn't feminism

I've seen this piece - "I clean up the messes of the pornography industry" by American lawyer Ann Olivarius - shared by several feminist groups that I follow on Facebook and Twitter recently. While I respect their right to hold different views to mine on the matter of porn, I do feel disappointed that feminists are getting behind such a post without deploying any critical thinking towards its content. 

I can see why the post is getting shares; it's not just written by a "random" feminist who has a beef with an industry with which (as is often the case with anti-porn activists) she has very little actual familiarity, but comes from a lawyer who has dealt with porn actors. (Or at least one porn actor.) That immediately appears to give it authority; it can't just be another piece advancing the moral biases of the author, now can it?

Well, actually - the very title of the piece is misleading. What exactly are these "messes" Olivarius claims to be cleaning up? The first - very deliberately emotive example - is about a suicide caused by revenge porn. I hesitate to even call non-consensual sharing of explicit images "porn" because it implies there's no difference between that and consensually produced porn. But that's a deliberate tactic by people such as Ann Olivarius - to make it look like these things all exist on the same spectrum. But they don't.

There's a world of difference between an adult woman making her living as a cam girl-- and I spent an evening amongst many such women last week, one of whom said "Everyone wants to know if I've been exploited in this industry; and I can honestly say I never have. In fact I sometimes wonder if I'm doing the exploiting, getting these men to pay me these amounts of money"-- and a vulnerable teenager being betrayed by their sexual partner. One has fuck-all to do with the other.

The porn industry does not have the power to create 16 year-old rapists. Implying it does lets the adolescent scumbag off lightly.

Which brings me to another of the author's deliberately heartstring-grabbing points; when she uses the case of an 8 year-old girl sexually abused by her cousin, and tries to lay the blame at the feet of the porn industry because apparently the cousin got ideas for how to molest the girl from his smartphone. Again, it continues to amaze me how feminists can't see the parallel between blaming porn for rape and sexual abuse and blaming a short skirt, an alcoholic drink, a smile, a "no" that wasn't screamed loudly enough. Any adult or teen with a smartphone has instant access to a dizzying cornucopia of images and videos at any given time. I can watch a cat video, or I can watch adults engaging in faecal play. I can laugh at a dog on a skateboard, or watch Colonel Gaddafi get beaten to death.

I make these choices. And even if I were to watch the more extreme choices, I would still consider no one and nothing but ME responsible were I to try and act out those things non-consensually on another adult or, god forbid, a child or animal. Same goes for everyone else on the planet. Having access to those images is not what makes you force yourself on another person. Billions of us do, and yet we manage not to rape or molest anyone. That twisted, rotten part of a person which thinks it's OK to do so is already there and was already there long before they opened their phone screen. By shifting responsibility away from the rapist/abuser you are merely supporting a culture and a system that already refuses to blame perpetrators far too readily. That's not feminism.

These emotionally manipulative tactics aside, the part of the article that probably got up my nose the most was the total misrepresenting of the porn actor who approached this lawyer. It's important to note here that the actor did not approach the lawyer with any complaints of mistreatment or abuse from her industry, as the title of the piece would have you believe. Instead, her question was a factual one; whether she was entitled to any job protections while being off work with an injury. Now, because the injury was sustained in her line of work -- from filming a scene that the author calls "brutal", even though the actor's own words are conspicuous by their absence -- that apparently is sufficient evidence that the porn industry is an evil, misogynist place where women are routinely injured. Even though, again, the question from the porn actor is not a complaint of mistreatment.

Well, let's just take a moment and allow me to list the injuries I sustained in my decade of doing care work on and off.

- Needlestick injury (where a hypodermic syringe accidentally pierces your skin, necessitating blood test and in some cases, Post-Exposure Prophylaxis to guard against HIV. Hepatitis is also a risk here.)

- Multiple bites; hands and arms were the most common places

- Cuts and bruises from having someone gouge their fingers as hard as they could into my skin

- Facial swelling and bruising from being headbutted

- Various bruises on arms and legs from being kicked and punched

- So many sore scalps from having my hair yanked I couldn't even begin to count them

- Ear infection from having a full plate of food thrown at my head (got gravy in my ear!)

(To work in care you're also advised to have Hepatitis B vaccination, because of the likelihood of coming into contact with bodily fluids, needles and/or sustaining one of the above injuries and then coming into contact with them [like the guy who gouged my arm - he often had faeces under his fingernails]. If you think porn actors are the only people who come into contact with some nasty stuff, you really need to get out more)

All those injuries, assaults and precautions come alongside doing a job that's both physically taxing and emotionally stressful, where one regularly has to clean up faeces, urine, saliva, vomit and blood, dodge violence from dementia patients and those with learning disabilities who exhibit "challenging behaviour," often work understaffed or with poorly trained, apathetic workers (three male staff once stood by and watched as a teenage boy a foot taller than my 5'2" headbutted me), where one gets paid maybe a bit more than minimum wage but not much more, and where one enjoys *none* of the protections of holiday pay, sick pay or pensions because I usually worked for agencies or as relief staff.

So, are feminists going to say that care work is inherently evil and degrading because people get injured doing it and because it's underpaid and there's little job security? Or because it's mostly women doing it?
Funnily enough, they are remarkably silent on that issue, except to suggest that we might need better working conditions and that care should not be seen as a solely female arena. I agree with both those statements. So why not suggest the same about the porn industry; that because as Olivarius says"this is not an industry in which performers can grow old, have a pension, guaranteed holidays, or job security," there should be reform, rather than abolition? Because I can sure as hell tell you that writing, my main career, is NOT an industry in which there are any pensions, sick pay, paid holidays or protection. No advances, pitiful royalties, and a plethora of clients asking you to work for a pittance, if not actively trying to get your work for free. I'm an internationally published author (not self-published) and yet if I relied solely on the money I've made from my book, I'd be homeless if not dead. I've worked for major publications on both sides of the Atlantic and yet I still have to supplement my writing work with private tutoring, care work and renting my spare room out in order to stay afloat. Where are the campaigns to save me from the evil, misogynist writing industry?!

I'm being facetious, of course -- I love what I do and I enjoy many privileges that mean I can manage to do it despite the often insulting remuneration offered. So why is it such a leap of the imagination to think porn performers -- who I would wager are HELLA better paid than care workers or writers!--might feel the same? So it might not be a long-term career choice - so the hell what? Neither is being an athlete, a dancer, a model, a racing driver, or indeed various jobs that require masses of energy and physical fitness, but we don't discourage children from aspiring to these jobs.

Ultimately what this misleading, mistitled, manipulative article is saying is "I don't like or understand porn, I don't see the appeal, and therefore I'm going to dress this personal distaste up as a moral fact." Did this lawyer ever ask the porn performer who came to her for a legal service how she actually felt about her job? Or did she just hijack her client's story to fit her own personal judgement on what is a totally legitimate job? If a male boxer came to her for legal advice on whether he was entitled to any job protections while out of work from having been injured in his line of work, would she use that as an excuse to go on a protracted rant about the evils of the boxing world, portraying this man as a victim of an evil misandrist industry that preys on those too stupid to see the harm it's doing to them?

Come on. You can't have it both ways. As feminists, we believe women are smart enough to make their own choices; a freedom enjoyed by men for millennia. You can't believe that and then simultaneously write off hundreds of thousands of women as moronic brainwashed children, preyed upon by an evil, male-dominated industry. You especially don't have the right to do that when your "evidence" that this industry is harmful amounts to nothing more than two unrelated anecdotes that deliberately use the old "won't someone think of the CHILDREN?!" tactic to manipulate readers into conflating non-consensual sharing of explicit images, rape and abuse, with consensual adult erotica; and one innocent legal enquiry by a worker who has made no complaint against her industry. 

So yes, please do fight against bad working conditions. Please DO fight against lack of job security. Please fight against the industries in which work is shitty and low-paid being disproportionately staffed by women and immigrants. Hell, come and help me fight for care work and writing work to be remunerated to a level that actually shows some bloody respect for those two jobs. But don't take your personal crusade against depictions of sexuality that you dislike and hijack other people's stories to bolster that. It's cheap, manipulative and does nothing to improve anyone's job. That's not "cleaning up a mess," it's fighting an enemy that doesn't exist and then wanting a pat on the back for it.

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When 'protection' becomes condescension

Debates have been raging between feminists on Twitter and beyond about the ethics of 'rape porn' and how best to address the alleged harm that it causes. One of the most important distinctions to make before going any further is to state that I am not talking about the filming of actual sexual assaults, which as the excellent Stavvers points out, is never defensible. It's porn which depicts simulated sexual violence which is the topic of controversy, and as this headline today implies, condemning it entails a curious view of women who act in or enjoy 'violent' porn.

 

Headline - "Online porn: animals have more rights than women, say campaigners."

 

Subheading - "Animals and corpses have more rights than girls to protection from being used for internet pornography, a coalition of women’s groups warns. "

 

Arrrgh. Sensationalist much? It's catchy, I'll give them that. But there's actually nothing in this article that's in any way shocking. All it states is that female porn actors over 18 are free to participate in pornography that simulates rape or violence. Nowhere does it state that they are coerced. So far, so legal. Then it states that, somewhat bleeding obviously, it's not legal to use animals or dead people in porn, because they can't consent.

 

Have I missed something here? Porn is wrong because it only employs people who can consent?

 

The usual arguments are deployed here. It's stated that violent porn causes 'harm', that old nebulous concept. No evidence is cited, nor is the phrase 'harm' quantified any further, although all research I have encountered, even studies which most strongly draws a link between porn and harm, still states that findings are 'limited in their interpretive value' and says "Potential associations between pornography and pathological behaviour are not clear." Then there's the emotive 'porn creates paedophiles' line, where it's implied that the sexual abuse and murder of April Jones and Tia Sharp could somehow have been prevented by a harsher crackdown in internet porn. This is an utterly fallacious argument, and is entirely irrelevant to the subject of the article since the murderers of these two girls viewed porn involving children, which is already illegal. The abuse of children being filmed for sexual gratification is simply not comparable to the filming of consensual sexual behaviour between adults. They are as different as filming a savage beating and filming a stage fight for a Hollywood movie. One is a criminal offence, the other is theatre.

Which brings me on to the demand that the government "close a loophole in the pornography legislation which allows the lawful possession in England and Wales of pornographic images that depict rape, so long as the actors are over 18.” OK. Say we tried that. Do we then censor all films that show rape scenes? Because I can see my DVD collection suddenly getting sliced in half. Thelma and Louise, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, This is England and even A Streetcar Named Desire would immediately have to be jettisoned. Because they show rape, and rape is bad, and watching rape makes you, if not more accepting of rape, then more likely to rape, right? Since crime drama also loves to fetishise violence against women, with the regular rapes, beatings and murders of attractive young women, they would all have to be taken off our screens, especially 'Hey look, another scantily clad dead prostitute on a slab!' CSI.

Hmmm. Then I suppose we'd better move on to literature. 50 Shades of Grey? Gone. Millions of books pulped - we could construct a papier mache Buckingham Palace out of all the destroyed copies. The Story of O? God, that would have to be BURNED, it's so incendiary, with its scenes of bondage, branding, piercing and orifice stretching. American Psycho? Banished to outer space. A M Homes (who incidentally was just awarded the Women's Prize for Fiction) would see her early novel, The End of Alice, which contains scenes of explicit paedophilia, destroyed with nuclear devices, so potentially 'harmful' such a book must be.

 

And I can't imagine there'd be much left on the GCSE and A Level English Literature syllabus after we start removing everything that depicts or eroticises sexual violence. Angela Carter's collection The Bloody Chamber is so full of bestiality, necrophilia and violence that I'm amazed I'm not a total sexual deviant after teaching it to 18 year olds every year. And as for good old Shakespeare? Jeez, where to start. With The Two Gentlemen of Verona reminding women it's fine to accept a man's hand after he's attempted to rape you, or Titus Andronicus teaching our kids that raping a woman then cutting off her hands and tongue is acceptable, even sexy, behaviour, it's clear that The Bard's works would have to be chopped and censored until we only had A Midsummer Night's Dream left (but wait, is it bestiality when Bottom falls in love with Titania while he has a donkey's head? Arrrghh...)

 

And as for music videos? Well, only yesterday I was watching Robin Thicke tug a barely-clothed woman around the room by her hair, while singing 'You're an animal...' in the video for his latest song, Blurred Lines. So if 'rape porn' has got to go, consistency dictates we've got to get rid of that shite too, right?

 

Flippancy aside, while I don't deny that the smorgasbord of sexually violent images that are easily accessible is not unproblematic, I will say that the muddled thinking demonstrated by this article and the campaign it refers to is not going to produce any solutions. Assuming that adult porn is in any way equivalent to child porn, that porn per se is inherently negative and harmful to women (ignoring the women who participate in and/or watch and enjoy it) and that simulated rape must be the same as real rape, or lead to real rape, will only result in 'Think of the CHILDREN!!' hysterical calls for censorship. And thanks to Prohibition, we all know how well outright banning things works.

 

Today's article also screams to me how even those who claim to be 'on the side of women' while condemning porn/violent porn, are only capable of viewing women as victims or sluts. Saying "animals and dead people are better protected than women and girls" implies that the women in porn need the same kind of protection as female children, and are somehow indistinguishable from other groups that can't consent to sex. While women in porn certainly need and deserve the same kind of protection that anyone in a workplace deserves, I doubt this is what campaigners are referring to. What I feel they really mean is protection from 'sexual acts I personally find distasteful, and can't imagine anyone else enjoying or choosing'. And that's just patronising, small-minded BS. I find it as patronising as when radical feminists state there's no way a woman could 'truly' enjoy being tied up, gagged, spanked, slapped or called names as part of sexual role play, when I know full well I enjoy all those things and more.

I remember reading an extract by anti-porn feminist Gail Dines where she wrote how she thought a porn scene of double penetration looked painful, and she couldn't imagine any woman finding it pleasurable. My immediate thought was 'Maybe you need to get out more lady, the female body is amazingly adaptable and many, many women [including the writer Colette, who wrote about that very sexual act in her erotica decades ago] would disagree strongly that this act isn't enjoyable."' While Dines is entitled to her view, I don't believe it deserves more weight than that of someone who believes the opposite, nor do I believe that such views should be used to effect legislation.

 

Yes, it troubles me when a friend tells me of other girls her age being shocked that their sexual partners think it's normal to throttle them or spit on them during sex. Yes, it upsets me to think of my 6 year old cousin stumbling across extreme porn on his mum's iPad. But pushing the aspects of our media culture that we dislike into dark corners is no solution. Neither is pushing adult women into the same bracket as vulnerable children - didn't we spend most of the 1800s fighting for our right to be distinguished from under-18s? We might think we are 'protecting' women by standing up and saying that rape porn causes harm, but actually we're not that far away from absolving rapists of responsibility. What's really the difference between saying a short skirt causes rape and saying an internet video causes rape, when both shift blame away from the attacker, and on to outside influences? If I go out in to the streets and force someone to fellate a piece of KFC, can I get Matthew McConaughey's recent film Killer Joe banned too, because it gave me the idea? Or should I perhaps take responsibility for my own actions?

 

Just a radical idea there.

 

Strongly recommended reading: The Fantasy of Acceptable Non-Consent by Stacey May Fowles

 

Related rants by me:

Violent porn doesn't cause murder

50 Shades of Kink-Shaming

Thoughts on feminism and the politics of kink

Reading The Sun is rarely, if ever, a good idea

...but during an idle moment at work, I succumbed. What caught my eye was not any of the usual breasts, casual racism or right-wing hatred, but the crop of letters on the Letters page. All were roundly condemning the judge in the Joanna Yeates murder trial for not allowing the 'fact' of her murderer, Vincent Tabak's 'obsession' with 'strangulation porn' to be admitted as evidence in court. Never mind that the judge was entirely right to leave this irrelevant and potentially leading information out of the case - it's the supreme irony of readers of a newspaper displaying a bare-breasted 20 year-old on its 3rd page writing in to complain about pornography, that really rankles with me.

These Sun readers see no inconsistency in condemning the judge for refusing to admit the evidence of  'Tabak trawling porn sites' whilst happily airing their views in a tabloid which regularly appears to be little more than pornography itself. One letter writer even says "watching vile films of women being strangled during sex are not the actions of an innocent man". Hmmm. I wonder how many rapists, murderers or paedophiles are Sun readers, or have ever glanced at Page 3? Would that be admissible evidence of a predilection for objectifying and degrading women? Somehow, I'm guessing no.

In the letter-writers' minds, the guy who leers at an undressed girl, usually a teenager, with his cup of tea in the morning, is worlds apart from the 'evil sicko' who watches porn where women are tied up, whipped, strangled or humiliated in some way. Yet no study has ever conclusively established a link between viewing degrading or extreme porn and sexual violence, whereas the cumulative effects of The Sun's shitty attitude towards women is everywhere for us to see in British culture. Competitions to win your girlfriend a boob job, preadolescents dreaming of being glamour models, young girls being taught that their entire worth comes from their bodies and sexual behaviour. It's not 'extreme porn' - viewed and consumed in private, controlled environments by adults who choose to do so - that's causing such contempt for women. It's the British tabloid media.

Without getting too much into the ethical debate over 'extreme', 'degrading' or BDSM porn, I do feel it worth mentioning that as someone who has both watched and engaged in acts that could be deemed any of those things, I resent being judged as perverse or deviant by those I consider far more responsible for degrading women. I certainly trusted my male BDSM partners more than I would trust a man who regularly consumes The Sun, Zoo, Nuts, Playboy or even mainstream porn - which is often pretty 'nasty' and 'degrading' itself, and which lacks the disclaimers and reminders that This Is Not Reality which BDSM porn always displays. If you believe that a porn film can turn you into a violent murderer, then you must also believe that consuming media which encourages you to see women as consumable objects perpetually available for men's sexual pleasure can also make your attitudes and actions towards women vile and degrading.

Violent porn doesn't make men murderers - images on a screen just don't have the power to do that. People seek out the kind of erotic stimulation that they know they are already interested in - I knew I was into BDSM long before I saw any images depicting it. I don't seek out foot fetish websites because I don't find feet sexy, and I don't imagine that going on a foot fetish website would do anything to change my preferences. The interest in a particular act predates the search for depictions of that act. That's why I agree that Mr Justice Field was right to disallow the admission of Vincent Tabak's porn tastes into the Joanna Yeates trial. Hopefully he saw, as I can plainly see, that pornography tastes alone do not create, indicate or guarantee sadistic and murderous tendencies. He also probably realised that this simple assertion is beyond the grasp of many people, who view any sexual tastes out of the ordinary as not just deviant but actually dangerous.

What those people, Sun readers included, don't stop to consider is what precisely is so 'normal' about being served sex with your morning breakfast and being aroused by tits as you eat your toast. It's only because that ritual is considered socially acceptable, due to the dominance of a deeply sexist media, that the sexualised Sun is beyond question whereas alternative sexual practices are apparently beyond the pale. Violent porn did not kill Joanna Yeates. The man who chose of his own volition to strangle her, did that. The jury who found Vincent Tabak guilty were able to see that without needing to hear about his porn tastes. Sun readers would do well to remember this, and also to remember that their own attitudes to women are not beyond reproach simply because they consider their sexual tastes 'normal'.

No good can come of watching the Virgin TV channel...

...but hey, sometimes a girl gets bored late at night and flicks over. And what do Virgin like to show at night? Programmes all about sex, loosely disguised in the form of documentaries. I knew I was probably heading for trouble selecting 'Why Men Watch Porn', but it wasn't as horrific as it could have been. The attitude was pretty predictable, starting from the perspective that porn is fine and groovy, with no discussion of its potential to harm women, and that consuming it is 'just something normal guys do'. It was even mildly interesting to watch the results of a study involving men of different age groups rating their interest in different types of porn - and somewhat heartening to see men from all the age groups stating their lack of interest in using it. The reaction of the men's (female) partners to what the study 'revealed' about their sexual tastes was a bit tiresome - the women seemed happy to make excuses for male consumption of porn viz arguments that 'men are just wired differently', that women can distract themselves with 'a bath or a book' or that when we 'get the horn', we're capable of waiting for satisfaction, whereas men have to be satisfied Right Now, Dammit. I thought the women's words were evidence of just how internalised the modern stance on porn has become, that being: it's fine, men need it, we couldn't possibly understand because we're women, there's no point trying to argue against it. I also wondered if any of these women had ever 'had the horn' to the point where a bath or a book just wouldn't do it, and only a date with Ms Right Hand would suffice - cos I know have!

What was probably most dismaying though, was the final throwaway 'stat', which was that 32% of men surveyed thought porn reduced sex crime. That's an argument I get reeeal tired of hearing, simply because it seems to rely on a fatal misunderstanding of what sex crime is, and why it's committed. However, it means acknowledging that the opposition to that argument (that porn increases sex crime), also comes from barking up the wrong tree, which is anathema to some anti-porn feminists. I just think that this simplistic view of male sexuality needs to be dispensed with. If you're sadistic and fucked up enough that you're actually considering raping someone, I doubt that any alternative form of outlet is going to be enough. Rape isn't just about 'needing to have sex really badly' (and please, can we stop saying prostitution is justified because it somehow 'stops rape'? Newsflash - prostitution and rape still continue side by side) or wanting to do something so kinky that no woman would put up with it. Wanting sex and not always getting it is part of life - normal men and women can put up with that. They may masturbate, use porn, or just distract themselves, but to suggest that people rape because they're just too randy, is to fatally misunderstand what rape is about. It's not about sex, or sexual release, or satisfaction. It's about power, humiliation, domination, and controlling another person's body. If that is what you truly desire, then watching porn isn't going to stop you from wanting to go out and get it. Unfortunately, I think too many people 'normalise' rapists as 'regular guys who just got carried away because damn women won't put out all the time'. As if there's never been a rapist who was already in a sexual relationship with a wife or a girlfriend, or who had access to stacks of porn, or who used prostitutes, and went out and raped anyway.

However, as I said, this means also acknowledging the limitations of porn when it comes to influencing men's sexual behaviour. Now, it's important not to make blanket statements about this. When I say I don't think porn causes rape, that's not to say I think it has no impact whatsoever on the sexual landscape. But, as I said above, since rape has very little to do with sex, it stands to reason that its connection with on-screen depictions of sex, will only ever be fleeting. Yes, a violent porn film might give you an idea of how to violate someone, but it's not going to make you go out and do it. The impulse for sexual violence needs to be there already. Porn doesn't turn ordinary men into rapists - it doesn't have the power. It may give men who are already raping or considering rape, some methods for terrorising their victims, but that's where the connection ends. However, that's not to say I don't see the connection with porn and rape culture - one where rape isn't taken seriously because our porned society has numbed us to sexual violence. If we're all exposed to, or able to easily access, porn that sends out the message that women love to be beaten and raped, then our understanding of rape as a crime is going to be affected - even if it's just subconsciously. How many times have we heard rapists defended on the basis that 'she just liked it rough, your honour'? Only this week five men were acquitted of the rape of a woman on the basis that she had had fantasies about group sex, clearly sending out the message that if a woman has a kinky fantasy, she should be prepared to enact it with any man, at all times, and has no right to say no. Something's clearly fucked up - but it's not porn causing the rapes directly. It's a society so numbed to sexual violence, partly by increasingly violent porn, that's allowing rapists to go free, and sending out the message to would-be rapists that they'll always get away with it.

I wouldn't call myself an anti-porn feminist though. I don't believe that repression of human sexuality is ever going to lead to anything good. I think that porn can be produced responsibly, and that porn which depicts violence/coercion can be framed in the language of choice and consent, as BDSM porn always has been. It's the mainstream porn which steals the acts of BDSM porn, whilst leaving out the crucial aspects of consent (and failing to emphasise, as many BDSM sites do, that the actors are just that, actors playing a part and that This Is Not Reality) which I believe does the most harm. It's how to keep the good and dispense with the swathes of bad which is troubling. It was also telling on the programme that many men described a scene of anal sex - which would have been viewed as shocking and explicit a few decades ago - as 'quite tame'. It seems that the more extreme porn is produced, the more bored we get. Perhaps this is a worrying sign of how people will go to further and further extremes to get satisfaction, or perhaps it's a heartening sign that people recognised porn's limitations and will start to turn away from it, maybe even back to real people and having real sexual relationships. I think we are all capable of learning, and the depiction of men as so deeply influenced by porn that they're unable to shake off its 'conditioning' is more than a tad insulting. In the early days of our relationship, my partner admitted to me that the porn he viewed in his younger days made him think that women's genitalia 'worked a lot easier than it really does'. Ha ha, no shit, I remember thinking, and I didn't feel ashamed or guilty about my complex, hard-to-please body, but rather pleased that he had encountered a real woman and learned a lesson.