by Simon Caldwell, TCW
PORNOGRAPHY is a vice which in today’s hyper-sexualised society adults assume they have a licence to use. Even those who don’t like it tend to accept the argument that whatever adults choose to do behind closed doors is no-one else’s business as long as neither children nor animals are involved.
So unassailable is this shibboleth that when former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries moaned in the Daily Mail about how her Online Safety Act had been hijacked and twisted into a weapon to restrict legitimate free speech she felt it necessary to qualify her intention to protect children from the ‘terrible things’ they would see online by saying: ‘I don’t care if grown adults want to look at pornography; not my cup of tea, but not my place to judge.’
But surely as a politician Ms Dorries had a responsibility to exercise her judgment on matters which are gravely harmful to the common good, and she would have had compelling grounds to scream from the rooftops that ubiquitous and extreme internet pornography is one of the greatest evils of our times.
It should have concerned her that a hell of sexual violence may be released at the mere push of a button wherever an iPhone and internet service exist together. As Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel reveal in their new book, Pornocracy, this is a world where women are filmed being choked, beaten, spat upon and sodomised in fantasies frequently involving incest, child abuse and rape. The ways in which performers are routinely violated are indeed so brutal that it is hard to imagine a more diabolical inversion of the truth and meaning of human sexuality, the dignity of women, the beauty of marriage and the role of the family. Nor does anyone have to search for online pornography. It is designed to seek people out. It is also designed to be addictive, which is all the more worrying when the average age that a child views it is estimated to be between 11 and 13 years, with some schools even encouraging children to look.
How did everyone forget that pornography depraves on contact and that such material is constantly associated with violent and sexual crimes against women? One only has to consider the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard in 2021 by the police officer Wayne Couzens, a voracious consumer of pornography, to understand that its use has consequences which go far beyond a question of taste.