Tuesday, December 09, 2008 

Wikipaedia part 2.

Almost as quickly as it was imposed, the blocking of the Wikipedia entry on the Scorpions' Virgin Killer album has been lifted. Don't imagine however that this is because the Internet Watch Foundation has suddenly decided that the image after all isn't indecent, or that regarding the context of it, it's ridiculous to now declare 32 years after its original release that it is. Their statement again says it all:

Following representations from Wikipedia, IWF invoked its Appeals Procedure and has given careful consideration to the issues involved in this case. The procedure is now complete and has confirmed that the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.
Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the UK will be assessed in line with IWF procedures.
IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect. We regret the unintended consequences for Wikipedia and its users. Wikipedia have been informed of the outcome of this procedure and IWF Board’s subsequent decision.

In other words, the only mistake the IWF is owning up to is that they overreached themselves in blocking a site that was always likely to stand up to them. While admitting that they flagrantly failed to consider the contextual and extenuating circumstances surrounding the image, they make quite clear that if the image was hosted on a server in the UK that they reserve the right to demand that it either be taken down, and/or blocked. It is, after all, in their view, in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. That the "child" didn't object at the time and still doesn't object today is irrelevant, as is the context of the image when it isn't hosted on a encyclopaedic or shopping website.

The entire case highlights the secretive and undemocratic nature of the way the IWF operates. If, rather than Wikipedia, they had simply blocked a page on a Scorpions fan site, no one would probably have been any the wiser, and even if it had been noticed, seems unlikely to have spread beyond the tech based sites. It's only because they overreached themselves and completely failed to think through the consequences of blocking a site of the size of Wikipedia that they have come so unstuck.

It also highlights the disparity between the increasing tenor of our laws and those of our peers abroad. Once the ban on "extreme pornography" comes in, our own smut purveyors which dabble in such material will be essentially out of a job, unable to know what is and isn't illegal without running up obscene legal costs. Similarly, the same reason why there isn't much of a porn industry in this country is because of the draconian and ridiculous laws on, if you'll excuse the expression, "hard" copy distribution of the finished product. The only place you can legally buy a hardcore DVD from is a council sanctioned sex shop, again usually for an obscene price. This doesn't stop mail-order or internet companies from existing, but essentially they are breaking the law by operating in such a way. There is however no such ban on you importing hardcore material from abroad, although customs can still be sniffy about the more extreme material - meaning that our overseas cousins have a monopoly on the market. Some will think there's nothing wrong with that, as after all, pornography is without doubt exploitative, but it still seems ludicrous in this day and age.

The entire episode has also shown the haphazard way in the which the IWF was founded, and its rather curious legal position. As noted by Richard Jones in the comments on the previous post, the IWF or rather its predecessor, SafetyNet, came about primarily as an invention of ISPs to avoid direct government censorship, which our ever prurient media and police were advocating once it became public knowledge the delights that the internet could offer, with the Met threatening to raid an ISP over the contents of 132 newsgroups which it considered the ISP to be personally publishing by carrying. As laudatory as this was, this also means that there is no specific legislation concerning the IWF's legal status. Agreements between the government and the ISPs themselves effectively govern its entire being and what is and isn't censored. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has said that his first intention was to send in the lawyers - until they informed him that because the IWF isn't a statutory body it isn't even clear that they can be sued. That is remarkable in itself.

Moreover, the IWF has just more or less admitted that there is very little it can do about large foreign opponents complaining and attempting to get around the bans which it might well impose, come the 26th of January. They'll have no problems banning "extreme pornography" from UK servers, but considering very little of it exists as it is in this country, Longhurst's win might well turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. If the IWF shows the same level of intellect in blocking the likes of "Necrobabes" or other such sites as it has Wikipedia, it might well find itself being shown up as ineffective as well as unaccountable. That the IWF's blocks can easily be circumvented using anonymiser websites or open proxy servers should be irrelevant.

Again, it's worth stating that this is not primarily about child pornography, or "child sexual abuse images", as the IWF term them. No one has any real problem with what are clearly abusive images of children being either censored or removed from the internet, as images or video above the "level 2" scale are, with images at the "level 1" scale being very carefully considered before they are similarly removed. It's with the IWF's extending mandate and their apparent inability to exercise what appears to good common sense. After all, shouldn't a court establish what is and isn't material which incites racial hatred before they block it, especially when the IWF has no solid legal basis? You can argue that this is what it is doing in the Darryn Walker case, but should any fictional textual material now be considered to be potentially obscene in the first place? The IWF's whole existence is based on a compromise, one that we ought to be careful before we challenge, considering the potential to make things a whole lot worse rather than better, but shouldn't there at least be legislation put forward which sets up the organisation as a separate independent legal body, like the BBFC, which can be challenged and held to something approaching account, and so the organisation's current set-up can be discussed in parliament? By bringing itself into disrepute over something so apparently inconsequential, a whole hornet's nest has been opened up.

Related:
Wardman Wire - Privatised censorship
Frank Fisher - A nasty sting in the censors' tail

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12/09/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, December 08, 2008 

Wikipaedia.

Another erotic album cover pose?

It occasionally takes a decision made ultimately by an underling to expose the stupidity that often underlies some of the laws which govern us - and the moronic, for it can only be described as moronic, decision by someone simply doing their job at the Internet Watch Foundation that an album cover by an otherwise almost forgotten metal band from the 70s amounts to child pornography, although of the very lowest level, resulting in the blocking of the editing of Wikipedia for sections of the UK deserves to be one of those.

The Internet Watch Foundation's main work is blocking images of "child sexual abuse images" (according to them, terms such as child pornography "are not acceptable", as apparently the "use of such language acts to legitimise images which are not pornography, rather, they are permanent records of children being sexually abused", which suggests they don't just want to censor images but words also) which for the most part, with the exception more than ably illustrated today, is uncontroversial. Less well-known however is that they also block material which incites "racial hatred", although again how much of it they actually do block is impossible to know, but also material which potentially breaches the Obscene Publications Act. The OPA, notoriously, defines an obscene publication as something which is liable to both "deprave and corrupt", something wholly subjective and which juries, notably during the 1980s, could not decide upon when the "video nasties" were prosecuted. Some found some of the films brought before them to be obscene; others decided that the exact same films were in fact, not obscene. Most recently this remit resulted in the prosecution of Darryn Walker, author of a short story depicting the kidnap, rape and murder of the pop group Girls Aloud, apparently first reported to them and passed by them onto the police. His trial is upcoming.

That decision was one of the first to alert us to the vagaries of an apparently unaccountable organisation which still deigns fiction to be liable to bring out the inner Daily Mail reader in us all, but the blocking of the "Virgin Killer" cover is far more instructive of what might be yet to come. According to the IWF, the Virgin Killer cover amounts to level 1 indecent image of a child, as defined by the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Level 1 images depict "erotic posing with no sexual activity". Whilst all the successive levels involve actual sexual activity of one variety or another, level 1 is, like the OPA definition, utterly subjective. Is the girl in the image posing erotically? Quite possibly. Even if she is however, surely the extenuating circumstances surrounding the image should have been taken into consideration. Not only is the image over 30 years old, been available on the high street without causing any real high profile attention, but a tiny amount of background reading from the controversy that had arisen over it would have shown that the girl depicted was someone related to those behind the cover design, that she had posed willingly at the time and has no objections to it now still being used. That the image is not just available on Wikipedia, but also on Amazon (or at least was) and a dozen other places via a Google search, ought to have suggested that this should be a special case.

Instead what we have is an organisation which thinks that using a sledgehammer to crack a nut is both a good idea, and one which is only concerned by doing things entirely by the rules as set out before them. Image is, according to their thinking, obscene, therefore it must be blocked. As it isn't hosted in this country and therefore the ISP responsible cannot be ordered (surely asked politely? Ed.) to take it down, proxy servers and fake 404 pages are set-up to do the job. No thought is given to how this might affect what is after all a rather larger endeavour than a Scorpions album cover repository. The statement from the organisation doesn't even begin to delve into how the decision was came to be made in detail: instead, all they've done is added the URL to the list "provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child". Protect is the key word; that's after all what they're doing. It doesn't matter that no one would ever be prosecuted over a single image, especially one in such wide circulation; the general public but most of all their customers needs to be saved from potential "inadvertent exposure".

Where after all does all of this end? As others have already pointed out, children have throughout art history been depicted naked, perhaps, it deserves to be pointed out, in more innocent, less hysterical times. Recently the London Underground briefly banned the image of a nude Venus lest anyone be sexually aroused by the advert for an exhibition. If someone for instance posted images of their children online in a photo album (not advisable by any yardstick), and one of these was reported by the same apparent busybody that reported this one to the IWF, and was decided by one of their employees to involve an "erotic pose", would that find itself being blocked too? If "Klara and Edda Belly Dancing" was reported to the IWF, would they demure from the police decision not to prosecute after it was seized from an exhibition and potentially suggest that it also involved erotic posing?

The real concern here though is not over idiotic individual decisions, but rather that from the end of January next year the IWF will also have the power to block "extreme pornography", the kind recently outlawed after parliament abjectly failed to prevent the campaign by Liz Longhurst reaching its ultimate conclusion. This will potentially lead to the blocking of any pornographic material, which is again subjective, which portrays the threatening of a person's life or which results or is likely to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitalia, to say nothing of the ban it also places on apparent necrophilia or bestiality. The Heresiarch noted at the time of the Brand-Ross frenzy that the fragrant Georgina Baillie had appeared in material which could well find itself falling foul of the law and which the Daily Mail had republished. To suggest that the law in this case is nonsensical is perhaps to be too kind; the contradictions and lunacy of banning out and out pornographic material featuring necrophilia, for example, when "art" films such as Visitor Q, which features a man killing and then having sex with the corpse of his victim (although that's not by any means an adequate explanation of what goes on and it is a rather excellent film by the consistently outrageous Takashi Miike), Kissed and Love Me Deadly are considered fine to be seen by those over 18, despite the fact that what one man deems culture another deems beating off material have to literally (or ought to be) be seen to be believed. Who has any confidence whatsoever in the IWF making sensible decisions based on the current performance?

It would be nice to imagine that it ends there. But it doesn't. There are plans to ban drawn material which depicts "abuse" or sex between child and adult, which sounds fair enough, but which is likely to be used not just to ban "lolicon", as such anime-type material is known, but hentai and other anime where the age of those involved is not so obvious. Having therefore made those predisposed to sadomasochistic material potentially breach the law to otherwise further their perfectly legal personal habits, the government seems to wish to criminalise those that enjoy the likes of La Blue Girl (already admittedly banned or heavily cut when submitted to the BBFC) or other fantastical hentai as well. Along with the plans to prosecute those who have sex with prostitutes "controlled by others" with rape, with ignorance not being an excuse, you'd similarly be excused for imagining that the government was determined to diminish sexual freedom as a whole by stealth, all so that one-off campaigners and tabloid newspapers can sleep secure in their beds knowing that perverts aren't masturbating and potentially incubating deviant thoughts which they will subsequently carry out on others. Although whether someone will ever successfully create a tentacle monster remains to be seen.

If this sounds like a slippery slope argument, suggesting that child pornography isn't so bad really honest, then it isn't. It does however come down to whether you think that the likes of the Scorpion album cover is an image of abuse, as the IWF does. If you don't, then you have reason to be concerned not just that an organisation like the IWF which claims to be self-regulating has such a potentially chilling control over the internet in this country, but also that the government seems convinced that far less exploitative imagery must also be banned for all our sakes. Then we won't just that IWF to blame and attack, but ourselves also.

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12/08/2008 09:47:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, August 05, 2008 

Book review: Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk.

Ever since Chuck Palahniuk (pronounced Paula-nick, fact fans) burst onto the literary scene in 1996 with the incendiary Fight Club, a novel which in just over 200 pages had more ideas than some authors have in an entire career, his star has waxed and waned appropriately. While Fight Club, with its tale of the crisis of masculinity, both warned of and mocked a world in which support groups for cancer sufferers had the monopoly on both self-improvement and emotional solidarity, where former followers and the atomised and abandoned subsequently turned to underground boxing clubs led by the charismatic Tyler Durden, the schizophrenic split personality of the unnamed narrator, which then gradually morphed into a fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist group set on destroying the banking records and bringing everyone back down to an equal zero was instantly translatable into a massively commercially and critically successful film, the possibilities of the rest of his early work, especially Survivor, remarkably similar to Fight Club, going the same way has gradually fallen away.

Although Choke, his ostensible fourth novel, has recently become a film, it's notable also as probably his weakest work, its narrative of a sexual obsessive who earns the money to pay for his sick mother's hospice treatment through tricking people into believing they've saved his life as he pretends to choke to death while eating in restaurants. The thinness of its strands perhaps lends itself to cinema because of the ease with which it can be filmed; something that can't be said for much else of his work.

Undoubtedly Palahniuk's second wind came with Haunted from 2005, a novel built around the conceit that the short stories within are the work of the participants on a literary retreat, getting away from it all to write their masterpieces. The often horrific and gruesome personal stories are tied together with a taut, increasingly absurdist narrative of their time in an old theatre, as the writers increasingly up the ante on their hosts, with the intention of emerging from the theatre at the end of their allotted time, scarred both mentally and physically but with an incredible story to tell that will ensure their financial and celebrity status until their deaths. A satire of reality television, celebrity culture and misery memoirs that takes the genre to its the obvious ultimate conclusion, that death, suffering and huge personal torment, regardless of their actual provenance are now increasingly what sells, it was the kind of work which despite its undoubted provocation simply ached to be both devoured and savoured. Including the infamous story "Guts", which purportedly led to a number of individuals fainting when Palahniuk read it at various sessions, it also features as its final entry "Obsolete", which is at least half the inspiration for the name of this very blog.

Palahniuk followed up Haunted with Rant, also known as Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. Written in the style of an oral history, a double-pun as Rant is "patient zero" of an especially virulent form of rabies and a reasonably transparent tribute to the works of both JG Ballard and David Cronenberg, it never quite reached the dizzy heights of Haunted, but its background of a dystopian America in which there are "Daytimers" and "Nighttimers" was filled in enough for those turned off by its denouement, where it's implied that Rant might the second coming, to be satisfied.

When the news came through that Palahniuk's next novel was to be set in the porn industry, on the set of an attempt to break the record for the number of sexual partners one woman has got through in an allotted time, it was hard not to be discouraged. Even by his generally high standards, to get anything out of such a restrictive setting, and from the three characters from whom the story emerges, three men lined up to take part in the record attempt was going to be difficult. It really did seem that Palahniuk was trying to live up to the criticism, where he increasingly broaches more and more lurid topics, to top each new degradation with something worse.

Snuff then is perhaps not as bad as it might well have been. Told from the perspective of three of the six hundred men Cassie Wright intends to have sex with in one session, each labelled by the wrangler Sheila, who also enters the narrative, we have Mr.72, the virgin who's grown up with Ms Wright's films, bought the plastic vagina and right breast modelled on her own and who's also convinced that he's the son whom Wright gave away; Mr.137, a former star on a prime-time detective show brought low by the revelation that he himself starred in a gang-bang porn film, albeit a gay one as the receiver, looking to restart his career by proving he isn't passive after all; and Mr.600, also known as Branch Bacardi, a celebrated "woodsman" long past his prime, whose relationship with Wright is as long as both their careers.

As always, Palahniuk has done his research. Annabel Chong, Jasmin St. Claire and Sabrina Johnson all feature, as do, as the pages turn, the Roman empress Messalina, Kegel exercises, Andrea Dworkin, Naomi Wolf, Ariel Levy, Catherine Blackledge and then actors and actresses that either suffered for their craft through injury or otherwise. The one thing that perhaps make you wonder whether this was a cynical, quick exercise is one obvious mistake, on a passage on how pornography and its users have been early adopters and influencers down the years, claiming that HD won the battle against Blu-ray for the world's dominant high-definition technology. As any geek will tell you, the opposite is the case, although the porn producers of America did mostly stump for HD. That error undermines the rest of the book's quick-fire, ratatat style synonymous with Palahniuk of producing "facts" along with the underlying narrative. It's impossible to check all the examples of the silent film actors who never appeared again due to their voices not being considered up to the task who are mentioned, of the tragedies that befell others due to the vagaries of production mistakes, but that one falsehood makes you wonder about the truthfulness of all the rest. That sloppiness previously wouldn't have happened.

Slow to start, despite its brevity, and with the puns and jokes on film titles parodied by porn producers quickly wearing very thin indeed, Snuff doesn't come into its own until the final 60-70 pages, although the chapters from the perspective of the wrangler Sheila are vastly superior to anything from any one of the three male characters, and even then it doesn't come close to recreating the intense, page-turning atmosphere which some of his previous work created.

Indeed, what's most noticeable is just what Palahniuk has abandoned from his usual story-telling. Gone are the explanatory passages which set the scene, although the minimalism and usual perspective are still in evidence. The broader brush-strokes and driving, defining narrative have also been left out, but what's most lacking is the disappearance of the satire itself, especially when there's so much scope for it. There's little more homoerotic and also disturbing than 600 almost naked men queueing up to have sex, three at a time with one exhausted, in incredible pain and apparently set on dying porn veteran, yet this is instead driven by character rather than by the author's usual mordant social analysis. Wright is in fact surprisingly amiable and friendly despite everything, even towards the end.

That's what most frustrates about Snuff. For all the supposed daring involved in putting this situation into a novel as the blurb claims, very little is actually done with it. What is an extraordinary setting makes for what is perversely, a mostly straight novel. Even the sex itself is probably less graphic than that in Choke. The shame is that you would have most certainly expected Palahniuk to have something to say about a society in which the young are growing up with porn stars as their idols, where it is increasingly defining our notions of sex and where the ultimate sign of love (or power) seems to be for the male to ejaculate on his partner's face (the "facial"). The one bright spot is that Palahniuk's next project is a far more tantalising prospect: 'Pygmy', described by him as a dark comedy about terrorism and racism, set around an exchange student sent to the states whose science project is set to explode in Washington DC killing millions. It might well be that pornography at the moment still fluxes even our finest critics and satirists.

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8/05/2008 08:18:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, March 04, 2008 

In praise of.... Paul Raymond.

For those of us unlucky enough to not grow up with every possible variety of pornography available at just a click of the mouse, your first real encounter with the female form in all its glory, at least not in the embarrassing clutches of other members of the family via the goggle box, tended to be with one of the now almost archaic top-shelf publications, and often one published by Paul Raymond.

Whether purloined from older brothers, a father or even from the almost cliched woodland which for some reason never failed to occasionally contain a copy of Britain's most restricted literature, one of these magazines for the hormonally-challenged teenager was the equivalent of gold dust. Although Raymond also published the less salubrious likes of Razzle and Escort, it was the higher-class mags of Club International, Men Only and Mayfair that were the ones truly to savour. Up until recently, and with the internet almost certainly to blame, as well as perhaps the diminishing concern due to the lads' mags which are almost the equivalent of the porn of yesteryear, these magazines didn't really go in for the gynaecological excesses that the state-side Hustler did and does; rather, they were usually slightly more explicit versions of Playboy, featuring the same luscious and beautiful women that doubtless did and always have done more hardcore stuff on the side, but whom in those pages were simply softcore models for hire and who did very well out of it indeed, one suspects. Alongside them were the more ludicrous "readers' stories" of their sexual exploits, with Alastair Campbell since outed as one of those who supplied their wares when desperate for petty cash, but they tended to be ignored when compared to the glossy finish of the photographs which the magazine was originally purchased and loved for. They were, and always have been, I would argue, relatively harmless, unlike the more hardcore pornography of today which tends to both make the young that absorb it more disappointed once they actually get into a sexual relationship, and also to believe that their every sexual whim, catered for in such pornography, is their right to be given to them. I might be romanticising it slightly, but it does now almost seem completely tame by comparison.

Raymond, unlike one of his up until recent rivals in Richard "Dirty" Desmond, didn't have any aspirations towards expanding his empire into newspapers, hopefully because he realised or believed that the two shouldn't mix. He instead invested in property in Soho, kept his ground-breaking Revue bar which was almost always advertised on the back page of the magazines open until 1997, and kept himself to himself after the tragic accidental drug overdose of his daughter in 1992. Accounts seem to differ over whether he was a wideboy who flaunted his wealth with those that suggest that he was far more austere, even shy, and unlike Hefner, whose relationships with his "girls" are well-known and others in porn such as Al Goldstein who have routinely boasted about how many of those they've employed that they've slept with, his ex-wife seemed to suggest she didn't believe that he had sex with any of the girls who accompanied him when he went out. Raymond by most accounts seems to have been an almost model businessman, albeit one involved in an industry which is always going to be far more controversial than say, bean counting.

With the online revolution ever accelerating, it seems unlikely that a figure such as Raymond could possibly rise to the same heights as he did by relying on softcore and traditional methods. Although it doesn't use the latter, the likes of perhaps Suicide Girls, which revolve around empowerment of those that would never have featured in Raymond's magazines, except perhaps in the readers' wives sections, and is defiantly against the more extreme sections of the online world, is probably the closest reflection that we're ever going to get.

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3/04/2008 09:25:00 PM | | | links to this post

Sunday, December 23, 2007 

The politics of pornography.

Marina Hyde writes convincingly on how pornography is shaping young men's expectations of sex:

The marvellous website jezebel.com touched on this theme recently, having identified an experiential trend among the staff's acquaintances. Several of these women had been on a first date, ended up sleeping with the guys, and the men had ejaculated on their face without asking.

...

Now, either these guys were just borderline rapists, or - way more likely and way more scarily - they simply didn't know any better.

I don't think it is either misogyny or, as Hyde puts it, borderline rape, but rather that pornography has changed, even from the early days when it was far more storyline-based and also erotic, into a series of perversions where women are sex objects rather than individuals whose sexual pleasure is just as important as that of the man's. The "studs" are there to have their every demand catered for by the "slut", whether it goes from the banal in pornographic terms of oral and "straight" sex, right up to the female performer having to rim or even felch the male, indulge in anal sex and then after all that, either take a "facial" or swallow his ejaculate. It's all about male power, and there are few more subjugating experiences for a woman than for the man to display his control over his lover than to come her on face. All of this though occurs in a controlled environment, in which the female performer has consented, most likely signed a contract which goes into exact details of what she's expected to do, probably received an enema and anesthetic if she's to "do anal", and then is handsomely paid for the privilege.

Unfortunately, young men especially don't see that pornography is fantasy, as Hyde points out. They expect women to be shaved or waxed, to perform blowjobs without any complaint and for them to be more than pleased when they come on their faces. After all, don't the women in porn at times beg for it, or even love it? Apart from that, there's also anecdotal evidence that teenagers especially are increasingly expecting their girlfriends to obligingly partake in anal, so commonplace has it become in pornography that they almost seem to imagine that the backside is self-lubricating, and that it's neither painful or messy. Anal sex is in fact even more about power, pain and force than "facials" are, for the simple reason that few women find it pleasurable without immense practice: they can't help that they don't have the prostate gland which is what becomes stimulated in homosexual male intercourse.

Pornography of course isn't going to go away, and this is also where sex education, which needs real reform, should be coming in and separating the myths from the reality. Pornography itself, despite some notable exceptions, is designed for male consumption: women don't get much of a look in. That needs to change, and it's that that's most likely to lead to a sea change in attitudes. In the meantime, a moderate, modern feminism, one that doesn't immediately dismiss all those involved in pornography as either victims or abusers, and which accepts that sex and the media are bound together but that they can be either toned down or that women themselves should be taking control, is sorely needed.

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12/23/2007 12:44:00 AM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, October 23, 2007 

Scum-watch: Thoughts on the return of page 3 idol and reoffending.

The Scum's vile page 3 "idol" competition (warning: nudity) has started up again, with the same pathetic prize as last year - a one-year contract with Page 3, as many teenage wank mag shoots as you can agree to, a holiday with added photoshoot and £5,000 - after which you'll be unceremoniously dumped back into obscurity.

As usual, my faith in humanity upon seeing the legions of young women willingly send in photographs of themselves semi-naked in the forlorn hope that they'll be selected to at least go through into the finals has plummeted through the floor. Why do they do it? Is it hubris on their part, or is it the exact opposite, the search for affirmation and acceptance through the exposing of their body parts? Is it simple pride, showing off what they have because they themselves adore how they look and want to share it with others, or again the apparently increasing belief, amongst younger teenagers especially, that glamour modeling is something to aspire towards?

I don't pretend to have any answers, mainly because I'm a butt ugly young male who consequently has never felt the need to shove a JPEG version of his pathetically average penis into anyone's face. It is amazing however what can constitute something sexually arousing to someone, as any quick trip into the cesspool of the internet will quickly alert you to. That's the other thing though - the internet has in effect flooded the market. Once the avid masturbator interested in the equivalent of readers' wives and girlfriends, which is what the page 3 idol competition in essence is, would have had to turn to the pages of the likes of Razzle and Escort, available from your local friendly corner shop, along with brown paper bag and the recommendations of the owner, who would invariably offer you something "harder" from under the counter. Now those women who would have once had pride of place in the centre pages of those crusty magazines, and as any peruser of older issues of such publications will be able to tell you, they were mostly the older, overweight lady, often outdoors and subsequently showing admirable contempt for the public decency laws, are left with desperately trying to gain attention on the plethora of websites dedicated to submissions from the public. They sink without trace.

I have nothing against exhibitionism, which is also what the page 3 idol contest adds up to. The main question ought to be however how many of those who are submitting their photographs to the Scum would have done if there was not a cash prize, the chance of national recognition and sort of fame, however faint, through doing so. The defenders of pornography, and while I dislike it intensely, I'm not ashamed to admit I use it, often point out that the women involved aren't necessarily the ones being exploited - although disproportionately those who have been abused, come from low income backgrounds or had generally what we'd define as miserable lives make up the numbers of those involved in it, as the tragic recent death of Haley Paige, a well-known US porn performer showed - they're exploiting those that are paying for the privilege of watching them au-naturelle. This clearly doesn't apply in the page 3 idol case, as they're making nothing out of it while the one-handed hordes of Sun readers and page3.com browsers sneer and jerk in equal measure at the collection of today's unlucky 25.

Disregarding the faux-philosophy and psychology behind why women involve themselves in pornography, if anything the page 3 idol contest does bring a whole new meaning to the idea of selling your soul to Rupert Murdoch. Getting your "tits out for the lads" while drunk is one thing; doing it more than happily for a national newspaper for nothing in return is quite another. It ought to show that the Sun, a publication which is nothing more than a propaganda vehicle for Murdoch which pretends to care what its readers' think and like ought to be thought of no better than the semen-splattered pages of Zoo or Nuts are. Instead, prime ministers and politicians bend over backwards to appeal to the base instincts of a pornographer who just happens to have acquired himself a media empire. The Scum is currently harrying Gordon Brown incessantly about the EU reform treaty - he ought to throw the Scum's exploitation of young women back in their faces. Murdoch isn't afraid to play dirty, as the constant lies printed in the Sun show, so why should those accused of selling this country down the river not respond like for like?

Take its response to the release of yesterday's figures from the Ministry of Justice (I shudder every time I write that Orwellian term) which while showing a 36% rise in those under the highest Mappa regime of supervision committing a serious offence actually recorded no real statistical increase, the numbers increasing year-on-year from 61 to 83, a rise of 22. It also doesn't note that as well as defining a serious offence as "any murder, manslaughter, attempted homicide, rape or attempted rape" it also includes arson, kidnap or armed robbery, as the Guardian makes clear. The Sun leader also erroneously claims that "almost 1,700 serious sex offenders committed more assaults while supposedly being monitored". The figures show nothing of the sort, instead showing that almost 1,700 were charged or cautioned for not keeping up with their requirements under their signing of the sex offenders register.

While statistics are never going to be any comfort to those who are the victims of those crimes, if anything it shows that Mappa is doing the best job it probably can. The fallibility of such organisations is never taken into consideration - some of those who reoffend simply could never have been stopped from doing so or showed no signs of being about to do so. The numbers committing a second serious offence could probably be brought down further, but unless we completely re-evaulate the criminal justice system as it stands, and start locking away those who pose such a serious threat indefinitely and disregard the possibility that they can reform, such recidivism is always going to occur. The question has to be whether we are prepared to lock away even more people than we currently do for even longer, when all the evidence suggests that doing so simply doesn't work.

The recent Guardian poll that suggested that the views of the public have now polarised between the two poles, to describe them crudely as the "harsher" and "softer" positions, ought to tell us that there is now the chance to change course completely. No matter how many times the Sun argues in its leader that the "only answer to swelling prison numbers is ... more prisons", it doesn't alter the fact we simply cannot build our way out of this problem. Polly Toynbee in one of her occasional decent pieces today made clear the way that even good figures that show crime is falling are spun to make them look the opposite.

To change this, Labour, whose policies as the Sun says have been appalling, although for entirely different reasons to why they think they've been, has to take the fight to those in favour of ever increasing draconian responses. Crime has dropped dramatically over the last ten years, and one of the reasons why despite that it continues to be such an issue of concern is that rehabilitation in overcrowded prisons simply isn't possible. To make them more effective, less people have to be imprisoned. This means more treatment for those addicted to drugs, and not inside prisons, but outside them. It means that the mentally ill who are stagnating in jails and only getting sicker need to be taken out of the system. Prison should return to what they were designed for: to protect the public from those who are a genuine danger to society, not as the dumping ground for the misfits and broken. It seems so obvious, but in the face of such hostility from the "popular" press has meant this has been impossible. Sadly, the time for this to happen, when the government had the support which such a move would be possible, has likely passed. This ought to be standard Liberal Democrat territory, but instead they were some of those most outraged by the tiny relative increase. Martin Kettle reckons there is a real choice (a theme I might return to when I have more time) but on crime and punishment, there certainly doesn't seem to be one.

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10/23/2007 08:09:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 

The poverty of prohibition.

It was a weekend of bad ideas, as Alan Johnson's bung for mums illustrated, but on the scale of denseness it's hard to beat the currently only being floated as part of a longer-term action against prostitution idea of making the buying/paying of sex illegal.

Putting aside for a moment there's a reason why women selling their bodies is known as the world's oldest profession, this idea takes its cue directly from the deeply discredited and fatally flawed part of radical feminist ideology that maintains every woman working in the sex trade, whether involved in producing pornography or working the streets is a victim of some sort. Like all the usual strong but deeply misguided ideological positions, it has more than a merit of truth to it: you only had to see the five murdered prostitutes in Ipswich last December, all addicted to one or more drugs, to see that they were victims who needed help. To apply this universally though is naive, discriminatory and even possibly misogynistic. Cast your way through any local newspaper's classifieds, and you're bound to find a whole cavalcade of advertisements for saunas, escorts and women working from flats, almost all of them selling sex, and the vast majority also doing it out of choice.

Radical feminism in general doesn't have an answer for why these women choose to do what they do, so it more or less treats them as though they either don't exist or as traitors to the cause, in it for the money. The irony of this is that those women are the ones with the most to gain from any ban on the buying or the selling of sex; the ones who don't need to walk the streets, hidden away from the gaze of CCTV cameras and the police are already the ones doing the best out of their work, reasonably to excellently paid and able to argue out their own terms. A ban, as well as naming and shaming, also proposed, would only drive the curious kerb-crawler far away from those women who survive by selling their wares on the streets, leaving them far more vulnerable than they already were. If trade dries up, their drug habits or men demanding money don't, pushing them to shoplift or commit other crimes, only making it more likely that they'll become the latest additions to our already overcrowded prison system.

This policy isn't just based around the notion of victimhood though, it's also based on the farcical assumption that you can somehow control human urges through legislation, and also that the selling of sex itself is morally wrong. You can't outlaw the fact that some men either can't or won't develop normal relationships and so use prostitutes on that basis, nor can you stop the philandering bored husband from visiting the local massage parlour, let alone the increasing fad for stag parties to visit European capitals famed for their red light districts. In fact, it's wrong to assume that it's just men using women; while it's on nowhere near the scale of female prostitution, there are more than enough male escorts out there, available for use by both men and women.

After all, it's not necessarily that men are exploiting women; in some cases it's quite the opposite. What is heterosexual pornography if it isn't a woman using what she either was given or bought to extract money from males who simply can't help themselves? It's them taking the money off idiot males who go goggle-eyed at the mention of all those acronyms that make up the specialist end of the market, rather than being exploited by the men invariably involved in running the actual business. The American pornography industry is remarkably self-regulating, thanks to measures brought in during the 80s after the Traci Lords scandal, and the notion that women are being forced into doing anything they don't want to over there is laughable.

Primarily, the government is concerned by figures that supposedly show that 85% of women working in brothels are from foreign countries, and takes this as proof that forced trafficking is endemic. On the contrary, it rather shows that some of these women know full well that they can make decent sums of money in a relatively short time, far beyond what they'd ever earn if they did the menial jobs most of the other migrants from within the EU are coming here to do, and without any of the stigma of walking the streets back in their home country and without their families knowing what they're actually doing. It's undeniable that some women are being effectively kidnapped and then forced into prostitution by gangs who bring them here, but the numbers are tiny compared to those who are actually more than willing to come here for similar purposes.

It's hard not to imagine that as well as appealing to the more feminist thinking members of the cabinet, it's also something that Brown and his "moral compass" couldn't help but be attracted to. Previous plans by the government that suggested allowing women to set-up mini-brothels where three could work, away from both the streets and predators of all kinds were predictably loudly condemned by the usual suspects, i.e. the Daily Mail, etc. Out the window goes Blair's lack of any principles and in comes the clunking fist's crackdown on vice, whether it be in the form of gambling, drinking or sex.

As Diane Taylor points out, the very last thing that will change the current landscape of prostitution, except for the worst will be the criminalising of men who pay for sex. Prostitution is such an intractable problem, without any obvious solution that it's easy to jump to the obvious reactionary position. Until we start valuing drug treatment programmes as much as we do prison cells, and providing real alternatives to street walking as we do to the thump of the gavel, nothing will be any different. And you're sure as hell not going to stop men from seeking out sex, unless you castrate them all at birth, which brings with it other problems.

Related post:
Stumbling and Mumbling - New Labour's misogyny

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9/11/2007 08:26:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, March 26, 2007 

Scum-watch: Pornography? Us?

You have to feel sorry for the poor hacks enslaved in Wapping. They can surely see the incredible chutzpah in putting up news stories like the following on the Sun's website, but they have to do it anyway:

ONE in five searches on the internet serve up offensive, illegal or unsafe content, a web study has found.

Pornography, viruses and pirated software were found after millions of popular searches were carried out on Yahoo, Google and MSN and other sites.


Imagine for a moment that you didn't know the Sun was the most moronic, dumbed-down newspaper on the face of the planet. Pretend that you didn't know how the Sun and soft pornography go hand in repetitive strain injured hand. There you are, searching naively for the latest on what's happening with the captured sailors in Iran for instance, and you come across the Sun's hysterical jingoistic coverage (The current discussion on MyScum is Iran seizes our boys: Will war get them back?). At the top of the page you're informed that you can vote for the best Easter bunny girl (nudity, obviously). You click, and what do you find? Five talentless butter-faced women, so lacking in self-confidence that they have to get their disgusting flabs of flesh out for leering ex-pats and a media mogul with the morals of a exceptionally lecherous stag. To be fair to them, I shouldn't be so harsh. Kelly, especially, bears much more of a resemblance to an actual rabbit than even she realises - she looks completely fucking terrified, frozen in horror in the headlight of the camera flash, apparently uncertain of what she's doing, or rather scared witless that once she's uploaded her pictorial that no one will care about the two orbs attached to her chest. Her worst fears were confirmed: they did.

No, it's not their fault. It's the fault of a soft pornographic celebrity magazine that pretends to be a newspaper in order to wield a despicable amount of leverage over the government of the day. It's the fault of the politicians that kowtow to this jumped-up peddler of low-brow, mind-numbing, soul-crushing tripe.

Ahem, where was I? Oh yeah, bashing the Sun rather than the man. Here's some more clearly non-offensive or unsafe content from the Sun's current news page:

Who's the sexiest ad babe?

CHECK out sex-tacular babes and vote every day this week for the foxiest one

Cor, it's Tina head turner
CURVY Christina Aguilera snapped hanging out on a street corner in a tight white dress

Is 10 inches too short for you?

CHECK out our celeb mini marvels and decide which skirt is a mite too far in our poll

Paris parties with Amy and Kel
PARIS Hilton pays homage to Brit rock royal Amy Winehouse, watched by Kelly Osbourne

Back to the article:

Searches for celebrities such as Paris Hilton and free wallpapers can produce dozens of links to sites which could contain potentially damaging computer worms and viruses.

Well, it could be worse. You could actually get pictures of Paris Hilton.

Elsewhere today in the Scum, there's an advert article on the fascinating news that "Princess" Eugenie has set herself up on MurdochSpace:

PRINCESS Eugenie has revealed a string of personal details on an internet blog.

The 17-year-old, chatting on website MySpace, says hotdogs and doughnuts are her favourite food.

She praises parents Sarah and Andrew as “wonderful and supportive” and calls the Queen “Super Gran”.

Eugenie, studying for A-levels at Marlborough College, says her most prized possession is her mobile, adding: “Sorry Dad, ha ha!”

She loves sport and TV show Lost, favourite bands include the Stereophonics and the person she wants to meet most is Superman Returns hunk Brandon Routh.

In other words, she's a very ordinary 17-year-old girl. How insightful. Still, I have to hand it to the one commenter on the article:

Doesn't it just thrill you to know that your tax money will finance this deserving and clearly talented young woman to live in luxury for the rest of her life?

Yep, just like those deserving and clearly talented young men who got tanked up at the weekend and then filled the tabloids with their tedious, predictable antics. Harry can't go to Iraq soon enough.

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3/26/2007 06:55:00 PM | | | links to this post

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