ideas: on media

Porno at risk from Rev Lovejoy!

There’s been a great deal said about the Federal Government’s ham-fisted attempt to censor the world wide web. Certainly with more authority than I could begin to say.

But what’s been starkly missing from the debate on a smut-free internet are proponents for smut. The deviants who Google-up all sorts of nasty sexual filth for their own titillation. The sordid night owls who log-on to get-off. You know, from time to time, all of us.

Well, no more. The sick, twisted porn-lovers of the world have been given a voice. Enter the debate, the divine Miss Helen Razor.

“It’s time for the less seemly to have their say. It’s time for fans of Voltaire, and his civil biographer, Miss Hall, to defend to the death the tastes of people like me. It’s time to ask: ‘Won’t someone think of the porn fans?’”

Sing it, sister. In a shamelessly brave column in today’s Sydney Morning Herald – ‘Hey, Senator – leave us discerning viewers of pornography alone’ – Razor finally speaks up for the silent majority too afraid to be tarred by the broad brush of Senator Stephen Conroy with his “evangelical logic” and “Reverend Lovejoy decree”.

Razor likes porn. And she’s not afraid to say it.

“I enjoy pornography. Perhaps not quite so much as I enjoy living among citizens who take an entitlement to free speech for granted. But I do like it quite a lot. And it seems that my porn is endangered.”

As Razor points out, “garden-variety X-rated material” could be banned under a scheme that draws a moral line somewhere at the whim of ministers, governments and bureaucrats. The productivity savings are immense, she concedes, but where’s the fun in that?

“According to the communication authority’s criteria, everything saucy must go. This will certainly save many Australian adults thousands of hours. This will possibly save a handful of unsupervised minors from harm. But not many. As a keen internet hobbyist, I can report that one doesn’t simply amble into X-rated or even R18+ material. One must actively seek it. I have become adept at this; children, presumably, have not. And if they have, clearly they are the issue of the world’s most reprehensible parents and should be sent to live with Hetty Johnston forthwith.”

Ahh Hetty. A vile woman, really, so admirably righteous about protecting children she pickets the houses of pedophiles who have served their time and froths at the mouth to hear anyone would be against eliminating smut from cyberspace. To send children to her would REALLY amount to child abuse.

Porn, of course, is not what this debate is about. It is a worthy fight for freedom of expression and publication, against any form of abhorrent state censorship, and a compelling technical case against a system that will simply not work. And there have been many worthy combatants who have made the strongest case to Conroy against it.

But let’s not pretend it’s not a little bit about sex. This occurred to me long before Razor publicly outed herself. Indeed, I recently met one of the leaders of the No Clean Feed campaign who said (admittedly tipsy and in jest) that his anti-censorship blog had been mostly successful in getting himself laid. Nice. Razor even makes the case for the benefits of free-access pornography on the internet:

“I have found the medium terribly instructive. When I am lacking culinary inspiration, I will browse a recipe database. When my writing is misfiring, I catch up with The New Yorker. And when my boudoir has become as flavourless as my writing or my food, I go to a website that propriety will not permit me to divulge. I am very grateful for the DIY stylings of my internet teachers. And I imagine many others are grateful for the inspiration that gushes from these amateur couplings as well.”

And when it all gets down to it – as the brilliantly black musical Avenue Q points out (I saw this on West End in London last year; it opens in Melbourne mid-year) – isn’t “porn why the internet was born”? There’s rarely been a more catchy tune on Broadway than:

“The internet is for porn / The internet is for porn / So grab your dick and double click for porn, porn, porn…”

The point is simply this: consenting adults can view any material they like in the privacy of their own home; responsible parents can block any material they like from their children. On all matters of censorship the rule is: if you don’t know where to draw the line, don’t draw it.

And anyway, as Razor writes, it’s all perfectly harmless:

“The only lasting effect of my access to porn is a reflex giggle when the pizza delivery man knocks on my door.”

From sick, twisted, amoral deviants everywhere: amen to that.

© 2009 importance of ideas….