The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (21 page)

Rather wonderfully, the jury came back with a verdict of not guilty, unanimously, on all counts after about a tea-break’s worth of deliberation.

For those who value personal liberty, it was a win. It also revealed a lot about the state of how the public views sex today. It’s that perhaps we are finally beginning to become
comfortable with the idea of consent, the notion that one does not have to practise a particular sexual kink or orientation to not condemn it, and that people who approach an escort who goes by the
handle ‘Sleazy Michael’ and rent or buy DVDs from him are possibly, just possibly, not being blindsided by the nature of their content.

It was only after the trial began that I realised the defendant, Michael Peacock, was someone I know. In my opinion he is a nice person who is genuinely enthusiastic about his work and his
clients. In short, the best kind of escort. A really top bloke. And brave too. The thought that he corrupts or defiles anyone who doesn’t want said treatment is frankly ridiculous.

But the notions that led to this trial even happening are part of a line of thinking that is all too pervasive when it comes to sex. The sexualisation debate for example is entirely built on the
erroneous assumption that if suggestive material wasn’t available, young people would never become curious about sex. The idea that sex (and especially sex where commerce is involved) is
unique, and uniquely corrupting, is an unfortunate leitmotif in public discourse. In such an atmosphere, someone who distributes images of
consenting adults engaging in perfectly legal acts
is targeted simply because it is Big Bad Sex.

There’s a strong element of ‘what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’ about the not guilty verdict. After all, no one was disputing the legality of consenting
to being fisted or punched in the balls. It was more the question of who might see it happening. The history of pornography is littered with such arbitrary divides between who is assumed to be
corruptible and who is not. Private galleries of Pompeiian icons of Priapus and his giant penis were once fine for men of a certain class, but not suitable to be seen by the general adult
public.

The case against Michael Peacock was in many ways trying to affirm the same arbitrary standard: this is suitable for some but not for others. In this case, the medium is
what enforces the class divide. It’s perfectly okay for those who, in the privacy of their own homes, can afford it. Let’s not mince words; we all know the rich and powerful can and do
indulge their kinky desires and would like to continue to do so in private. What the prosecution alleged is that it’s not okay for the plebs to be looking at cheap DVDs or (presumably)
downloads.

The bottom line is that whatever movies we watch, books we read, or music we listen to should not be used to infer criminal guilt. No matter how offensive it is. Misattributing the outcome of a
young woman’s murder to a man’s viewing of porn might also be seen as somehow taking away his responsibility for the killing, which would be abhorrent. The judge made the right call,
and Tabak was convicted of murder on a case that was strong enough on its own. It didn’t need a prop of junk data and prejudicial assumptions. Surely that is real justice for Jo Yeates.

There’s a lack of real courage in the inability of the government to admit its consultations on issues about sex, erotica, and sexuality are unfit for purpose. They propose easy solutions
to difficult problems. And criminals jump to endorse state-approved easy answers rather than face their own depravity.

Consider serial murderer Ted Bundy, an attractive smooth talker who murdered scores of students in Florida in the 1970s. He claimed a porn addiction made him do it, and his observations were
repeated and reported as if gospel truth. Respected sex therapist Dr Marty Klein summarises the problems with this beautifully. ‘If convicted mass murderer Ted Bundy had said that watching
Bill Cosby reruns motivated his awful crimes, he would have been dismissed as a deranged sociopath.’
⁹⁵
Why give his porn claims any weight? Of
course he wanted to reduce his own responsibility in these crimes . . . he was facing death row.

And, by the way, Bundy’s crimes were committed decades before the web even existed.

Campaigns like the one against ‘extreme’ porn are nothing new. Cheap and readily available printing in the mid-nineteenth century led to the popularisation of stories and true crime
tales among a
mostly young male audience. Called ‘penny dreadfuls’, they were widely blamed for glorifying violence to working-class readers. Mary
Whitehouse’s campaign against ‘video nasties’ in the 1980s exploited a similar discomfort with new technology. The widely publicised campaign not only demonised something that was
never shown to cause any particular crime, it also spread the distribution of such videos to a far larger audience than they would have otherwise enjoyed. In many ways, such public decency
campaigns against new technological entertainments often have the exact opposite effect than was intended.

Opponents of the extreme porn law feared that it would target consumers of fetish porn, since the legislation makes no distinction between consenting and non-consenting participants. It also
targeted animal porn, but made no distinction between live animals, cartoons of animals, or people dressed as animals (so-called ‘furries’).

Other critics of the law on violent porn were concerned that it was wide open to abuse by the police. There are technicalities of law that, instead of being enforced in the spirit in which they
were written, are also commonly used against anyone who is investigated for unrelated reasons – think Al Capone and tax evasion. Given how much inappropriate material is viral in nature and
can easily appear on your phone or in your email without you wanting to see it, this could criminalise a lot of ordinary people. Would it be possible for people to be prosecuted for material they
never sought out?

The confusion doesn’t end there. While films classified by the British Board of Film Classification are exempt from the legislation, stills from the same films are not. So the 2009 cinema
release of
Anti-christ
by Lars von Trier, which features a scene of a woman performing female genital mutilation on herself, would be fine. But a single frame of the scene taken from the
film would be potentially illegal.

The Labour government answered critics of the extreme porn law by saying that it was meant to target only those whose porn habits were a serious concern. The spirit of the law was supposed to be
to prevent murders similar to Jane Longhurst’s. So, has the law worked? Has it prevented another terrible death like Jane’s, or put away another disturbed criminal like Graham
Coutts?

No. The prosecutions associated with the new law have not targeted potentially murderous obsessives. Rather, it has been used to
bring additional charges in cases
completely unrelated to sex crime. The way the law is written means anyone in possession of just one ‘extreme’ image could be charged, regardless of how the image came into their
possession.

Perusing cases in which the law has been used shows such misuses have already happened. Take for instance Andrew Holland, who was prosecuted for a joke animation he was sent starring Tony the
Tiger. Or Michael Nelson in Sunderland, who was arrested for unrelated offences when police found two short video clips that had been sent unsolicited to his phone. It turned out both of them have
been in wide circulation on the internet for at least ten years. Extreme violence? Or common-or-garden tasteless humour? Juries never got to see the clips and decide, since that interpretation is
strictly up to the judge.

In both the Holland and the Nelson cases, the law was used to bring charges despite the lack of any evidence that the men involved were thought to be sex predators. Not for the first time, a law
is being used as a way of getting an arrest where there is not enough evidence to pursue the original investigation.

The evidence that porn does not cause violence is ample, but it’s a message that has yet to penetrate the newsrooms of Britain. ‘The cycle of addiction leads one way: towards ever
harder material,’ claims Edward Marriott in the
Guardian.
As evidence he makes reference to ‘the now-infamous Carnegie Mellon study of porn on the internet,’ which
‘found that images of hardcore sex were in far less demand than more extreme material’.
⁹⁶

Unfortunately for Marriott, the study he mentions has been widely debunked. ‘Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway’ was a high-profile piece that looked at Usenet
groups.
⁹⁷
Its shocking results were widely publicised – until duped journalists for
Time
magazine and other media outlets were sheepishly
forced to admit that it had all been made up. Academics whose names had been associated with the research were quick to distance themselves from it.
⁹⁸
It’s pretty surprising for someone to know about that article and not know about it being discredited so publically.

As once went ‘penny dreadfuls’ and ‘video nasties’, so now goes the common thinking about the effects of the internet. Placing blame at the door of technology ignores the
fact that horrid sex crimes like
the murder of Jane Longhurst are, and remain, thankfully rare. Cutting off the porn supply will not prevent another death – killers
like Graham Coutts and Vincent Tabak existed long before the internet.

When law is written quickly, either in response to a perceived crisis or in order to bolster a government or further an agenda, there is always the risk that it will be used
more for harm than good.

Take, for instance, the October 2011 announcement from Prime Minister David Cameron that he was meeting with internet service providers to discuss filtering content. The assumption is that an
opt-in system would be an effective way to keep young people from looking at adult materials. Quite apart from the civil rights questions raised from keeping a database of the people who want to
look at pornography online, there are a number of other issues.

Will it be an effective filter? Unlikely. The web alone is growing at such a vast rate that the only sensible way to filter material is by using programs to screen content rather than actual
people. This can lead to unintended blocks. Famously, back in the early 1990s, some AOL users received warnings for discussing ‘tits’ in online forums. They were twitchers talking about
birds, not sex fiends slavering over women.

Many wonder what such a ban would actually look like. Recently, I had a direct experience showing why these filters are bound to fail.

A friend on Twitter pointed out that a story about internet porn on the
Daily Mail
website in fact contained an image of someone looking at a computer monitor, and on that monitor was an
actual pornographic image.
⁹⁹
Knowing my phone's browser was supposed to auto-matically detect and block adult material, I decided to see if I could
view the page in question. If the block was effective, then in theory, I shouldn’t have been able to see the image or even open the page.

That’s not exactly what happened. I could see it just fine, naked lady and all. It was another few hours before the
Mail
website altered the image to blur the porn, but still, you
can imagine plenty of similar instances in which objectionable material would sail past the authorities.

Then, on a hunch, I decided to do some more phone browsing. I have a friend who is an SRE (sex and relationships education) specialist. His site, which contains no explicit images and very
little rude
talk, is designed specifically as a safe resource for teens and their parents. What do you know? Blocked on the phone's browser. And all I would have to do in
order to unblock it is go to my phone company’s nearest shop, present a copy of my passport to prove my age (which they already have from when I signed the contract with them), and pay for
access to a site that is free on other browsers. Way to profit from a panic!

There must be loads of other people who would have similar problems . . . cancer researchers blocked from searching the word ‘breast’ – something that used to happen on NHS
computers when I was in science. Rape victims unable to find online information about vital services. The capacity for such top-down measures to fail the users is almost unimaginably large.

But the ‘ban the filth' juggernaut continues whether we actually need it or not. With confused ideas about cause and effect, and a mysterious Agenda Setter guiding politicians, what is the
public to make of all of this?

People are often unaware of the origins of the scare tactics deployed by the media Evangelisers. And with the majority of the public in no position to critique the bogus statistics properly
themselves, cargo cult science wins the day yet again.

Unfortunately, there is little to make headlines in statements such as ‘we should consider the social and developmental concerns of a ten-year-old and a fifteen-year-old to be rather
different’ when discussing young people and internet use. Or ‘people with different environments and different circumstances often interpret the same cues differently’ when
talking about whether porn ever really is a good enough defence against a murder charge. It’s far too boring a bit of nuance for the media. And, sadly, it seems far too boring for the people
advising the government, as well.

By looking at basic criteria to do with some of the scare stories and rigged statistics making the rounds, we can see that an agenda of legislating online access features in virtually every
discussion. But that raises the grim possibility of the state deciding what is and is not appropriate. While they have a legitimate interest in protecting people, there is simply nothing in the
assumption that tightening online materials reduces sex crimes or harm to children.

Certainly young people are living within a different time to the one their parents grew up in. There is easier access to sexualised (and often commercialised) messages.
These are not just within the domains of ‘internet porn' but often in the pages of our daily papers, celebrity sex scandal stories, music, advertising, and so on. It is important to talk
about the information both young people and parents need, but deciding to begin this debate by recommending a top-down, censoring approach does not allow us to really explore what would help young
people and where actual risks may originate.