IntroductionMy first contact with ideas on mental health was picking up and reading Wilhelm Reich's "The Function of the Orgasm". Reich, who had been a pupil of Freud, had a big effect on me and helped me become aware for the first time that I had an internal life which was capable of being thought about. Suddenly I became aware that there might be a way of making sense of my sexual and emotional life.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and a lot of contact with the mental health services. Virtually none of that contact involved consideration of my sex life. Yet if I think back at the conflicts that brought on my breakdowns and led me to be painfully at odds with people, then very often they were to do with sexual relationships. I was taking a different view about "politically correct" sexual relations from the common attitudes in the social networks I inhabited.
Writing about sexuality reminds me of issues and brings back memories that are sometimes painful. Yet, after many years of turmoil I feel more confident now that I have come across feminist writers who write from a viewpoint that makes sense of my feelings. Another reason to re-open the issues is my personal contact with Germany over the last 8 years. I have lived in Germany, learned German and every evening watch satellite TV from Germany. As a result I have had the chance to look at English sexual attitudes from a different cultural perspective.
I cannot be stressed too strongly that people in other countries see sexual matters very differently from how they are seen in the UK. On a programme I saw recently it was said that every day in Germany about one million men visit approximately 400,000 prostitutes. The policy of the German Green party (by no means a fringe party) was the full legalisation of prostitution so that workers in the sex trades have the same legal and employment rights as any other kind of worker. The aim of extending legal protection is to protect the women concerned because there is a growing problem of "Menschen Handel" - i.e. the trade or trafficking in human beings.
In most other countries in Europe laws about pornography and prostitution are very different from the UK and clearly it is becoming more and more acceptable in many countries for a variety of sexual activities to be traded - for example pornography. This raises big questions and partly forms the background to this article.
Sexual ethics
It is, I think, helpful to be aware that the Greek word 'ethics' arises from a word which meant that which is common to all - ethos. Our norms arise from what is supposed to be normal - the regular pattern. These help form our "social constructions" - the way we see how things are in the normal course of things. The taken for granted way of how things are (and "should be") orientate us collectively to each other. It is not only the tax and social security system that gets uneasy when there are dealing with something that does not fit a regular pattern. Where there is no clear pattern that matches their needs the structures of authority get uneasy. And not only them. People have a need to get on with each other. This means that certain common ways of acting and behaving are taken for granted and people who step outside of these are regarded with anger and fear. (Such people may then be excluded and/or "excommunicated" from "ideological networks" and develop mental health problems as a result ).
People, as members of society, are managed and used in a variety of social roles by structures of authority and powerful interest groups. (Schools, employing organisations and economic institutions, welfare and labour market regulatory systems, the police services, courts and prison service etc etc). The stability of the social structure and the vested interests in it are best preserved through clear and commonly shared patterns. The public authorities fear that new patterns for living, including new sexual mores, may evolve as a threat (e.g. in our own time homeless people who have started travelling are regarded in this way). Social structures of power (police, employers, social workers, psychiatrists, marketing managers, politicians) perceive people's activity, including their sexual activity, as 'behaviour' - it needs regulation and management. On the other hand there are those, like market managers, who want to manipulate sexuality for their own different purposes . Thus sexual life is regarded in the vested interest power structures in two entirely contradictory ways. Firstly it is an emotional charge which underlies and motivates behaviour which they want to regulate and control in order to maintain regular pattern in the social structure but secondly it is a vehicle to be manipulated in the pursuit of a variety of money making activities. On the continent in the last few years these things have evolved in a very different way from in the UK and there is a tension because Internet, satellite and travel exposes the gross difference between the continental pattern and the UK one.
Generalisations are not helpful
I grew up for the first six years of my life mainly on my own. My sister was several years older and we lived in an area of low population density. There were no other children of my own age to play with. I got used to being a solitary person. When my parents moved to another town there were still very few girls my own age with whom I had any everyday contact. I then went to single sex secondary school. When I went to university I was convinced that sexual love was never to be mine. If I was to ever find it might be because the women, I hoped, would love me for being a (secretly timid and uncertain) rebel and an intellectual. Those were the only things that I felt that I had going for me. I remember thinking as I waited for the results of my degree exams - gosh, if I get a good degree I might become a research student - then all the women will really want me. As if there was some connection between a degree in economics and your sex life.
In large part I did not feel really entitled to a sex or love life. I did not really feel as if I was a man. Looking back I can recognise that this is beause I had absorbed a macho idea of what being a man was. In fact I remember the thought that I had as a child - when men grow up they go off to fight in wars. Romances were things that occurred in the middle of war movies. If one survived the war you were entitled to have a relationship - because you had then proved yourself. (In my childhood there was still call-up. On my estate, near an army camp, many people were doing tours of duty in violent places as the empire came to an end). This attitude, and the prevalent macho social assumptions, were still there when I went to university and for many years after. Of course I could not write it down as clearly and explicitly as this but that is what I felt. So I did not think I was entitled to a relationship. Despite being, at that time, "a revolutionary Marxist" I was just too timid. As I had led a very solitary childhood I had never learn to fight. I could not drive. I was a machine for passing exams and, as compensatory demagogery, stirring things up in student politics.
As already said when you are not entitled to something then, if and when you can get the courage to pursue it, you inevitably do so with an attitude which is guilty. More than that - to pursue something that you do not feel entitled to is to experience yourself as if intent on theft. This does not make for much fun in bed and I can hardly blame any woman who knew me in the 60s and early seventies, in what would have been biologically, the high point of my sex life, for steering well clear of me. I did have some sexual experiences. I look back on them with regret, sadness and pain.
They were pretty miserable too because I kept having premature ejaculations. I think looking back that this was partly because of my attitude to my own semen. When I first ejaculated I remember the surprise, but above all the horror, that this semen was sticky evidence of what I had been up to that I wanted to hide from my parents. So I masturbated and ejaculated not to cause a mess thereafter and when it came to sex with women I assumed that my ejaculate would also be unwanted because it carried the danger of unwanted pregnancy. If you have intercourse with that sub concious assumption then you are not going to have a very happy time of it. It was only very very much later that I was cured of that. Women who were very explicit that they loved the stuff came as a plenty surprise. As I shall explain later seeing pornography also effected me. So too did a therapist who referred to ejaculate as a gift to a partner.
Back in the mid seventies I discovered enough psychoanalysis (Wilhelm Reich) to throw off some of my guilt. At this point I would have probably started an ordinary and reasonably happy sex life. Unfortunately two things went wrong. Firstly, because of my left wing beliefs I found it very difficult to get a job and start on a career. Nothing in my childhood had prepared me for long periods of unemployment. Later I helped set up a variety of radical projects. In this work too I was not well prepared and was often scared that I was really wasting the grant money which paid for my wages and the running of the project I was involved in. Revolutionary Marxism had given me few of the skills I needed to be a project developer. For many many years I was out of my depths in coping with life practicalities. I lived with prolonged states of fear, depression and mental break up. Again I did not feel I could approach women with any degree of confidence because I did not feel good about myself.
The second thing that went wrong, for me, was that when I did finally feel begin to feel secure in my work, and as I was discovering a more relaxed and non guilty attitude to sex, the feminist movement was moving over to a position where, among large numbers of women, herosexual sex was, per se, regarded as sexist. Since I was an active member of the left virtually all the women I knew were active feminists. The roots for the growing hostility to heterosexuality lay probably in the bad experiences that women had had with men like myself. For a long time in the 60s and early 70s sex was no big deal. I did not share in the party but many of those that did came away bitter and disappointed. Just as I was ready to have a sex life the feminist movement decided the party was over. A view of heterosexuality which was very negative cemented in the social networks that the women I knew inhabited.
For long periods of time I had no sexual relationships and when I did they went disastrously wrong. I desperately tried to be a good boy in the manner then defined as "politically correct" but occaisionally, visiting Amsterdam, gorged myself on a diet of pornographic movies. I then fell from grace out of my left wing social because of my differences over the slogan "Porn the theory. Rape the Practice" - and the graffiti slogans that appeared around Nottingham in the early 1980s - including "Castrate Men". Looking back I recognise now what a big emotional impact porn had on me - especially when people seemed more than going through the motions for a camera. I can see retrospectively why I was so effected. To see the ejaculation of semen regarded not as the creation of messy puddle but as a cheekily cheerful triumph by someone whose expression said "Mother, I'm the girl you warned me not to become", was incredibly liberating.
In her recent book on "Money" Dorothy Rowe takes issue with pornography and prostitution using arguments very reminiscent of that time. To Rowe, pornography is an intrinsically "stupid" industry which does a great deal of harm to those who perform in it and those who use it. In her view "Not being able to think up an exciting sexual fantasy is really pathetic" if you masturbate. If there is something wrong with the sex side of a relationship then, in Dorothy Rowe's world, it is also wrong to use pornography. Instead, she writes, you either need to find a new partner, or, and I quote, " take up gardening or hang gliding".
To Dorothy, "The uncomplicated, straightforward purpose of our sexual behaviour is to strengthen and deepen our relationships. When we engage in sexual behaviour which does not have this aim we are trying to use sex to express or achieve something which in itself has nothing to do with sex." (p 230).
I think this is rather like saying the uncomplicated, straightforward purpose of eating is to give our body nutrition. When we engage in eating which does not have this as its aim we are trying to use eating to express or achieve something which has nothing to do with eating. So please let nutritionists guide our eating but not chefs. Let us not have cookery books, let us have no lascivious food and drink programmes on TV. Let us not go to restaurants. Let us eat good honest plain food as recommended by the Health Education Council.
I am not an apologist for all pornography. Some pornography justifies the idea that it "depraves and corrupts". There is much nasty stuff which is about abusing and exploiting vulnerable people. Clearly child pornography is in this group. So too is pornography that is essentially about showing the desperation of people like addicts.The word "degrade" can be broken into its two parts "de-grade" and some pornography is about seeing people lose their social status through sexual acts. However, what bedevills the whole field are the people who come in and in a one sided way convey one sided generalisation. Dorothy Rowe is just such a person. She writes "The powerless person who is being used in sex detaches her/his person from her/his body and treats this body as an object. This is a way of protecting the person...... However a frequent or long term use of this defence has two deleterious effects - an increasing inability to make relatively accurate assessements of reality and a dwindling self -confidence which leads to self hatred." ( The Real Meaning of Money pp 232).
This is an excellent example of an argument where the conclusions are already present in the assumptions. But what if the people do not see themselves as being powerless? What if, indeed, they regard as an important aspect of their power, their personality and sense of aliveneness, as residing in the way they use their body? What if their personality does not lie (as with Dorothy Rowe) solely in mental constructs but in the expressive use of their bodies? (Is this not also true of dancers, for example?). What if they get aroused at the idea that they are arousing others and while they are earning money into the bargain? What if, in short, they do not detach themselves from their body at all but enjoy flaunting it?
There is more to the issue here than a discussion of sexuality as a traded activity. Underlying the hostility to pornography there is also, I suspect, a hostility to the up-front, out in the open raw physical excitement that, for me, motivates sexual activity. I get a hard on from what a woman looks like, feels like, and smells like, how she moves, the sounds she makes before and when she comes- not "because of an aim" to deepen the relationship. This is getting things the wrong way round. If the sex is good it is likely to play an important part in deepening the relationship. If the relationship is not good the sex will not be. But when Dorothy Rowe declares what "the aim and purpose" of sex it all begins to seem to me a bit like the Pope deciding what the aim and purpose of sex is. He says it is for having children and if you are not doing it to have children then you are sinning. Dorothy says it is to deepen our relationships and if is not for this purpose, well, you are out of order. It is as if we have to justify sex on against criteria. (Would the next step would be having to justify it against measurable indicators of relationship improvement?)
Back to basics - rethinking the roots of inhibitions, women as meat and men as pigs.
As I have already argued much inhibition is rooted in our parents trying to socialise us to stick to social norms. But I think there is more to be said than this. Freud examined the whole field from the point of view of inhibitions about incest - the Oedipus compex in a clearly defined stages of growth model for the psyche which followed children through "oral", "anal" and "genital" phases. Frankly I think things are more complex. If I reflect on phantasies and pre-occupations I have had when I have been seriously disturbed then my feelings about sex at the deepest level of my psyche have mainly been associated with wishing to push out of my consciousness, wishing to avoid, emotional associations to do with death, feeding, meat and animals. These were part of the psychological complex that made up my psyche. One should beware of saying everyone is the same. However there are reasons to suppose that many people have these sort of connections in their psyches.
In the early days of the feminist movement it was not uncommon to refer to the display of women's bodies as if meat was on display. Places where women might be meeting men were described as "cattle markets". A porn magazine, I think it was Playboy, ironically showed a naked woman with dotted lines across her body in the way she might be cut up under a butchers knife. This freaky and deeply frightening side of some people's emotional associations when it comes to sexual feeling, also to be found in horror films (significantly called the "Silence of the Lambs") or played out in the real horrors of some sex murders. It displays a complex of emotional associations in the sub conscious from our childhoods which seems to affect many people.
One of the earliest horrors of my life, which I have often written about as a reoccuring theme in times of horror, was being taken, at the age of three, to a slaughter house. (My father did meat inspection as part of his job as an environmental health official). At this point I woke up to the reality of death and simultaneously to meat.
There is a growing recognition that relationships with animals play an important part in the emotional life of humans. Yet domesticated animals, like pigs who are as intelligent and as affectionate as dogs, are killed for meat. My mother tells me how a pig farmer she knows hates to see the pigs go to the market. A worker at a local city farm stays away the day his pigs go to market. Emotional and affectionate relationships are built up with creatures which are not at all conceptual or based on meaning and personal constructs but rather on body language, physical contact and voice tone - and then they are sent off to be killed and eaten.
This has always been a major horror in my periods of deep turmoil. It is a reliving of a profound sense of distrust behind apparently affectionate relationships. There is now a growing evidence that relationships with animals plays a particularly large part on the emotional maturation of children. Indeed pets are sometimes used in the therapy of autisitic children. Yet what happens when we find these creatures, with whom we have developed relationships are killed? I believe paranoia then becomes very understandable. Yet why should this effect our sexuality? I believe it is because, almost in polar opposition to Dorothy Rowe, that the real emotional kick of sexuality it to experience ourselves physically and to let go of ourselves to our non-conceptual being, to our bodies, to what people think of as their "animal natures". "You are an animal" is the sort of phrase that a head person will use to put down a person getting into their sensual side. Some feminists refer not just to male chauvinists, but significantly to male chauvinist pigs. When we refer to people as animals it is an insult because we want to distance ourself psychologically from the assumed status of animals, beings that are "dirty", that are to be used and to be slaughtered for meat.
Inhibited sex is then when we want to stay as far away from our animal nature as possible because if we see ourselves as having the status of animals the emotional associations can be rather freaky. As we grow up our way of coping with these trauma and the reality of what meat is is to exaggerate our differences with animals. Animals do not think. They are not intelligent. They are not civilised. They are wild or dumb. This is connected to us giving more and more status to our conceptual sides - to be human is to be a thinking animal. I think therefore I am. But this way you lose touch with sex (unless you are a Dorothy Rowe). When you put "psychological constructs" on your tactile and direct sensory experience you lose contact with the experience of your own body and that of other people - the feel of skin, its temperature, its texture and colour and scent, its curves and angles, breathing, heart beat rates, tension, slippery stickiness, tingling muscles and you let your attention go into mental stuff, a construction of words in the head. There is a case for being a pig in sex - there is no case for being an intellectual.
So I think that there is evidence that sexual feelings are deeply entangled in psychological complexes where we try to distance ourselves from our animal natures into our intellectual and conceptual sides. It is well known that intellectualising is a way of running away from feelings. Another way of running away from feelings as genuine physical sensations is to turn them into "psychological constructs" and make them materials for psychologists to interpret and earn their crusts with. People running away from their feelings (where feelings are literal physical sensations) run into their intellectual side, from their body into their mind. It is in this side that they get their status and jobs. In the late 60s and early 70s as the higher education world expanded the women who got feminism going were wanting to push their way into a male dominated job market. It mattered when men "were only interested in one thing" because if they were to get jobs they had to prove they were capable of other things. Having to argue and fight to be taken seriously quite naturally tended to drive some women to profile and identify themselves first and foremost as thinking beings, before they were sensual ones. Some women who were only regarded as sexual objects came to not want to be an object of sexual desire at all, at least by men. It seems to me that Dorothy Rowe has a slighly different position but with many similarities. Sure you can have sex but, as a therapist, deepening relationships comes first and sex has to be judged against that criteria.
I have lots of relationships with women where I do not want, and would not expect that physical side ever to be there. However I do not think of these as sexual. In such relationships with women I can and do seek to deepen and strengthen my relationship through talk, perhaps by a hug or going out drinking, but these are not sexual relationships. On the other hand the distinctively sexual dimensions and stimuli of physical arousal can exist to a degree independently whether or not I am in a deep relationship. I can feel physically attracted to women I do not know at all. Or I can feel sexually attracted to those that I do know but decide not to act sexually in the situation, because they are already attached perhaps. Sexuality cannot be reduced to "deepening relationships". It may be futile, of course, to try to get in a relationship with someone who is physically stimulating who I cannot converse with, that is true. In that case the sensible thing to do is not to act on one's desire as it would end unhappily. (This the case for abstinence on the basis of avoiding that which will make one unhappy in the longer term. A morality based on non-futility rather than on denial for its own sake.)
Obviously pornography is in large part based on processes of desire and arousal which exist independently of "deepening relationships". As part of this physical process it does not make sense to deny that people enjoy arousing others by their physical appearance and being aroused. In pornography of course money passes hands but people flaunting themselves physically is surely an ordinary biological process. In one report I have seen on German TV a club in New York was featured in which men who are turned on by very large women could meet them. You could not deny that the joy of both groups as they got together as the women were obviously really getting high on a rampant exhibitionism that they had previously thought was not open to them. As far as I could see it was rescuing the self esteem of a lonely group of women and giving some men a good time.
As Marcia Pally writes, "...To believe that sexual imagery or male arousal is degrading to women, one must believe sex degrades women; that being sexual or arousing men is something good girls do not do - that only bad girls turn men on. Pornography is the pictorial evidence of a woman's fall from grace. This is the batter's excuse for battery - she deserves what she got; it excuses the batter and promotes female shame, not feminism. The notion that pornography objectifies women is another curiosity. Those who promote it cannot mean that no woman was the object of male desire before commercialised pictures. Being an object of sexual desire is demeaning only if that is all that one is....It cannot be a goal of feminism to eliminate moments during the day when a heterosexual man considers a woman, or women as a class, to be sexually desirable. Feminism seeks to expand the roles accessible to women, including the role of voyeur and sexual subject. It is feminist goal for women to recognise the objects of their desire and partake of them without a fall from good-girl grace. That means more sexual imagery by and for women, not less for men."
Pally also martials evidence that challenges the idea that pornography unleashes rape. The statistics do not bear this out. Moreovers, as Pally puts it "Men used to get away with rape and assualt with the 'tight sweater' excuse; a skirt too short, a neckline too low, made rape a woman's fault. Under image blaming, it is still the woman's fault - if not the woman in the sweater then the woman in the magazine".
There is yet more to be said about this argument. It is insulting to be regarded as a class of animal that responds automatically to a stimuli in a fixed way like Pavlov's conditioned dogs. As if all men, having been exposed to particular images, are unable to control their urge to go off and repeat what they have seen somewhere else. It is a way of seeing men that again lacks all depth about the compexity of how different men react to what they perceive. There are, to be sure, some men (and women) that will seek out and enjoy pornograph that is cruel and where the distress of the people involved is clear on the screen. For centuries people have been attending public executions and having a nice day out of it. Pornography from Holland is advertised for this group of emotionally sick people "Look what these junkies will do when they are desperate for their next fix!" Because drug problems, social decomposition and economic inequalities are on the rise this side of the sex industry is also on the rise. There is a social process feeding both the supply and demand for what I would really consider "depraved and corrupt" because it is based on one group of people deriving pleasure gawking at the other people's misery and desperation. This is not the same situation as described in the following quote from Nancy Friday where women exhibitions and male voyeurs are enjoying each other's company.
"The angry feminists who stand on street corners yelling at passersby to sign petitions against the 'bad people' (men) who disparage women in so called pornographic films and magazines would have us believe their fantasy: no woman would flaunt her naked genitals in front of a camera unless coerced by men..........."What is generally overlooked is that the great majority of women in burlesque houses and in the pages of Playboy and Penthouse have chosen to be there. These women like to take their clothes off and spread their legs in front of an audience.....No one made them do it. That is probably what is driving the angry feminists crazy - not rage at the entrepreneurs but at the naked women who dare to break The Rules against exhibitionism on which all girls are raised. How dare they! How dare they get into that power all little girls swore at mother's knee never to use..........What the naked, smiling women with the full lips and tousled hair are doing, God forbid, is opening the doors to competition....Untenable! Unacceptable! But do the angry feminists attack the exhibitionists? Absolutely not. Women are too frightened of the wrath of other women, of tapping the pool of rage that would open the flood gates. As always, they go for the easier, safer target: men" (Nancy Friday "Women on Top" pp161-162).
The issues are complex and generalisation does not help. Dorothy Rowe writes: " The people/ objects which are sold in prostitution are always the weak, helpless and poor members if society - women, children and powerless men." ( p229). I have highlighted the word "always" because if one looks into the facts that this is actually not true. The word "often" might well be true but "always" is not. Having lived and worked in Germany I quite often watch and follow the German TV programmes on satellite where the economics of the sex trades are much discussed. People enter the very varied sex trades for many reasons. What Dorothy Rowe says is often true and there is an end of the market where people, for example desperate junkies, Third World men and women, children, are abused and exploited on screen. There is another end of the market that where people have got involved because it turns them on and increases their sexual excitement to have sex, perhaps with their long term partner, perhaps not, in front of cameras, audiences, or artists. Others have got involved because they are able to combine pornography with a professional skill - e.g. dance.
I have many times heard and seen such people, women and men, being featured on TV. It is of course true that you cannot always tell what people's true feelings are. However most people who are masking or hiding their feelings do it from behind an impassive mask that will often betray their true feelings if these feelings are uncomfortable or unpleasant. One of the first things I felt that I did learn was the difference between my mother's true smile and her polite smile for some visitors. While psychotic I would buy porn magazines and make a point of looking at the faces of the models. It became clear that there were very different kinds of pornography. In the faces of some models was glee, pleasure, cheekiness, a really genuine randiness. In others there were naked women who were looking uncomfortable, upset, who actually looked as if they did not want to be there. Then there were those who were clearly putting on a simpering expression - a pretend depravity which, when it was too far from their real feelings, was actually a combination expression that, to me, seemed awkard and very very sad. In hard core porn that I have seen on the continent there are the same differences to be found.
The interviews of performers, artists and models on sex programmes on T V displays a similar variety, as I argue later in more detail. In many cases though it is impossible to see what they are doing in Dorothy Rowe's terms. Just to give one example. A couple who pose for a group of artists who are interested in erotic art. At the end of the session they have intercourse before the group of artists. They were interviewed. Both of them clearly sincerely got a real kick out of their exhibitionism - perhaps it even deepened their relationship!
The poor, weak and helpless idea barely fits the facts either when one realises that many female porn stars in Germany and Holland have ended up heading multi-million pound porn empires (e.g. Theresa Thorlowski and Helen Duval), that some marry their chief producers (e.g. Dolly Buster and Sarah Young) and that many actually do make the transition to other jobs. For example Dolly Buster is a celebrity on Germany TV and I have heard her interviewed about her Buddhist beliefs as well as seen her adverts (e.g. For telecoms products). Another male porn star is now making a career as a pop singer.
There is, in short, a degree of social acceptability of pornography, which has been made acceptable in a host of TV shows, and where porn stars are interviewed as people, about their feelings, negative and positive about their work, not mere bodies that appear on the screen. I think it worth describing at length the content of some of these programmes because doing so makes clear the hugely different sexual life in Germany and Britain, which is an indicators generally of sexual repressiveness, not just in England, but in much of the English speaking world. (Of course in comparison to many Middle Eastern countries Britain is extremely relaxed in its sexual mores.) It is also relevant since in the era of Internet, satellite and cable it really is no longer possible to censor material from other countries - though huge gulfs in understanding exist because people who cannot speak the foreign language will be totally unaware of what is going on. All they would see, for example, if they were to watch the German TV programmes is some raunchy clips between people talking. Missing the talking between the raunchy clips and missing the commentary in the raunchy clips actually severely limits one's understanding.
There are a number of programmes like Wa(h)re Liebe which can be translated "True Love" or "Traded Love" depending on whether you leave in the "h" or not, then there is Liebe - Sunde (Love and Sin), Peep (which needs no translation). There is also a more serious up -market programme recently started by West Deutsche Rundfunk and from former east Germany there is Indiskret. Several programmes, like Indiskret, will deal with other non sexual themes. Then again there may be occaisional treatment of sexual issues in quite ordinary programmes - for example in the television programmes put out by the newsmagazine Der Spiegel. In these programmes there will be discussions and sections on, for example, what sperm tastes like (better after drinking pineapple juice!) and oral sex - with a discussion of its HIV infection risks, there might follow a session where foreign men and women describe what it is like having love affairs with German partners. This might be followed by an auctioning of a specially carved marble penis to raise funds for an AIDS hospice or an interview with someone, themselves HIV infected who has supported dying AIDS victims. There might be a section on urination and sex, followed by a discussion about S and M fashion, followed by a discussion with a psychotherapist about why some men get off on wearing nappies. There might be a discussion with a couple about their erotic dance routine which may or may not involve sex on the stage. There are discussions about swingers clubs where people take their partners to have sex in the company of other people who are also having sex, perhaps with the other people, about agencies who check up on these establishments for cleanliness and ambience and about the number of German people who have been to such clubs (claimed to be several million in a population of 70 million) as well as interviews with couples in such clubs. There are erotic quizzes before the ads with answers after the ads by Germany's most famous porn star, Dolly Buster. There are discussions with prostitutes about their work and their feelings about their work as well as with porn stars, male and female and the difficulties of what they do and about team work on the set. There are discussions about sex toys and interviews with inventors and manufacturers. There are visits to gay clubs, discussions of gay porn and about its stars. There are presentations about male strippers. There are sections on erotic arts and erotic artists. There are interviews with a female gynacealogist who, as a private hobby, uses her knowledge to drain off the sexual lubricants from her female friends, mixes them with body paint and then uses this for art. There are presentations about the woman that has set herself up in business teaching other women how to fellate men - demonstrating her approach with a latex penis and giving her tutees a sense of the sensation by fellating their fingers. There are similar presentations about the art of cunnilingus. There are sections about women who provide sexual services for other women. There are sessions about sexology as a scientific academic discipline. There are interviews with men and women who practice sado masochist sex, of dripping candle wax and the dos and don'ts of bondage (never leave your partner alone - what if the house burned down!) There are sections on women who organise parties for other women to buy lingerie, female orientated pornography, dildoes and other sex toys. (Another way for a woman to make money in the sex industry!)
One could fill several pages - my reasons for listing these things so extensively is to show that those pathetic people like myself can learn a lot where our imagination would never otherwise stretch though such programmes. (Pally comments that one of the statistically provable effects of pornography is to enable people to more accurately estimate the prevalence of a variety of sexual practices). Occaisionally these TV programmes discuss sexuality in other countries. A sex industry is opening up in the former soviet bloc and it is difficult not to watch this happening in reports in Wa(h)re Liebe and not feel very sad about what is happening. It is here that the economic processes involved, the naked power and the total absence of any values, can barely be kept out of the screen. You can see big money moving in and encountering just those desperatedly hard up people that Dorothy Rowe describes who explain to a German interviewer and camera crew that they are only doing it because they need the money. And you can see this in their faces and their tone of voice too. At times like this you get a sense that the programmes are functioning as PR for the skin trade but it just does not quite work. There is a discrepancy between the up-beat tone of voice of the commentator and the shabby reality that what you are actually seeing. Sometimes too this different reality is explicitly commented upon. For example when a publisher of a Russian porn magazine admits that sexual life was better under communism. Or again when Lilo Wanders of Wa(h)re Liebe comments on the worrying and sad nature of the unprotected sex occuring, after a report on a sex club in the basement of a Russian hospital run by a "sexologist" and used to raise money for the hospital.
Big money, depravation and corruption -the exploitation and humiliation of vulnerable people
The point I would make here is that it does not help to have debates for or against pornography. The issue is of greater complexity. In all of these programmes, and in pornography in general, there are several processes going on - some of which can be seen as positive and some of which definitely are not. It is also extremely difficult to stand outside one's own culture and form a view of what is and what is not positive. Several years ago I got involved in a written dialogue with Alice Frohnert who has written two books on the sex trade in Germany and who had herself been a prostitute. Her books are based on her doctoral thesis at the Free University of Berlin. One of the things that Alice writes it is actually not possible any more to decide what is healthy and what is not healthy sexuality. I find that a terribly depressing statement but there is, to me, a real difficulty that she is pointing to.
However it is clearly that there are somethings which are not healthy. For example, one example that I found particularly shocking was when a porn film convention gave an award for best script to a film based on the mass rape of women in the former Yugoslavia. This was described by Lilo Wanders of "Wa(h)re Liebe" as "tasteless". To say "tasteless" is to understate something that is terribly sick.
Things like this throw a huge doubt into my mind for simple minded apologia for the porn industry. Both Marcia Pally in Index on Censorship, and Nancy Friday, who two women authors that I have found very useful in understanding the sex trade, argue that while there is violence and intimidation and sick people in the sex trade there is probably no more intimidation than anywhere else. "I am sure that there are some evil people in the skin business who take advantage of women. But every industry has its share of creeps who humiliate others, its bullies and perverts who beat up people littler than they. The 'bad men' who make 'sex objects' out of women are as likely to turn up in a blue chip corporation as in the photography studio at Penthouse." (Nancy Friday p 161-162).
This has less credibility when the porn industry gives prizes for scripts based on mass rape or advertise the degradation of junkies. There is something about giving a prize that calibrates the market and this is to calibrate it at a very sick point. I would not want to deny either that I have seen porn movies where the expression faces on the faces of the female actors were not those that I would want to see. In one case it was like seeing someone looking at me from out of hell, just watching the camera with a blank expression that was utterly devoid of any hope.
I am sure that there are lots of people who get pleasure from watching this far too big dark side of porn. I have seen a hunt saboteurs video of a person holding up a horribly injured terrified, anguished, tortured fox and then they freeze framed the expression on the face of the hunter. It was true pleasure. It was glee, triumph and joy. In my world to derive pleasure out of another's misery, terror and pain is true sickness and there is a market for these people in the sex industry. It is this area of the sex trade that should subjected to criminal investigations where need be, not pornograpy in general. What this means, to me, is that, it should be legal to see what it is legal to do. It should not be legal to harrass and intimidate people and if this seems to be happening on a screen then the film or video should be used as evidence in criminal investigations. Nor should it be legal to do things that carry a grave physical health risk - like pushing your hand into someone's vagina or anus or shitting in someone's mouth. In some parts of the continental skin trade this protection for sex industry workers is not really happening. It is almost as if the regulatory agencies have given up entirely any consideration of the issue so that a distinctive market for creeps and bullies is appearing that is being tolerated and is growing as economic processes make available an increasing number of desperate people on the one hand and an increasing number of power and money junkies who assume that have a right to do and see anything on the other. As far as the big sex businesses are concerned these power junkies are just as much a source of profit as anything else.
How do we understand such people? Is it the fact that they are "men!" - that species that, according to certain grafitti artists, need to be castrated. Actually the psychology of such people cannot be reduced to the fact that they have a male gender. Partly they are the personalities produced in some worrying social processes of greater and greater polarisation. To a degree these kind of people have always been there. Many are very sick people who have been traumatised in childhood, perhaps in wars and civil wars (like those unleashed by Mrs Thatcher, the sinker of the Belgrano as it sailed away from the Falklands exclusion zone). Hitler enjoyed pornography too - and enjoyed seeing films of the execution of his opponents. When I grew up as a child our secondary school was run with the rod and the children were terrorised by teachers many of whom were war traumatised. One teacher I remember with horror for his brutality. He had survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp. There are many people who have had childhoods and lives in which they have been brutalised and where there was no one to sympathise and support them in their distress. If there had been sympathy they would have grown up identifying with the adult that empathised with and supported them. When there are no such supporters they cut off from all their vulnerable feelings and identify with the thugs that terrorised them. What makes such psychopaths feel sick is vulnerability. Their biggest achievement in life was cutting themselves off from their vlnerable feelings in the manner described by Dorothy Rowe. And on this I do agree with her. There is a pornography for these people too - but it is not all pornography.
Even the sado maso porn is very confusing however. Much sado masochistic porn is actually more symbolic, dressing up and play, than really hurting people. To me it can be terribly tedious and can come over as the most hammy acting imaginable. However I suppose it is people coping with feelings that come to the surface when they are aroused by pretending. The people involved know they are pretending. If you do not trust someone very deeply it would be very scary to play such games. You do not allow yourself to be tied up unless you trust someone totally. There is a paradox here. It is in the acceptance and trust that they find with their partner as they pretend they actually generate real affection and mutual pleasure. This is a lot different to the sadism, which is also on the market, where real pain is accompanied by real degradation and misery that you can see clearly in people's faces.
These are things that can no longer be ignored in Britain either because you can see what you want on the Internet. Effectively censorship is breaking down. Continental sexuality cannot be kept out any longer at bay by customs control at Dover. What we need is an debate about the wide ranging implications and what we individually and collectively should do about them. What is urgently needed in this situation is a wide ranging and well informed public debate about all the issues. It goes without saying that our political leaders, as with drugs, being total opportunists, will probably refuse to look at this as it is too much a hot potato. This will be a shame because a new look at English sex laws could be a vehicle to help clean up the situation on the continent while at the same time relaxing some of the prudish absurdities that we are subjected to:
Marcia Pally argues " The most effective guarantee of physical safety for sex industry workers would be provisions making the sex industries legitimate retail businesses; the more legitimate, the more accoutable to law, from sanitation codes and work for hire contracts to criminal codes" (Index on Censorship, p 6)
In conclusion
A growth in sex trades is almost inevitable as stable communities based on geographical place break down. In the pre industrial world most people lived in small communities and never moved far from their birth place. In consequence the choice of sexual partners of their own age was probably 10 to 20 at most. In a village with 300 inhabitants with a life expectancy of 50 years there would be, say, 3 people of the opposite sex with the same age as yourself. Meanwhile possibilities for neighbour disapproval as a regulator and brake are severe in villages .City life is totally different - particularly if one goes to places to meet members of the opposite sex you cannot avoid such places taking on at least some of the character of markets. Contraception makes the consequences of sexual activity less fearsome.
The notion of a companionate relationship is itself now under stress from the reality of the modern world. Feminism arose from women's entry into the labour force and into higher education on equal terms with men. It seems to me that greater economic independence and the equal, or in some cases superior, intellectual status for women, has completely broken up the ground rules and assumptions of the traditional sexual relationship and marriage. At least part of the growth of the sex industry, with women as customers now as well as men, is due to the inability to find sexual satisfaction inside the traditional marital relationships.
Economic trends make it difficult for people to stay together for long as career paths diverge and with them social networks, interests and places of work. The growth of sex as a consumption commodity is perhaps one resulting process. I believe in the USA people move on average once every two years. There is thus an increasing phenomenon of couples being unable to stay together without great sacrifice to the career of one partner. The sex trades have always been there for migrants or for men on the move. Sexuality is becoming a mass marketed good with a whole army of workers at all levels servicing the new industry. Modern mass communications make this a process that I for one now regard as unstoppable. Therefore, to use a metaphor, if we cannot damn the flood, we can perhaps channel it so that it is a process that occurs with as least possible damage and with maximum positive effect. At the end of the 20th century humanity is going through a number of huge changes and this is perhaps one of the biggest of them all.
In the meantime it is difficult to deny that the transfer of sexuality into the organised sector of the economy is a process with many different facets. This has many sad sides, particularly when people enter the market vulnerably, without other things going for them, or even worse enter the market to fund a heroin addiction. But the process is complicated. There is an idea around, taken over from crude Marxism perhaps, that traded activity always and per se perverts authentic human relationships. In a local market today (not a supermarket) I saw people socialising, chatting and being friendly buying and selling vegetables. It is clear that some market settings give a greater scope for friendliness than others. I could see otherwise isolated elderly people actually able to stand and have a gossip with market traders that would not be possible in a supermarket. In a similar way there are clearly times in the sex trades in which people can develop lasting trust and friendship - partly with colleagues partly with clients. I am reminded of reading about the prostitute who had one client that kept coming back well into her old age. He always paid but does that mean that there was no affection and trust built up here? Why did he keep on coming back to her?
If we think of what is happening in the sex trades as a social process in which sexual activity is now partly located inside the "paid work sphere" then we ought to begin to think of it in different terms. We should recognise that sex workers might actually do their work because they want to and get job satisfaction from it in some cases. If this is not so then they should be assisted, like anyone else into another job - without carrying a stigma with them preventing that. We should stop making presumptions about the way people "should" or "should not" organise their work and personal life. This is particulary important in areas of urban disintegration where addicts, prostitutes and workers in the sex trades will otherwise be excluded from urban regeneration strategies. (The Reeperbahn in Hamburg is the poorest neighbourhood in Germany). Instead it would be better to upgrade their status. It is as well to be reminded that prostitutes originally worked from temples and were often highly regarded.
A few years ago I worked with a very disabled woman. As I got to know her I became aware that she had had, despite her great disabilities a sex life a good deal better than mine. One of her friends was a well known sex celebrity who ran a club dedicated to ensuring disabled people actually had a sex life. She knew her personally and regarded her with respect. It was one thing that helped me get over my "politically correct" simplifications.
There is a growing extent to which men and women work together at the same workplaces - so that workplaces are the breeding places of new relationships as well as sexual tensions. Workplaces are where an increasing number of people meet their sexual partners. This whole situation may give rise to sexual harrassment, it can give rise to sources of disappointed emotional aspirations and/or new sources of jealousy or rivalry - as men and women use sex subtly or overtly as vehicles for their other ambitions involving cross cutting the interests of other parties.
Lower down in the social structure the trend is, if anything, in the other direction to womens liberation. Growing social and economic inequality tends to fragment and breaks up social structures among the poorest sectors of society. Policies, like those of urban slum clearance and tower block estates, have further isolated women and men from their own sex and the opposite sex. In areas of deprivation and poverty there are now powerful tendencies for the sexes to live apart - not the least of which is the social security system which (in the UK) penalises cohabitation. As poverty and single parenthood increases the attractiveness of a man with money, property and a car tends to outweigh issues of emotional compatibility with him. Carried further these trends lead to prostitution on the one hand and an increasing number of young people (men) too poor to start relationships in a society where relationships come, like Nicole in the advertisement does, if you've got a car to drive her around in.
In general terms social and economic changes are leading to greater insecurity in economic affairs and therefore greater insecurity in the ability of people to make common arrangements for being together. One the one hand people want to fly into emotional relationships as a refuge of security and comfort in an insecure world - on the other hand the world insists that their ideal relationship is in house with a particular value and in a car which has a particular power rating. If, as is inevitable for many, the practical things of life fall apart when people become unemployed or interests rates on the value of the house overwhelm their income, then they find that these things overwhelm their relationships too. These different trends have implications. They give rise to a need for new codes for sexual relating - a different set of assumptions about what one does and does not do. In so far as economic changes are rendering whole population segments vulnerable then sexual matters must be looked at against this background. That means for me defending those vulnerable people who enter the sex market by upholding their right to do so as a valid occupational choice which should bear no stigma. At the same time means must be found to counter the destructive effect on communities and relationships of the market economy. These are to be found in holistic community development strategies which seek to rebuild people's relationships with each other based on economic self help and mutual aid and in which, hopefully, people will be able to find trusting and affectionate relationships.
There is a need for an extensive social debate and a rethink to recreate a more realistic sense of what is, and is not sustainable, in the generation of positive sexual experience and stable emotional life. It requires new thinking about how, in many cases, people can tell if a relationship is likely to be sustainable or not in its early stages, not wanting to hop into bed quickly and sort out the problems later. There is a need for a new social consensus about what happens in relationships - what one can do to make them work and, finally, a better sense of when to end relationships, if possible amicably, when the needs and interests of partners diverge.
Brian Davey
Written at different times between 1998 and April 2000
© BRIAN DAVEY