While I was in Saigon I found the time to write an opinion piece about censorship of internet pornography, which has now been published at Online Opinion and has sparked some interesting debate that has helped me to clarify my views on the issue. My article — which has also cropped up in The Nation, a local paper from Papua New Guinea — responded to a hysterical article by Caroline Norma, who argued that the digital age will become a ‘dark age’ for women because of the easy availability of online porn. She argued that porn ‘trains’ men to commit acts of sexual violence, and that, in line with the rise of online pornography, we can expect to see a spike in sexual violence. This is taken, implicitly, to justify bans or restrictions on the availability of pornography. Instead of buying into the social constructionist dogma that men’s inclinations are dictated by what they see online, I argue the opposite: that porn is an expression and manifestation (however grotesque or tacky) of innate sexual urges. Therefore, any sort of ban or restriction on online pornography is unlikely to achieve the aim of reducing sexual violence. I also suggest, after a study by Todd Kendall, that there may — and note the qualifier — even be a negative correlation between the two: that increasing web access has actually reduced sexual violence.

Last week, another blogger seized on this last point and criticised me for indulging in the same ‘logical fallacies’ of which I accuse Norma:

[Strangio] has confused correlation with causation in attempting to link the rise of the internet with a decrease in sexual violence… He cites no evidence at all that backs up his claim.

This is a strange accusation, since I referenced the Kendall study, which clearly sets out its methodology and controls for sex, age, location, socioeconomic situation and a host of other factors. In any case, I never meant to claim that porn unequivocally prevents sexual violence, or that it is ‘necessary’ to prevent men becoming rapists. I merely flagged Kendall’s argument to demonstrate that the available evidence is varied, and does not conform to either right or left-wing assumptions about human impressionability.

Bennett continues:

He goes further and confuses argument with a factual description of human nature, Freud may have believed that humans are naturally barbarians, but this does not make it so. He has committed the fallacy of the worship of experts, someone’s renown does not in itself convey factual basis to their hundred year old opinions.

Bennett is right in arguing that any unthinking adherence to ‘experts’ is misguided, but wrong in applying it to my use of Freud, whom I used to substantiate an argument grounded in common sense. It is no great leap of faith to argue that human sexual urges are part of a biological imperative and that humans, under their layers of socialization, have an essentially animal nature. According to Freud, the entire history of civilisation has been a process of taming these tendencies. As he argues in Civilisation and Its Discontents, ‘civilisation overcomes the dangerous aggressivity of the individual by weakening him, disarming him and setting up an internal authority to watch over him, like a garrison in a conquered town’. Note the choice of metaphor: these are urges that cannot be removed or eradicated from the outside, but merely kept under close watch by the actions of law or social custom. For a clear demonstration of these tendencies, as well as a refutation of the opposite view — that basic human urges can be eradicated by state policy — one need look no further than the twentieth century’s many failed experiments with communism. Here is Freud again:

The communists think they have found the way to redeem mankind from evil. [For communists], man is unequivocally good and well disposed to his neighbour, but his nature has been corrupted by the institution of private property. Ownership of property gives the individual the power, and so the temptation, to mistreat his neighbour… When private property is abolished, when goods are held in common and enjoyed by all, ill will and enmity among human beings will cease… [But] the psychological presumption behind [communism] is a baseless illusion.

Many on the left, including puritans like Norma, see social problems as the result of a flawed process of socialisation and therefore solvable by means of public policy geared towards changing the process itself. The Freudian view, on the other hand, sees social problems as the expression of an underlying tendency toward aggressivity and self-gratification that our moral education and legal system keep in check, demonstrating which acts are acceptable to the wider community and which are not. The main difference between the two — and a philosophically crucial one — is in the conception of origins. Where the former see children in Rousseauean terms, as blank slates waiting to be encoded by society (and therefore essentially ‘good’ at birth) Freudians see them as fundamentally selfish, rambunctious and competitive, tendencies that our upbringing is designed to hedge around with social conventions (such as sport) and turn to productive ends (such as business). Both views would agree that the law can act as a primary tool of socialisation, articulating and enforcing a society’s basic norms and values. Both would also agree that bans are a legitimate form of action in the case of criminal acts (such as rape). But here the similarity ends.

The worldview of the social constructionist exists in unavoidable conflict with the idea of basic civil liberties: if we are primarily products of our surroundings — and crimes like rape are seen in these terms — then it makes sense to manipulate these surroundings in order to reduce crime and inculcate certain moral virtues. It needs no pointing out, however, that our environment extends far beyond objective actions (such as crimes) to encompass the realms of thought, speech and communication. Where the civil libertarian would draw a firm line between speech and action (between porn and sexual violence, for instance), social constructionism cannot for long maintain the distinction if it is to stay true to its underlying philosophy. If the media is seen to dictate our behaviour, then it becomes the legitimate target of government control. If sexual urges are socially inscribed then banning pornography — or any other form of media that is arbitrarily deemed to fall under its rubric — is not only justifiable; it is necessary.

Freudians, who recognise the impossibility of eradicating certain basic human impulses, would condemn violent acts but would see no sense in banning forms of speech that bear no direct relation to human actions. If sexual urges are innate to human nature, and pornography merely a commercial manifestation of these urges, as I would argue, any sort of ban would be senselessly misguided. The evidence for this is furnished by five millennia of human existence: namely, that pornography (and/or its old-time proxy, prostitution) has more or less existed since the dawn of civilisation and has only been suppressed at a massive cost in individual liberties. The very ubiquity of pornography puts the burden of proof onto those, like Norma, who would argue that there is nothing inherent to human nature that underpins this phenomenon and that there is instead some elastic, transcultural force (enter ‘patriarchy’) that has instilled the same model of ‘oppressive gender relations’ in nearly every human society known to history. The truth, of course, is that there is no such evidence.

Rather than our society ‘creating’ the problem of rape through adult entertainment, I think that through law, education and parenting our socialisation is constantly working to reduce it. Not only would a ban on pornography compromise our civil liberties to a degree not conscionable in a society that values the individual rights; because of the vagaries of human nature, it would simply fail in its purpose. Such a course of action would be a senseless sacrifice of civil liberties for essentially no reward. Of course, it is necessary to control access to pornography to minors and instill in children the difference between right and wrong, between what they see on the screen and what exists in reality. But if we wish to preserve civil liberties, these duties can only be borne by teachers and parents. The gradual, untidy progress of education will always be a better protection against sexual violence than blue ink and moral hysteria.