the times | Saturday April 30 2022 29
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Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826Watching porn in public should be illegal
It’s astonishing that men have so lost their sexual bearings they think it’s OK to view hardcore films on trains and in parliament
committee. The bigger question is
how some men become so
desensitised that they lose their
sexual bearings, and can’t last five
minutes without an “erotic snack”.
Young women have long reported
being expected to comply with acts
like choking, hair-pulling or
smacking, which their partners have
picked up in porn. But young men
too are starting to understand how
their libidos are being hijacked by
obsessive consumption. On Reddit is
a “no-fapping” forum for men trying
to wean themselves off porn. Many
find they can’t enjoy real intimacy
because partners’ bodies don’t live up
to plasticised porn stars, who are
neither instantly orgasmic nor
utterly biddable. “No fap” posters are
mocked and damned as incels. But
Gail Dines, feminist author of
Pornland, reports that desperate guys
come to her for help whenever she
lectures in American colleges: they
long to cut free of the cold,
industrialised travesty of sex which is
wrecking their lives.
In Westminster we are seeing just
another example of how the
unfettered pornified online world
has seeped into reality. Neil Parish,
the MP in question, should lose his
seat, not just for the sake of his
disgusted female colleagues but as a
statement of what is intolerable in
every office, on any bus, in every
public place.TfL tells women to report users,
but that requires you to get off the
train, rake through CCTV, and for
what? If flashing isn’t taken seriously
— just 594 prosecutions out of 10,775
reports of indecent exposure cases in
2020 — why would we expect any
action on public porn? It comes into
that expanding category of new
sexual offences where virtual and
real worlds collide: from “upskirting”,
sending unwanted nudes and
“revenge porn”, to the strangulationof women by men mimicking
extreme images.
It’s debatable whether public porn
use is even illegal. It should be. The
best hope for a prosecution currently
looks to be as an “offence against
public decency”. But what an archaic
notion that sounds now. If the
government wants to retrieve any
credibility from this debacle it could
order a legal review: can old laws be
repurposed or is new legislation
required?
Instead ministers make excuses,
with Ben Wallace blaming “long
hours, drink and pressure”. As if an
exhausted female MP fires up
RedTube in a parliamentarybelieves it should only count as
sexual harassment if the MP was
watching porn with the intention of
upsetting a colleague. If women
accidentally saw the images, it was
merely an ethical misstep. When
three judges were sacked in 2015 for
accessing porn through their judicial
IT accounts, the Guardian columnist
Owen Jones wrote flippantly that a
“tense judge seeking a quick bit of
relief will concentrate better”.
Men who regard pornography as
“empowering” are oblivious to how
offensive, upsetting and
dehumanising women find sitting
next to a stranger watching rough
sex. Or how girls hate school bus
journeys with boys perving over
PornHub: “That’s you, that is.” On a
train, how do you know if a porn-user
is targeting you or demonstrating his
utter impunity, getting a kick from
smashing the boundaries of everyone
around him, from old ladies to kids.
Few women make a fuss. (I didn’t
grass up the young man to the guard.)
It’s embarrassing, and we know to
fear entitled, angry men in confined
spaces. Transport for London has
launched a campaign against staring
and, sure, the unwanted gaze of a
man who may get off at your stop is
intimidating. But why is there no
“Put it away, lads: porn is not OK
here” poster campaign to make it
clear that those who watch it in
public have crossed a line?I
t was an off-peak afternoon train
and as I passed by looking for a
quiet seat, I assumed this young
guy dressed for the office, eating
sandwiches and swigging Fanta,
was poring over Excel spreadsheets.
Instead I got a glimpse of thrashing
bodies on his laptop screen, and
hastily moved on.
How did watching porn in public
become so banal that barely a
woman I know hasn’t sat beside a
guy flicking through hardcore? On a
bus or a plane, in GP waiting rooms,
cafés, libraries, beaches, parks. From
builders on a fag break, train drivers
and a charity worker at the NSPCC,
to MPs in parliament, porn has
flooded the workplace.
How strange that it has become
untethered from its presumed
purpose. While some public porn-
users are, overtly or covertly,
masturbating, most consume their
clips dead-eyed, just as the rest of us
catch up on Masterchef or zone out
to YouTube videos of cats. Why? The
best explanation I found was from a
“sex positive” American writer. “Bus
porn,” he notes, “is like having a
small erotic snack to tide me over
before the big decadent meal at
home.” If other passengers could
stink up a compartment eating a
tuna sandwich, why shouldn’t he get
off on Hot Teenage Asians?
He has a point about private
selfishness contaminating the public
sphere. People now clip fingernails or
apply full make-up on trains, eat hot
food or text in cinemas. Without that
old-fashioned notion, propriety, what
is to stop anyone doing what the hell
they like? The portability of our lives
— all our work, fun, connections,
desires squidged into a six-inch
plastic phone case — has muddied
any division between being at home
and out in the world.Besides, unfettered access to porn
is not just advocated by the free-
speech right but the libertarian left.
Feminists who critique the inherent
misogyny of the porn industry, how it
normalises sexual violence, writes the
script for abuse, are accused of being
religious moralisers, uptight prudes.
For the sex-positive movement,
porn is freedom. The academic João
Florêncio, author of Bareback Porn,It is offensive to sit
next to a stranger
watching rough sex
Westminster shows
how online porn has
seeped into reality
Janice
Turner@victoriapeckham