Given the government’s methods for trying to control just about everything we see and do, and what they’ve slid into recent laws and bills should give pause to anyone with an ounce of understanding about what freedom of speech is all about. While legitimate concerns come up over what porn and erotica does or doesn’t escalate as far as behavior from those that choose to view it, at what point do we allow the lawmakers to define certain aspects of what’s portrayed, written or produced?

Sophie Buckland wrote an article expressing her views on pornography and censorship and the government’s desire to make violent content unavailable and ownership of such content punishable by fines and jail time.

Personally, I need to know just how they’d define violent content first and foremost. And my experience with how the government cloaks one supposed reason of control as being something else entirely scares me no end. (Sliding in certain rules and regs that are damn near impossible to comply with on the legitimate side of the porn industry under the guise of “protecting our children from porn” comes to mind). And control never stops at one point, things keep getting added little by little, and usually the general public is totally unaware of certain freedoms that are being taken away or surpressed.

While the government could position itself to regulate certain violent aspects that seem to have found a new home on the internet, I personally doubt they’d be able to come to a consensus on just what that means. I agree that the internet has become a hotbed of material that otherwise wouldn’t be readily available, and it’s being distributed by people who feel their invisibility protects them, and it leaves us with social issues we haven’t had to deal with until now. In the face of so many unwilling to regulate themselves, are we creating the very environment that’s going to demand that the government step in and make the very decisions we should be making on our own?

“In feminist circles today talking about pornography, except in the exclusively negative sense, can get you into trouble. It is seen as being deliberately provocative. Addressing the subject in online discussion forums and elsewhere, I’ve encountered Stalinist-style shutting down of debate, with lots of personal abuse. And no one from the pro-censorship side would share a platform with me at the recent Workers’ Liberty London Forum on porn. Nor would they attend the Feminist Fightback conference on 21 October (www.fightback.org.uk). There’s a sense that we shouldn’t talk about things that might politically divide the feminist movement. That is not a democratic approach. Whilst we may want and need maximum unity in action, we also need honest discussion of our differences.

First of all, I wouldn’t want to be a cheerleader for mainstream heterosexual pornography — much of which is as sexist as the anti-porn side say. This kind of porn encapsulates pretty much everything we find objectionable and upsetting about representations of women and of sexuality as a whole so it’s no wonder emotions run high over this.

The important thing for socialists to recognise, however, is that the debate over pornography has to be political, not something about which we draw conclusions from a personal morality or as a way of expressing distaste. When radical feminists call for state censorship of pornography they claim it’s not the sexual content they object to, but the ideas expressed in porn about gender and sexuality. But these are political ideas and calling for state censorship or regulation of adult porn (as opposed to child pornography which is a special categroy) is calling for state control of ideas we disagree with.”

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