It is good to know that a committee of British MPs, as this magazine reports, have had some harsh things to say about pornography. Everything they say strikes me as sensible and obvious: they see pornography as socially corrosive, as impacting negatively on women, and encouraging violence against them. Porn panders to sexual appetites, presenting them as normalised, and surely must result in more sexual aggression – that seems to be the inescapable truth.
That the MPs think this is encouraging and another setback for the defenders of pornography. For such indeed there be, though they rarely come out and fight for their corner. Apart from a rather feeble defence of pornography as part of our right to freedom of expression, the main defence of porn is usually to attack those who disapprove of it as prudish or else as ‘dogmatic’.
