by Mary Ellen Synon, Monday September 11, 2006
So, the decent people of England have persuaded Parliament to legislate against the possession of violent pornography. The push for the new law started in 2003 after the conviction of a pornwatching pervert, Graham Coutts, for the rape and strangulation of a West Sussex music teacher, Jane Longhurst. Now it will be a criminal offence in England and Wales to possess pornography that includes "violence that was, or appeared to be, life-threatening or likely to result in serious and disabling injury".
Under the new legislation, Britain's police will be investigating more than just people who download images of rape and other serious sexual violence.
They will also be after anyone who possesses images of sex with animals, sexual interference with a human corpse, or any serious violence in a sexual context (for example, and I am not making this up, rape during mutilation with a battery-pack power drill).
Jane's mother, Liz Longhurst, led the campaign. She is certain that Coutts was driven to sexual murder by online pornography. You can see her point. The prosecution showed that the man logged on to everything from the necrobabes site to one called deathbyasphyxia, even going back to check one of the necrophilia websites after her murder to get inspiration for what to do next.
He is now serving a life sentence, minimum 30 years. He ought to hang, but that is another issue.
The grieving Mrs Longhurst and the thousands of decent people who supported her in demanding the new legislation will now feel some sense of satisfaction that they have "tackled" (they like that word) the problem of extreme porn on the internet and the sexual violence it breeds.
Or, the sexual violence they assume it breeds. One cannot doubt their good intentions, but one must doubt their logic.
Extreme sexual violence did not start with the internet. And it goes on in cultures where, even now, the possession of pornography is somewhere between impossible and suicidal or do you imagine that the village elders of rural Pakistan who sanction the gang rape of virgins as a judicial punishment for the transgressions of the girls' brothers and fathers got the idea from something they recently downloaded from shariababes.com ?
Indeed, if you want to see what kind of sexual violence can be committed by men who have never even seen the mildest of centrefold nudes, much less full-on 21st century web porn, then read the account of A Woman In Berlin, the anonymous journal of a 34-year-old German woman who was in the city when the Red Army arrived in April 1945.
Before the Russians arrived, the author already feared what would happen.
She and the other women had all heard the reports of the mass rapes by the Soviet soldiers as they swept over Eastern Europe. The women hoped the reports were Nazi propaganda. They found out they were not.
Anthony Beevor, a leading historian of the Second World War, has called the journal "one of the most important personal accounts ever written". Certainly as the account of a witness to the first weeks of the Russian occupation, it is that. But the book is useful, too, as the record of a kind of controlled experiment for the origins of sexual violence.
Here are just a couple of accounts of the attacks. One young German woman was found in her hiding place and gang-raped by at least 20 Russian soldiers at the end of it, "her swollen mouth stuck out from her pale face like a blue plum". A 50-yearold woman escaped because the soldiers thought the weeping eczema on her face was syphilis; later she was raped anyway.
The author's own first rape was in the bomb shelter of her apartment building, by two soldiers, one pulling her by the arm, "the other with his hand on my throat so I can no longer scream. I end up with my head on the bottom step of the basement stairs. When I struggle to come up, the second one throws himself on me as well, forcing me back on the ground with his fists and knees."
In the end, after more gang rapes, she finds herself whimpering to a Siberian rapist, "Only one, please, please, only one." Yet these violent rapists were from a culture so insulated from any pornography that the author remembered seeing Russian men tearing advertisements for ladies' corsetry out of German papers. The drawings were passed around for lascivious viewing.
So if you wanted to design a laboratory experiment to find out what men are capable of without a "permissive society", without raunchy Hollywood movies, without sex shops and internet porn, indeed, when even under the order of the "ukaz Stalina", the dictator Stalin's decree that rape must not happen, you could look to the sexual brutalities suffered in Eastern Europe in 1945. Evil was not invented by the worldwide web.
Nor indeed by the Red Army. Think of what we now know was going on in Ireland at the same time the Russians were raping their way along the road to Berlin. The priests and monks who sodomised little boys and the fathers who raped little daughters in the Ireland of the Forties needed no porn to encourage them.
Fantasies of rape, and depictions of it have existed among mankind throughout history. It was no accident that portrayals of the violent rape of the Sabine women were so often commissioned by the rich patrons of the Renaissance. They liked the look of it. One of the most famous poems of 19th-century American literature, Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee, is an ode to necrophilia. The last chapter of Victor Hugo's Notre Dame De Paris recounts the finding of a hunchbacked skeleton entwined with the skeleton of a young girl: Quasimodo had gone to the charnel-house to die in the embrace of Esmeralda's corpse after her execution.
The ancient Greeks admired all the ways that Zeus changed shape in order to carry out bestial sex. Leda was assaulted by the god disguised as a swan. The girl Europa was raped by Zeus in the form of a bull.
The French Revolution was swept with mass sexual violence. The Parisian mob seized the Princesse de Lamballe, a loyal lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and, after hacking her to death and stripping her, insisted on the obscene mutilation and display of her genitals.
The less-exalted women of Paris fared no better: at the prison of La Salpetriere more than 40 prostitutes were subjected to sexual molestation by their jailors before being executed. Such things were so common that one revolutionary apologist called them "the custom of those days".
Though of course we are worried about the custom of these days. Such is the level of sexual violence that we feel it is all around us that no doubt there will be some move in the next Dil for legislation similar to the new legislation in England and Wales. The decent people of Ireland, like the decent people of England, demand that something must be done.
So they will try to control the web (impossible). They will give police intrusive powers to examine the computers of innocent adults (outrageous).
They will manage a few prosecutions of men who have watched videos of consenting adults engaged in Black & Decker sexual acts (a waste of police time). And they will not stop sexual violence, not that way. Porn doesn't make perverts. Perverts go looking for porn.
Yet such is the anger and impotence of decent people in the face of sexual violence that they will try new laws anyway.
There is a drive now to force so-called sex shops here to be controlled or shut down.
But the sex-shop business selling explicit DVDs, sex toys, magazines, the lot is no longer a dark-alley industry.
Consider: the social-set of this country admires the vastly rich Weston family, who own Brown Thomas. But they also own Selfridges, the fashionable London department store where you will find on sale everything from crotchless knickers to mechanical sex toys to fur-lined handcuffs.
Still, a band of decent Irish folk has been demonstrating outside the sex shops in Phibsborough. "Shut down these sex shops, they are too near a church," they say. No doubt they are. But Selfridges is just down the road from the execution place of the Tyburn martyrs and the convent that still commemorates them. That's life. And that's liberty.
What is needed is for Ireland and England to embrace a philosophy that does not stir in its men an uncontrolled lust for sex with a goat or sodomy with a small boy or intercourse with a corpse or the rape of a helpless and terrified woman. A rational ideology in the meaning of sex is needed here; indeed, a rational ideology in the meaning of many things is needed here.
But that, like hanging, is another issue.
© Associated Newspapers Ltd 2006 .