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Pornocopia
Laurence O'Toole
Serpent's Tail paperback, 393 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)

Anyone who thought -- hoped, dreamed even -- that the arrival of the first Labour Government in 20 years would mean a relaxing of their predecessors' moral -- albeit frequently hypocritical -- straightjacket can think again. If anything it's fair to say New Labour (that's New, kids) is more at pains to ensure that we stand stiff for a principled line in the bedroom than John Major's battle-worn troops ever were. Smiling Tone has crashed into Downing Street with fire in his belly and a massive majority in his Y-fronts. He is both our political leader and our spiritual protector for the new Millennium.

That is, we are now in the grip of the UK's first ever Christian Socialist administration; and it's easier to buy the first part than the second. Tone and his robotic pals seem all too willing to be God-fearing first and true the principles that brought them here a long way second. Evidence: who in their right mind would appoint Jack Straw to a position of authority over anything more complex than a packet of digestives? But no, in the New Labour World Order, Jackboot Jack -- those scary Himmler spectacles gleaming in the camera-light -- gets to appear on our TVs and pronounce. Home Secretary is a position of power. It's up there with the Chancellor and the PM himself (and ghastly Press Secretary Campbell and Dome-Lord Mandelson) amongst The Big League. This man is dangerous.

But, you all rise as one to intercede, were we not only a year into this Parliament when the iniquitous law on gay sex was overturned? Is this not a step forward? Well, yes and no, I'll spit back. Yes, because it is high time. But no, because it's both a nod towards the fact that Europe (you know, that sensible, grown-up place only 22 miles to the south of Kent) would have made us change it soon enough anyway, and a sop to the nutty little faggots to belt-up about equal rights. You can shag a 16-year-old lad and have one of your kind in the Cabinet, now shut the fuck up. *

At least it upset the collective churches and that's always a job worth doing, but such victories are short-lived and largely pyrrhic. Priests and vicars across the land will mouth-off God's alleged law, then rut with their pretty, blond fop-fringed choirboys whether the Archbishop of Canterbury is caught buying Asian Schoolboys In Bondage in his local Indian newsagents or not. And let's not forget that the likes of David Blunkett had to be dragged bodily into the Yes lobby for that vote. Unlike last time, when he was vociferous in his opposition. We call him a bigot.

No, there is a New Puritanism abroad in the land, carried shoulder-high by the Crusaders of New Labour. We've all heard Straw pronounce on the future of the BBFC and his condemnation of certain video certifications. How long before the man-who-would-be-Himmler decides to persuade his colleges to take classification (now, there's a euphemism) under the official wing? It doesn't stand thinking about, but trust me, you'll have to before the world has turned much further.

Journalist Laurence O'Toole's Pornocopia is an unapologetic paean to pornography. Yes, it comes under the guise of a serious field study -- and, to be fair, it is that -- but you are not going to finish this lengthy book and be left in any doubt. What's wrong with Britporn, he says, is not all those things Jackboot Jack and Blind-Eye Blunkett (a more bizarre anti-porn campaigner I challenge you to imagine) would have us believe. No, it's those little shops that pop up occasionally stocked with nth generation US hardcore. Or the way under-the-counter deals in Soho can often leave you with little more than egg on your face. Or the angle of dangle in a top shelf magazine. It's not being able to get a hold of it.

In the US, he argues, the problem isn't availability (although shipping across state lines can bring a whole heap of trouble, if anal or multiracial shagging are involved). O'Toole's difficulty is with the preponderance of silicone and shaving brushes. O'Toole (great name) argues for the Golden Age of The Devil in Miss Jones and The Opening of Misty Beethoven: all pubic hair and natural breasts. But not Deep Throat which, despite being one of the all-time box office hits, is a really rotten film. 'Golden age porn', he writes, 'was dreaming . . . of becoming a regular movie genre.' O'Toole's travels through a cleaned-up US video industry are dispiriting, but do throw up a couple of intriguing statistics: around a quarter of hard porn buyers are women; and, at 15% of the overall market, adult programming is 'bigger than Disney.'

There is a detailed and excellent chapter on kiddie porn that Bea Campbell and the other Satanic abuse believers would do well to digest. Most child porn, according to O'Toole, derives from a handful of semi-legally produced Continental magazines from the early seventies. It's typical of his approach that he relies on research and documented fact rather than the hearsay and 'common sense' with which we so often find ourselves bombarded. Snuff, he decides, is simply an urban myth; the connection between porn and sexual violence is not proven, and may in fact be a simple negative of the actual truth. 'What porn leads to,' says one of his interviewees, 'is a good wank, half a lager, a sandwich and a good night's kip.'

Pornocopia will not be on the recommended list for our dear government this summer -- although they are the people who should study O'Toole's argument in detail. Anything that can forge an alliance between radical feminism, the Church, Esther Rantzen and Jack Straw has to be questioned. Where was the Home Secretary when the police attempted to have a university's copy of a Robert Mapplethorpe book destroyed earlier this year? Most surely heading out the other door with his morals in a brown paper bag. Attempts to censor the Internet (surely the most insidious and therefore welcome purveyor of inter-Continental filth the world has yet seen) will hot-up in coming months. Not for nothing have the former Eastern Bloc countries totally relaxed their porn laws since the Curtain fell.

Pornocopia is a literate, level-headed diatribe against New Puritanism. It will prove a provocative and valuable weapon in the battles to come.

* Of course, since then the pusillanimity of the Government has struck. Again.

Pornocopia
Laurence O'Toole
Serpent's Tail paperback, 393 pages, £13.99
Review by David Alexander (1998)

Pornography is generally thought of and written about as a problem. It's something which has to be regulated and controlled, managed and administered, marginalised and, in many cases, excluded. Variously, pornography is figured as depraving and corrupting, dehumanising and depersonalising, offensive and degrading, and so on.

Laurance O'Toole's fascinating study of the genre comes as a refreshing change, therefore. A mix of reportage and critical analysis, O'Toole deconstructs popular notions about the form, suggesting that there's no simple pornographic object, but, rather, a variety of discourses around pornography:
In reality, porn is a multifaceted phenomenon . . . made more diffuse and complex by the way different people experience and interpret porn as viewers (page xii).

One is led to the conclusion that what is generally defined and described as pornography is really only a composite effect, a consequence of all that's ever been said and written, not so much about something called pornography as about representations of sex and sexuality in the media in general, and cinema, television and video in particular. It's the traces of all these debates and arguments and controversies which constitute what we think of as pornography.

As such, it's not terribly surprising that for all O'Toole's attempts to redefine and re-describe porno as just another cultural commodity and artefact, a mode of production, distribution and consumption and a genre or narrative form with its own peculiar themes, motifs, codes and conventions, the book returns again and again to pornography as a regulatory discourse and practice, a system of classification and censorship, a way of sorting the good from the bad, the meaningful from the meaningless, the profound from the profane. For when all's said and done, pornography's a politico-social schema used to regulate and control our cultural life in general, and sexual behaviour and its representations in particular.

Perhaps, therefore, in attempting to deconstruct and subvert popular notions about porno, O'Toole should have concluded by thinking up a brand new term for the whole business. •

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