Very Safe Sex

National Review, July 28, 1997 by Roger Scruton

Pornography is a trade like any other--involving production, distribution, and consumption. It differs only in the moral status of the product, and the special kind of corruption required in order to produce and consume it. The oddest thing about America is that pornography is nowadays deemed to be protected by the Constitution--while those who wrote and ratified the Constitution regarded pornography as so loathsome that it was unnecessary to forbid it. The production and retailing of obscene images have consequently grown, to become the largest and most profitable industry in the United States, with worldwide markets and constantly evolving technological achievements. You could find in its technical fertility a justification for the trade, as you can find such a justification for war, crime, and disease. For war, crime, and disease pose a challenge to human ingenuity, a need to get ahead of the competition, be it human or bacteriological. And this stimulates our creative powers. Indeed, war has been the most progressive force in history. Just so with pornography: for here is a product in constant search of new outlets, new forms of communication, new opportunities to pollute the dwindling store of human innocence. It is things like war and pornography that give progress a bad name.

There exists no more fertile breeding ground for the pornographic impulse than the Internet. Recent estimates suggest that 10 to 15 per cent of Internet users are searching for pornographic material. And the market is meeting the need with ever more sophisticated images, and ever more ingenious ways of turning sexual fantasies into cash. Image scanning is at an early stage. But you can be sure that, before long, the Internet will be passing along high-resolution pictures as good as the best TV, and the driving force behind this new achievement will have been the market in the sexual fix.

The same force led to the perfecting of the photograph, the video camera, and the movie screen. What is new is the withdrawal of pornography from the arena of shame. People could see you entering the "adult" video shop; they could discover the photographs in your drawer or the books on your shelf. Your secrets were not just guilty, but shameful. Technology now enables you to escape from the public eye. You can enjoy your sexual encounters in cyberspace, without the shaming contact with your fellow human beings. Sex on the Internet recalls Wilde's quip about masturbation: "cleaner, more efficient, and you meet a better class of person." Sex has been confiscated by the machine, and virtual sex has come in place of it. Virtual sex is shame-free, since no one knows you are having it, not even the person with whom you are having it. And that which is shame-free soon becomes shameless.

Observers of American mores often wonder how pornography should have become an accepted part of the culture. What happened to guilt--the guilt which propelled this great society for centuries, and made it the model of respectability in a democratic age? The answer is that guilt goes the way of shame; it just takes a little longer. Abolish the witness and you have removed the mainstay of conscience. This does not mean that Americans have lost their puritanical instincts. It is rather that they feel guilty about other things--the things of which they can still feel ashamed. Public sins like smoking attract such outrage from the new puritans that TV idols cannot be seen to be committing them on the screen, not even with consenting adults in private. For smoking on the screen is a seductive message to the young and the innocent, inviting them to sin. Obviously, the solution to the problems now faced by the tobacco industry would be the virtual cigarette, which could be smoked in cyberspace, leaving no traces in reality. Smoking on the screen would then be as permissible as sex on the screen. The trouble is, how could you gain real physical pleasure from a virtual object?

In the case of sex the answer is clear. The encounter in cyberspace is merely the imaginative seed, brought to fruition by an act of masturbation. Ever since Americans accepted the view of sex propagated by such pseudo-scientific documents as the Kinsey report, they have been deprived of the concepts that would enable them to understand why masturbation is wrong. If all sex is a matter of pleasurable sensation, then what does it matter how it is produced, provided those involved consent to it? Masturbation has ceased to be self-abuse and become the most innocent form of sexual exploit--the only one in which no one but the agent is at risk. And other forms of sex are described and understood as a kind of masturbation a deux (or more). The sex of the partner is no longer morally relevant, and the single permitted moral question is the question of consent. The result is not Sodom or Babylon but a universal Onanistan.

The culture of masturbation spells the triumph of the individual, for whom even sex is a solitary pleasure, a private trophy brought home from the marketplace. The fantasies necessary to enjoy it are stored in cyperspace, which is a private space, a metaphysical nowhere between the individual and his screen.