Good Censor, Bad Censor

In a week that has seen both the condemnation of the US National Security Agency for surveying emails and other personal data worldwide, and major calls in the UK for the complete blocking of online pornography, the pressure to control and rein in the internet is growing stronger and stronger.

There is no such thing as good or bad censorship, as there are only good or bad people and content, visual, verbal or written, is what it is. It is how we, as adults, react, or respond to it that gives content its power, be it private, moral, political, sexual, criminal or offensive. Yet the internet with its labyrinthine pathways and myriad ideas, images, and views, reflects all mankind. It is our psyche, a huge digital Id into which we pour our thoughts and impulses.  Each day we upload the minutia of our lives, be they bland, brutal or base, good or bad, moral or immoral, legal or illegal, whatever mankind is capable of, the internet absorbs and stores it. Then, when we plug in, we have a choice, of what amongst man's cerebral detritus, to look at, read or ignore. 

Now our governments want to control, monitor and in some cases, expurgate sections of the internet in much the same way that doctors use electro-convulsive therapy to wipe out and erase parts of the brain. The result, even on a digital brain, is likely to be just as brutal and damaging.

Google is the current internet bugbear, chastised for the amount of tax it does or doesn't pay, and ordered by governments to stop this, or block that. Google is attacked relentlessly, but because of its size and financial clout, has been able to pretty much ignore these assaults on its propriety. However, the current furore around the activities of the US's National Security Agency (NSA) has caused Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt, to worry that the internet is about to suffer from a process of "Balkanisation", in which, like the countries of the Balkans, the internet begins the process of fragmenting as national governments seek to exert greater influence over it, essentially breaking it up.  Thereby creating a series of tightly controlled national networks and ending forever our current open communication platforms and the free flow of information that has been at the centre of the internet since its inception some twenty plus years ago.

This drive to control the internet and breakup the power of independent US companies like Google and Amazon with their huge stores of data, is coming not just from Authoritarian regimes like China and Iran, but from the law makers of the European Union. EU lawmakers in the wake of the National Security Agency scandal, are using the fear of data snooping to promote the idea of creating their own internet platforms separate from the likes of Google et al. Indeed for many European lawmakers the move now is to push for the ringfencing of their national networks which in turn will force internet companies like Google to comply with local rules for protecting local data and so on.

The result, according to an EU spokesman is that "You are likely to get a federation of different data centres, each fiefdom with its own different rules", which aside from its immediate aim of protecting its citizens data from the prying eyes of US intelligent agencies, becomes more sinister if used to repress political or other perceived subversions.

Indeed the fact that the National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on foreign nationals and probably eavesdropping on phone calls and reading the occasional email should not surprise or excessively worry us as this is what intelligence agencies do, and given that Facebook can already interpret everything from our taste in music to our political allegiances from analysing our 'Likes', the activities of the NSA will not make much difference to someone after your personal data. What should worry us are the calls for national security surveillance to be stopped or monitored, presumably by human rights lawyers and EU functionaries, as that will begin rendering any kind of clandestine snooping potentially unworkable, with possibly disastrous implications for our ongoing national security.

We should expect the United States, the most powerful country on earth to protect its people from attack, as likewise we expect our UK government agencies to do the same and as our main ally to share information and data when necessary. In effect, we expect our intelligence agencies to get the terrorists and our enemies before they get us and to do that successfully agencies need to snoop, spy and lie. Indeed, surveillance and data gathering are crucial, and by the very nature of their work the agencies involved need to be able to operate in secret, and monitoring the mass of internet traffic worldwide is a big part of that. Where this falls down is when those actions are perceived either as a threat to the citizens in whose name the surveillance is being carried out, or as a threat to other friendly nations, as the NSA's actions are now being made out to be.

Ironically in the name of democracy, and in a perceived benign move to protect its citizens from US data collecting, the EU's lawmakers could now begin the breakup of the Internet as we know it. Even more alarming is that the EU's desire to ringfence the internet along national borders is playing well with China, who's gleeful words on the NSA story see them sticking the knife in:  "Washington has been accusing China of cyber espionage, but it turns out that the biggest threat to the pursuit of individual freedom and privacy in the US is the unbridled power of the government". 

This means that countries like Iceland who have said that they wanted to ban access to all pornography, or in the UK where Prime Minister David Cameron or Labour MP Diane Abbott have called for a block on access to pornography in an effort to protect the young, and who have previously been mocked for their naiveté in thinking that an internet block along national boundaries was unworkable, can now look forward to a future where bans could not only be workable, but be made to work. Indeed, the calls of UK politicians for the blocking of pornography are now being championed by the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. Therefore the chance for the UK Government to create its own server will now be perceived by many on both sides of the political spectrum as a real vote winner. State control of the internet along national borders is coming, and coming fast, and ironically it will be championed not by China or Iran, but by the unelected and unaccountable law makers of the EU and I believe, by our own government.

The former CNN journalist and writer Rebecca Mackinnon said in her book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012), that: "We cannot assume that the Internet will evolve automatically in a direction that is going to be compatible with democracy" and prophetically that "Ten years from now, we will look back on the free and open internet with nostalgia". Yet this will all be done in the name of Democracy, of protecting personal data, and of fighting the currents totems of evil like racism, pornography, Islamophobia, homophobia, fascism, incitement to hatred and so on. As once the government and their state authorised censors are unleashed on an internet with borders, they will be unstoppable. For like the doctor who sees a once wild and dangerous patient rendered quiet and placid by the effects his electro-convulsive therapy, the glorious digital and untrammelled Id that represents our collective self, warts and all, will be blasted into submission and left, safe and inert, cured and cared for, in our new world, where nice is the new nasty and all bad thoughts have been erased. 

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© Nigel Wingrove 2013

Generation XXX - Born to Porn

Years ago in 1967 or 1968, when I was maybe ten or eleven years old, I found a stack of porn magazines while exploring the families rambling home in which various members of our extended tribe resided, the house had seventeen bedrooms, labyrinthine cellars and extensive grounds and had been requisitioned by the army during the second world war so finding exciting items in some abandoned corner was not that unusual, though I never found a wardrobe into Narnia or some secret passage containing hidden treasure which is what I was usually looking for. On this occasion though I had found a fencing sword and was having imagery battles in one of the older and more dilapidated parts of the cellars when I rammed the sword into an old blanket that was lying on top of a pile of coal, and with a deft flick of my wrist had hurled the blanket into the air revealing a box full of porn magazines. Treasure indeed!

I can't remember much about the magazines now and think that probably they were mainly American strong softcore titles, which meant that they would have contained full nudity, women in stockings and fetish gear and strong sex scenes but not hordcore penetration, though they certainly contained much stronger and a lot more graphic material than was readily available in the UK at the time. I remember being very excited about my 'find' and took one or two of the magazines into my Church of England Primary School the next day to show my friends. This proved to be a big mistake... 

When I got to school I showed the magazines to a few chums in the playground, the children went mad, shouting and screaming and calling their friends over and within minutes I was at the centre of a huge scrum of excited, almost hysterical boys and girls all jostling and fighting with each other to get a look at some naked flesh. Of course even in the non PC nineteen sixties a huge mêlée involving half the school was not going to be tolerated and soon a couple of our teachers waded into the throng to see what was going on and there in the middle was me, clutching a couple of, by this time, rather disheveled pictures of breasts and bottoms. I was also, I expect, smirking gleefully. 

Then all hell broke lose. I was marched to the headmasters office, canned, my mother called in, my father notified and with stern faces all round I was cross-examined as to where I had got hold of such filth and threatened with expulsion. I stuck to my story that I had found the magazines in a bin on the way to school, this still being a time when children could walk to and from school without fear, and eventually the matter was dropped. I'm sure that there was a bit more fallout but if there is it is now lost in the mists of time and I suspect too that our coal bunker only contained coal in future.

I mention this story of my childhood because over the last few days newspapers and the BBC have been full of stories regarding the readily available amount of pornography on the internet and how easily accessible that material is to children, teenagers and young adults and wanted to illustrate that up until a few years ago the exact opposite was true. The main gist of these articles is the concern many parents, psychologists and the wider society have that children's attitudes to relationships and to each other are being harmed by exposure to often pretty extreme pornography. This concern is more focused now because the wider availability of pornography began with the arrival of Web2o in the early noughties and now almost a decade later we are beginning to see children and teenagers of the Web2o decade become adults. 

This is the first generation that has grown up with pornography so readily available to them, yet they are also bombarded with warnings as to the malign, predatory and dangerous nature of sex. So in an already confusing world, sex is good and available at the click of button and bad because because every email or approach from an unknown adult is a paedophile out to do harm.

A new survey for the BBC has also shown that 8 out of 10 young men between 18 and 24 have looked at porn which is hardly surprising given that men of almost any age are thinking about sex virtually nonstop and between 15 and 30 are almost ready to explode with sexual angst so drooling over porn whilst not exactly edifying is hardly surprising. Nor is the fact that at least a third of young women have look at porn as well given that contrary to popular belief women are just as highly sexed as men if not more so, they are just a bit more circumspect in their drooling and lusting than men.

What is inconvertible though is that young people are seeing pornography at a younger and younger age and that is having an effect. The fashion for women to shave off their public hair stems from pornography, as does breast augmentation, labiaplasty and vaginoplasty. So did the demystifying of anal sex, cunnilingus and the introducing to a once fairly straight public a pornucopia of sexual proclivities covering everything from double penetration to fisting and beyond.

Many of these aspects of pornography are enlightening and for many empowering,

and, personally having fought adult censorship in the courts and having begun the legal process that legalized pornography in the UK, would not want to see the pendulum begin swinging back the other way. However it is not good that young children are accessing hardcore porn, yet the censoring of the internet is neither desirable or easily achievable unless the UK Government wishes to bring in draconian laws on a par with China or Saudi Arabia. Far better that we learn how to educate and help this new generation absorb what is going on around them and to understand, explain and reason the effects of what they are or will be seeing.

For boys this may mean explaining to them that what they see in porn does automatically equate to how they have sex with their girlfriend and that equally a girl doesn’t have to make love like a pornstar. They can and should be themselves. Most of all they need to understand that pornography needs to shock to survive, and as its audience and they themselves becomes jaded and immune through over exposure, so pornography as stimuli has to become increasing jaded in turn as unfortunately that is the nature of the beast.

Yes pornography is desensitising and should not readily be available to children, but pornography is only one aspect of a sexualized media that is bombarding children and adults alike with sexual images and messages in everything we see. From pop videos to the marketing of clothes and make-up, through to the antics of celebrities and reality TV contestants. The message being that sex is at the centre of everything and more than ever that message is 'if you've got it, flaunt it!'. 

The internet sex genie is out of the bottle and nothing short of an authoritarian or religious revolution will put in back in again. I suspect that now if a smirking ten year old brought a porn magazine to school he would find few takers and in a way that lost excitement of innocence is sad but time moves on. Now most young people will see porn as a kind of rite of passage to adulthood, they will look and then move on, some will have a problem with it, like others have problems with drink and drugs, but that is life and we cannot legislate for a minority. Far better to trust Generation XXX with being better able to handle porn and let them get on with making Generation YYY in their own natural way...

OOGLE ME

The last few months have seen a growing clamour regarding the sexualizing of children by parents, by the media, by retailers, by the music industry and by children themselves. This 'clamour' has been evoked by journalists, by books like Natasha Walter’s Living Doll, Pamela Paul’s Pornified and most recently by the Home Office's commissioned review into the ‘Sexualisation of Young People’ by Dr Linda Papadopoulos, the very media savvy Canadian psychologist who has appeared on TV programmes such as ‘My Big Breasts and Me’, ‘Celebrity Fit Club’ and ‘Big Brother’.

However, it wasn't until David 'call me Dave' Cameron jumped onto this august bandwagon and announced that he was, hand on heart, gravitas on face, 'very concerned that strap-ons and dungeonized Wendy-Houses were now being offered to five year olds' that things got really serious. Cameron’s carefully thought out response was that the Conservatives were going to rush through legislation that would ban ‘manipulative marketing techniques aimed at young people’, ‘strengthen the regulatory framework and give people the power to make complaints’, oh and ‘make Britain the most family-friendly country in the world’. So no pie-in-the-sky, knee-jerk policies there then.

Meanwhile, back on earth, the Home Office’s breathy new sexpert Dr Papadopoulos was appearing on countless TV shows, breasts heaving, lampooning lads mags and Beyonce videos for being too sexual. In actuality though Papadopoulos’s Home Office’s report covers a wide variety of topics, everything from the Internet, to sexual imagery’s impact on boys and girls, to relationships, to sexual violence and coercion, to pornography, computer games, fashion, music videos and body image. It is also full of sympathetic buzz words and phrases, of isms and concern. It talks of bullying - the new minority grouping, if you haven’t been bullied yet you soon will be - and partner violence.

The report is, in fact, a whole new layer of child protection, censorship, bullying and new words in the making, yet at its core are some very relevant concerns that should be addressed. The question is whether the media and, more importantly, the government, is capable of looking at anything that mentions children, sex, adults and the internet in the same breath, without immediately being consumed by apoplexy or, as David Cameron was, being compelled to adopt ‘concerned’ facial expressions and concoct legislative ideas out of thin air.

The reality is that children and adults now have access to hardcore pornography at the click of a button. Never in history has the human race had such a wealth of information, communication, imagery and graphic sexual material available, whether wished for or not. None of us know the long terms effects that such exposure will have on us or more particularly on young people growing up from birth in the age of the Net.

Already, theorists and psychologists and behaviorists have expressed concern at the inability of some children and teenagers to converse and fraternize with other people in a face-to-face situation. Though I tend to think that this is just using extreme examples to make a point rather than a comment on the young generally. However, without doubt, technology is changing our lives and none more so than the lives of the young and it is their unfettered ability to access ‘anything’ that is so alarming because it has no precedent, ever.

From head-hacking Taliban nasties, to gross-out anal gape videos to standard pornography to car crashes and celebrity sex tapes the whole lexicon of mans vileness and crassness is there for all to see at the click of a button. So as adults we can, if we chose to watch, deal with seeing anal gang bangs and watching Britney Spears chomping on her boyfriends penis, but can and should a ten year old? The answer is no.

As pre-Internet children, our journey to sexual awakening was varied and in many cases difficult. Some of us, no doubt depending on our age, saw adult magazines, TV programmes, films or videos, or whatever but in most cases these exposures would have been limited and for most of us seeing strong sexual content or pornography would have been rare. For many teenagers or children it would just have never happened. Now, given Internet access via mobiles, peer pressure and availability, I suspect that most teenagers and some children have looked at pornography a lot.

It may well be that exposure to strong sexual material will just be part of the rich tapestry of life in the 21st Century and maybe it will be. Certainly censorship isn’t the answer though education and sensible parenting is, though without an hysterical ‘something must be done’ approach from politicians and the media to drive our sensibilities. In fact far more invasive than pornography is the drip, drip of sexed-up imagery aimed at impressionable prepubescents,and child/adult crossovers that appear more and more in the media. Like Katie Price’s pictures of her three year old daughter heavily made up and looking like some bizarre hooker that she posted on Twitter or the sight of five and six years being dressed in sexually styled clothes by their parents who see it as cool. Yet in many ways these are the effects of the bombardment of imagery we all see and perhaps childhood is changing or adapting to the new technology as it must. Dr Linda Papadopoulos”s report and books like Living Doll are just some of the early manifestations of what will be an ongoing debate as people come to terms with the pornographization of the world and that the sexual act is now never more that a click away.

Porn is always the driver of new technology. Photography, film, video, DVD and the Internet have all been exploited commercially by the sex industry and now technology has made porn mainstream. Female pubic hair has all but vanished, breast augmentation and labia enhancement have been driven by women’s ability to see other women’s bodies in ways once unimaginable and equally perceive men’s responses to them. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is another argument and one that Dr Papadopoulos touched upon with her comments on body image but the fact is we are changing, our relationships, our sexual expectations, our emotions and how we respond to one another are all in transition and it is inevitable that we should be concerned. After all if Adam and Eve had had access to the internet its a sure bet that they would have posted and Twittered the first sex tape minutes after Eve bit into that Apple...