Britain’s Porn Ban Exposes the Lie of Sexual Liberation

Philip Larkin joked in his poem “Annus Mirabilis”—an ironical reflection on the sexual revolution—that “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three . . . / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.”

The Chatterley in question is of course D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In 1960, a prosecution brought under the new Obscene Publications Act against Penguin Books, the publisher of the first unexpurgated British edition of the novel, resulted in a unanimous acquittal. The trial is sometimes regarded as marking the dawn of the permissive society, and the rather halfhearted prosecution certainly demonstrated the fading moral authority and self-confidence of the old establishment; Anglican bishop John Robinson, later notorious for writing the crypto-atheist Honest to God, appeared as a defense witness, alongside liberal academics. 

Those who favored continuing restrictions on sex, violence, and bad language in media were constantly on the back foot thereafter. In 1968, the Theatres Act removed the longstanding power of the Lord Chamberlain to censor or prevent the performance of plays. The musical Hair, featuring full-frontal nudity, opened in London the day after the law came into effect. Another notorious obscenity trial in 1971, involving the short-lived satirical magazine Oz, did end in convictions, but these were overturned on appeal. Several well-known figures from the powerful, ascendant counterculture appeared for the defense, including Ronald Dworkin. The occasional wins scored by campaigners like Mary Whitehouse were shouts in a hurricane, given the changes occurring simultaneously all over the developed world. Blasphemy and decency laws remained on the books but were quietly ignored. The rise of the internet from the 1990s on cemented the victory of the sexual revolution by offering near-instant access to explicit material and to identity-based online groups, making it much easier to distance oneself, intellectually and morally, from the bonds of family, church, and community.

But all successful revolutions must eventually face the question, “Now what?” It is all very well to destroy an existing system of law, morality, taboo, and custom surrounding sex, as British elites and intellectuals have done over the last sixty years or so. The hard part is trying to piece together a coherent new system. 

Which brings us to a recent announcement by the British government: From November 6, it will be illegal in England and Wales to possess or publish pornography that depicts choking or incest. I’m sure most readers of First Things would be broadly supportive of any restrictions on obscene material. But singling out specific “genres” for prohibition, while implicitly endorsing “normal” pornography, raises many problems. The underlying logic goes like this: Viewing or producing pornographic material is not in itself a problem, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult. But particular types of pornography are liable to form vicious habits in people, encouraging them to act badly toward others in the real world, and so these must be restricted. In this spirit, a government minister told the BBC that they didn’t want to “[criminalize] harmless sexual preferences” but that normalizing and glorifying violence against women might “blur the line with what is acceptable in real life.”  

There is a sort of logic here. However, the underlying premise that most pornography is harmless in terms of real-world impact is far from self-evident. More broadly, there are huge tensions and contradictions inherent in the various attempts to manage the enormous downsides of sexual liberation, while preserving the overall ideological project. Sexual choking is itself an interesting example. Some anonymous surveys have suggested that this is something women actually seek out, rather than having it imposed on them by men. Does this make it unproblematic? Or does the mimetic component of human sexual desire mean that they are in some sense being tricked into liking it? Or does it not matter either way, because choking is intrinsically antithetical to the meaning of sexual intimacy? The contemporary ethic offers no clear answers to these questions, because it cannot help but frame them by reference to a particular person’s consent at a particular moment, when these questions are much deeper and wider.  

All sorts of oddities emerge from the attempt to minimize the damage of libertinism while not questioning the basic dogma of Do What Thou Wilt. Affirmative consent is an effort to counter the inevitable ambiguities and conflicting expectations that arise in a culture where sex officially has no inherent purpose or value.

Especially in the wake of the Cornell case, some commentators have tried to articulate a “consent plus” sexual ethic, where prospective sexual partners are enjoined to consider each other’s long-term health and well-being, and to have sex only in a context of shared expectations and understanding. Conservatives, of course, can reasonably point out that this sounds like reverse-engineering marriage from first principles. We already have a social technology to manage the minefield of sexual relations between men and women, in which the committed, permanent, and exclusive nature of the relationship is objectively defined and publicly agreed to by the participants.    

There is hope for advocates of a more humane sexual ethic. Most people across all generations remain extremely hostile to sexual infidelity, suggesting that at some level people understand the deep meaning of sex. Revulsion at the brutality of the contemporary sexual marketplace is a common theme in the testimony of converts to Christianity and is perhaps more widespread than pessimistic conservatives might imagine.  

To return to Larkin, even he, as a lifelong religious skeptic, was ambivalent about the dissolving of the old bonds. Reflecting on the new post-Pill world, he concluded his poem “High Windows” with an unsettling image of emptiness and ennui:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: 
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Image by Stadtarchiv Kiel via Creative Commons. Image cropped.