(151) Bleikur

I sometimes inveigh against pornography—“inveigh” is perhaps not the correct word, I’m not that strong about it—but I by no means wish to establish an order that ferrets out every lewd, naughty Blackpool Pier (anachronistic) image in the West. My admiration for the Taliban aside, that is not what the West is. And I don’t want to go back to late Victorian prurience where sweaty gentlemen with Pan-like beards would confiscate Bullfinch’s Ancient Roman and Greek Statues (157 plates) and recede back to their studies, slightly sweaty, to examine “material liable to corrupt the young and women, particularly wives and maidservants”.

No, to end up slightly sweaty, black marker in hand, hunched over images of a nude Greek goddess—salivation in the mouth—just takes it to another unhealthy extreme (of which the 1960s were the inevitable reaction). In fact, it is also feminine—the obsessive desire to root out all “indecency” and the desire that everyone should have OnlyFans are both fanatical positions; both unhealthy and both feminine. All I ask for is that commercial pornography should be debarred, that sites like OnlyFans should be OnlyBanned, and that it should not be possible to make money from pornography operations (no need to shroud Greek statues in black drapes—avert your eyes, ladies).

I don’t want to ferret out every n00d, lewd, or saucy sketch per DiCaprio in Titanic—and I’m fine with brothels, it’s just a bit much for every woman to be a whore. Anti-pornography campaigners often say that the women involved in pornography are victims of incest and so on—perhaps, but that’s just feminism. Pornography needs to be banned to protect men. The feminists are right: pornography empowers women, it increases their sexual influence over men and basically, to get Pavlovian, sets up a reward-orgasm mechanism connected to pictures of women; and that’s bad because it means you’ll feel good when you see women, when in fact women are atrocious liars (all religions agree)—don’t worship them.