Not all pornography, however, is violent. Some 95 per cent of it, according to Janet Strickland, shows both parties getting sexual pleasure. It is the five per cent, where the woman is unwilling and is brutalised to boot that sickens. To protest that kind of pornography, to raise people's consciousness about sexist sex, to ensure men are punished for assaulting and raping women is one thing. But to define all pornography as the enemy and to ban what adults watch in their homes strikes me as a kneejerk reaction to the perplexing realities of pornography.
Censorship cuts both ways.
If you believe that films should not be made about certain subjects, you must, therefore, believe that the people who are to see them are too stupid or deliberately blind or too ill-informed, to make up their own minds about those films. That's the basis of most male dictatorships over the centuries. I don't think the female version is any more attractive. That is a neat and succinct way of putting a viewpoint that I think sometimes gets lost in this perfectly understandable concern about the way in which pornography of the traditional hard core kind can be regarded as exploitative or degrading in its treatment of women. There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed in any serious debate about the banning outright of that kind of material.