Cyberporn and Pornography - Sex Should Not be a Spectator Sport :: Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Pornography - Sex Should Not be a Spectator Sport    Some adults recall the days in the early Sixties with a certain nostalgia, as a time when people were still aware of the distinction between pornography and erotic art, and when erotic books and films could pass the censor only if a case could be made for their artistic value. Everything changed very suddenly, according to the poet Philip Larkin:    Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three. Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles' first LP.    But still, even though the permissive habits spread rapidly through society, breaking down taboos and breaking up marriages, people remained sensitive to the distinction between art and pornography, and had no objections to a law which forbade explicit sexual imagery. The recent judgment of the High Court, upholding the decision of the Video Appeals Committee (another collection of the Great and the Good) to allow the sale of videos showing explicit scenes of sexual intercourse, suggests that the last vestiges of decency are being finally chased from the law.    Like many distinctions which are intuitively obvious, that between the erotic and the pornographic is not easy to explain. It has been said that pornography is obscene, whereas erotic art is merely suggestive. But what is obscenity? The old test laid down in the Obscene Publications Acts of 1959 and 1964 holds that matter is obscene if it tends to deprave and corrupt those who are likely to come across it. But that test is flawed, since it looks for obscenity only in the effects of a thing, and not in the thing itself. Moreover juries are by no means competent to predict the effects of watching any particular film or reading any particular novel, and are easily swayed by smooth-tongued barristers who represent pornography as a healthy "safety valve" for feelings which could erupt in far more dangerous ways.    The fact is that the desire to watch explicit scenes of carnal lust is in itself depraved. It is not that explicit videos have a tendency to corrupt: they are corrupt. In the sexual sphere this is what corruption consists in - namely the display of sexual appetite divorced from the personal relations that redeem it. To justify pornographic videos on the grounds that they don't make people worse than they are is like justifying gladiatorial combat because it doesn't make people into