Nick Smith: Porn? No, romance is the real risk

Photo / Thinkstock

When journalists write about sex or sexuality, they like to dress it up. Usually in Victorian tat, rather than modern bondage.

They clothe the topic in propriety by writing about the public interest rather than what the public is really interested in: sex in all its glorious contradictory and provocative glory.

The recent flurry of gosh-how-shocking stories about female consumption of pornography is emblematic. The creation and use of porn by women for women is one of the few growth areas in an industry that has suffered economic droop because of the internet.

Instead of reporting on changing perceptions of pornography and how many feminists defend it as a valid expression of sexuality, journalists quote several women who claim to be addicted to the stuff. According to the press, porn is still exploiting women but the victims are users rather than subjects.

The latter is news; the former ignored because it treats a subject seriously that some newspaper editors prefer to give a nudge and a wink to. These same editors who publish tut-tut articles about female porn also regularly run tits-in-frocks items dressed up as news.

If tits aren't available, they publish pictures of sharks.

Some serious young woman is now carving out an academic career by analysing media interest in seafaring carnivores and surgically enhanced mammary glands. The media will probably report the findings, illustrated with pictures of jaws and Pamela Anderson's decolletage. Not me. When I write about the subject there is no pretence: this is a column about sex.

What I loved about the female porn stories was how they turned mainstream ideas about female sexuality on their head.

It made perfect sense that some women, who are supposed to hate the objectification of the sexual act and the female body, would be big creators and consumers of the stuff. Any fruit if forbidden is fair game.

Similarly, many men confound public expectations. It is entirely understandable that senior executives who spend all their day bossing people around would pay to get their bums spanked in their downtime.

Many years ago I interviewed an Auckland dominatrix, Mistress Simone, who explained that many of her clients were the big swinging dicks of corporate legend, rich and successful men who wanted nothing more than to have a woman inflict pain and humiliation upon them. The mistress enjoyed her work, as did her clients.

A bigger mystery to me is not women watching porn, nor powerful men who are secretly submissive but why, in a country packed to the gunnels with intelligent, literate, stroppy femmes, romantic fiction is such a big seller.

I know it's the women reading this stuff; we men are too busy being spanked by comely PVC-clad wenches.

There's plenty of research and media coverage about the deleterious effects of pornography, but complete silence on the hidden cost of romantic fiction.

Hundreds of column inches are devoted to female porn addicts (and, seriously, these people are as credible as those men who claim an addiction to sex as the explanation for their philandering).

Yet nothing is written about the sufferings of women feverishly turning pages, while their brains silently atrophy. It's true that no one can hear you scream in books. This stuff promotes unhealthy gender roles, unrealistic expectations about sex and, worse, likely rots the brain.

Perhaps the arch-enemies of feminism are not Hefner and Flint, but Mills & Boon. Romantic fiction, not pornography, is the entertainment evil worthy of public censure.

Why can't women be more like men and take up a healthy pastime? Like spanking.