Paul Thomas: First to cop the porn backlash

In the course of one of his dogged quests through the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles, Raymond Chandler's fictional detective, Phillip Marlowe, is mockingly described as "a shop-soiled Galahad".

Like Chandler's work generally, the line retains its impact. In fact, it has become code for a popular culture archetype, the tough, wise-cracking private eye. Despite their cynical exteriors and obvious flaws, when push comes to shove Marlowe and his trench-coated successors line up on the side of the angels, knights errant in a world without chivalry.

In his essay The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler wrote: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is himself neither mean nor afraid."

The streets are much meaner now than when Marlowe was venturing forth 60-odd years ago. He was no saint and it's questionable whether society can retain the upper hand in the never-ending battle against the predators and the outlaws if we insist that our front-line troops behave like Girl Guides.

Marlowe was coolly and cleverly insolent, and authoritarians and phoneys brought out the best in him. Because of his contradictions - he was a romantic with a puritanical streak - Marlowe had trouble keeping on an even keel where women were concerned and, like his creator, he was fond of, if not reliant on, a drink.

Today he'd probably just boot up his lap-top and log on to filth.com, as many of our police officers are prone to do in a quiet moment. Given that the thin blue line is so thin that mundane break-ins and burglaries are often ignored and 111 calls go unanswered, you wonder where these porn-hounds find all this quiet time.

Ultimately, though, this affair is more about society's attitude to pornography than establishing just how shop-soiled our Galahads are.

As the witch-hunt widened to take in the entire public sector, State Services Commissioner Mark Prebble made a sensible point: assuming it wasn't illegal, the nature of the material was irrelevant; if it wasn't work-related, it shouldn't have been there.

A sensible point to which the obvious response is: stroke the other one, mate. Does Prebble really think this matter would have assumed the proportions of a national scandal if 330 cops made a habit of logging on to the New York Times Review of Books or allblacks.com?

Former Christchurch women's prison boss Celia Lashlie raised the question of whether police officers who consume pornography may be influenced by its depiction of women as sex-mad bimbos for whom too much is never enough.

An important question in this context, but perhaps she overstates her case by asserting that "you can't watch a pornographic image where a woman is being subjugated and then go out and deal appropriately with a prostitute who's just reported a rape".

That "can't" seems a bit sweeping to me. There's no doubt that some men and probably some policemen take pornography's core anti-women messages to heart; what's less clear, in big-picture terms, is whether pornography causes men to adopt bad and dangerous attitudes towards women or whether men with bad and dangerous attitudes towards women gravitate to porn.

I suspect that most men read and watch pornography for simple titillation and feel pretty much the same way towards women after they've been titillated as they did before.

What this and similar episodes suggest is that pornography has much the same status as smoking: legal but shameful. There's an evident contradiction here, given that we're bombarded with sexual imagery by the mass media and, as a society, have adopted a "whatever turns you on" attitude to sex in general.

It's interesting to observe where the Swedes have got to on this issue, given that they played a big part in getting the ball rolling.

Despite being regarded as the spiritual home of the permissive society, Sweden is engaged in a backlash against pornography.

Private Media Group began life in Sweden as a monthly pornographic magazine. It's now listed on the Nasdaq and achieved revenues of US$49 million ($67 million) last year, but has been effectively disowned by the Swedes. When a Stockholm equity analyst issued a "buy" recommendation for PMG last year, his analysis was hastily withdrawn and he soon left the brokerage.

While this formula - grudging and ever-more-prescriptive legality accompanied by glacial social disapproval - might eventually succeed in weaning us off smoking and porn, it won't be smooth sailing.

Along the way some harmless, law-abiding individuals will be hung out to dry by the media, our enlightened society's equivalent of being put in the stocks. Inevitably, too, there will be a backlash against the backlash, the leaders of which will position themselves as defenders of freedom of speech and expression against the thin-lipped, book-burning zealotry of the nanny state and prohibitionist lobby groups.

I might be showing my age here but didn't we go through all this not that long ago?