Dialogue: Porn - been around forever and definitely here to stay

By JOE BENNETT

Oh, it's so tedious and wrong. A judge or two has had a peek or two at a dirty picture or two. And so, say some, they shouldn't be judges.

Every male has his own private porn studio. It's called his head. At peak production shortly after puberty it can churn out a dozen reels a day of startlingly original material.

It needs no prompt. It gets no encouragement.

Indeed it gets the opposite of encouragement. It gets a pasting from every moral pulpit in the land.

Each man is taught to hide it. Each man is taught to feel shame. And yet the studio carries on in blithe disregard, pumping out its steaming torrent of images.

It does not corrupt its owner. It is its owner. Man is a lust-racked beast.

We can and do pretend this is not true. It is true. In later life the dream factory becomes less fertile. It still rolls out the films but it cribs more of its ideas from screen and print. And there is and always has been a wealth of material to help it.

We have pornography in Latin and in Greek. We have the Karma Sutra and the nudes that Titian painted to titillate the Pope.

Porn is as old as writing, as old, indeed, as drawings on the walls of caves.

Today it is an industry. In the USA the porn industry is bigger than the car industry. The internet is crammed with porn. It is so because men want it.

It is not good that it is so. It is simply so.

I may have met a man who has never riffled through a skin mag or watched a blue movie or dwelt on images that rouse him, but if I have I don't know who he is.

And I do know that I have met thousands, and I am one of them, who have in their time done all of these things. And we are not bad men. We are men.

"All men are rapists," screamed the strident women some 30 years ago and they were mad. Very few men are rapists. A randy man can also be a kind man.

A lusty man can be good. A man can surf the internet for porn and also be a judge, a fine and honest, wise and decent judge.

A judge has a job to do. To say he cannot do that job because he is randy is to talk startling nonsense. It is to say he cannot do the job because he is a man.

Men are capable of self-knowledge. Men are capable of knowing what is good and what is right while still being men. Their lust does not blind them. If it blinded them then all men would indeed be rapists.

But we have will and judgment and reason and sympathy. Without will or judgment or reason or sympathy there would be no courts of law, no civil society, things that men through history, men subject to lust, have forged.

Lurking behind all this is the presumption that people in authority should be androids, unstirred by the emotions that beset the rest of us.

With this presumption comes a hideous delight in exposing their frailty.

We pillory the judges, princes, kings and courtiers for having red blood in their veins, for being just like us.

We pelt them with the sour tomatoes of hypocrisy. It is, I think, the least appealing feature of that animal called man.

Women know men are randy. And they want men to be randy. Women strive to attract men.

They may pretend otherwise, but behind all diets, all make-up, all pretty clothes, lurks an evolutionary urge to be sexy.

But women also want men to be trustworthy and to restrain themselves and not to make unwelcome advances.

It is tough for men.

Come here, say the women, and keep your distance.

It is the endless dance of the mating game. Porn says only come here.

We live in a sex-driven world. Strip clubs litter the land. Increasingly the strippers are male.

Ladies Night drew huge crowds. Because it happened in that bastion of middle-class propriety, the theatre, countless women went to watch it with an almost easy conscience. Were any of our female judges among them? And if they were, do they differ one jot from their porn-surfing counterparts?

Yes they do, because at least one of the male judges attended his equivalent of Ladies Night when he was at work. He surfed the court computer.

He committed a crime, in other words, comparable with filching office stationery. He should be punished as all of us should be punished who have filched office stationery.

Let him who is without sin cast the first roll of Sellotape.