Paul Thomas: Porn is still poor form for many

Photo / Herald on Sunday

The official line on Shane Jones' disgrace is that it's not about the porn. MPs can watch what they like in the privacy of their hotel rooms as long as they don't make the taxpayer pick up the tab, even temporarily.

The press coverage suggests otherwise. Despite the comparatively paltry sum involved, the media had a field day with the porn and might still be doing so if Chris Carter hadn't flounced in and out of the spotlight.

Jones tried to portray himself as a "red-blooded, robust dude" but the media weren't buying it: as far as the headline writers were concerned he was the Minister of Sleaze.

It seemed our media had caught a mild dose of the English disease, that blend of savage glee, sanctimony and prurience which galvanises the British tabloids whenever they discover a public figure has a less than vanilla private life. It was left to the redoubtable Rosemary McLeod to explain why the porn mattered.

"Our personal behaviour is what we are," she wrote in the Dominion-Post, "and the soundness of the state has to be a reflection of the soundness of the people who run it. That involves individuals' judgements and any lonely vices that have an impact on it."

The true mark of a man then is what he does when he thinks no-one's looking.

This seems dangerous on a few counts.

Firstly, it's a snoop's charter. It implies that we have the right to know everything about our prospective leaders' private lives. Given that they're hardly likely to volunteer dark secrets, we'd also have licence to peep and ferret around to ensure they're telling the truth.

Secondly, what constitutes a vice? Mahatma Gandhi slept naked with teenage girls, supposedly to prove to himself - and presumably them - that he took celibacy seriously. Apparently he also gave them enemas. Feel free to speculate on precisely what that was meant to prove.

Pope John Paul II used to whip himself. In some quarters this is seen as further proof of his suitability for sainthood; in other quarters it would be seen as evidence of masochistic tendencies.

Former US President Jimmy Carter, who's about to celebrate his 64th wedding anniversary, revealed during the 1976 election campaign that he sometimes looked at women other than his wife and "felt lust in my heart." Does that make him unsound or merely imperfect?

Thirdly, how relevant is it to the big picture? Carter is probably the most high-minded occupant of the White House in recent times.

His altruistic endeavours since leaving office have made him the benchmark for ex-presidents. The consensus, however, is that he was an ineffectual president.

By all accounts the teetotal, monogamous George W. Bush's personal conduct was impeccable, yet impeccable isn't the word that springs to mind when assessing his performance and legacy.

Perhaps saintly individuals can be outstanding leaders, but history and common sense suggest it's a rare combination. And why should this test and associated scrutiny be restricted to politicians? In a narrow sense they run the state, but they get a lot of help from civil servants. Why not apply it to everyone who exercises influence over our lives: business leaders, celebrities and even journalists, although that would require someone else to snoop, weigh the evidence, and sit in judgement?

What this episode clearly demonstrates is that two and a half decades after the Lange Government legalised hard core pornography as part of its project to drag New Zealand into the 20th century, our attitude towards it remains equivocal to say the least.

In 1975 the total retail value of hard-core pornography in America was estimated at somewhere between $7.5 and $15 million. By 2000 that figure had risen to almost $12 billion. Porn is bigger than Hollywood, bigger than pop music.

Its penetration - if one can use that term - of popular culture becomes more evident by the day. To take one example, Christina Aguilera's latest video is a soft-core lesbian S & M extravaganza. She may blather on about sexuality being empowering, but the reality is that she's got a lot of ground to make up on Lady Gaga: the now conventional way of doing that is to wheel out the pornographic iconography and up the sexual ante.

Porn clearly has a massive customer base, but belonging to it is still seen as shameful and grubby, a high tech version of the dirty old man emerging from the second-hand bookshop stowing a brown paper parcel inside his stained, shabby mac.

If Jones had charged mainstream films - slasher movies say, in which young women are horribly murdered - to his ministerial credit card, his rehabilitation would already be underway.