Gerry Dawson

The politics of pornography

(July 1971)


From Socialist Worker, 24 July 1971. [1]
Reprinted in Chris Harman (ed.), In the Heat of the Struggle, Bookmarks, London 1983, pp. 64–5.
Transcribed and marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.


BOTH OZ magazine and The Little Red School Book have been on trial for their ‘obscenity’. They were accused under the Obscene Publications Act of 1964, an Act whose alleged purpose, said the Solicitor General in parliament, ‘is to strike at and to hit what I might call the Soho bookshop and the importers of prurient pornography’.

Yet under its clauses, Spankers’ Monthly, Leather News and the Soho novelettes that cater for sadism and self-hatred boom, while publications combining radical politics with sexual frankness are continually persecuted.

The long mackintosh brigade’s need for masturbatory excitement is discreetly and profitably attended to, but school children whose revolt really scares our rulers must stay in sexual ignorance.

The Little Red School Book puts a sensible and modern morality in plain and honest English. In sexual matters it urges mutual respect and gives unvarnished facts about masturbation and contraception.

There is no sanctimonious moralism and none of the preaching tone which puts so many kids off reading anything at all written for them about sex.

It explains about drugs in a straightforward and factual way, again avoiding the sensational and obviously exaggerated alarmism that causes so many drug warnings to children to go unheeded.

But its real crime in the eyes of the authorities is not its obscenity but its outline of children’s and pupils’ rights and its suggestions for class-room democracy. The politics are a lot less than revolutionary but educational liberalism, put plainly and taken to its logical conclusions, is quite enough to terrify many of those who run our authoritarian school system.

In this case obscenity means little more than encouraging people to disobey teachers.

In the OZ case, the issue concerned was produced by a team of mainly London schoolchildren who were invited by the editors to guest edit an issue of the underground magazine. The issue they produced centred on the school system with articles from various points of view on the need for reform

It includes a brilliant account of the visits made by a Schools Action Union ‘guerrilla theatre group’ to present a play in the grounds of various North London schools.

The troupe, despite the interest and support of kids, were without exception thrown off the premises by the teachers, unable to deal rationally with the slightest threat to their authority.

Other articles deal with the politics of SAU, examples of ‘school atrocities’, including beatings, censorship and political expulsions. The only prosecution witness at school called spoke of his expulsion after the issue went on sale and subsequent police harassment.

The school kids also contributed some searing cartoons on the suppressed sexual sadism of corporal punishment and the repressions which churn beneath the gamesmaster’s healthiness. The prosecution insisted on discovering details of obscenity in the drawings, invisible to the normal eye. The judge, for example, insisted that a rolled copy of OZ in a drawing of a skinhead was in fact an erect penis, a suggestion for which no one else in court was able to see the slightest evidence.

The prosecutor refers throughout to oral sex and homosexual lovemaking as ‘perversions’.

The archaic charge of ‘conspiring to corrupt public morals’ in fact means encouraging school kids to express their ideas with a free hand. Critical thought and sexual frankness become obscene in a world which cannot stand up to either.

The debate on pornography can take place within a conventional political framework. The ideology of the Tory rank and file demands of its leaders a self-righteousness on sexual matters which seems to imply that sex does not even exist except as an occasional and unpleasant transaction between a married couple in pyjamas to produce Tory babies.

Sir Gerald Nabarro’s (58, MP for Kidderminster) recent attack on sex education films and The Little Red School Book seem to have been inspired both by local electoral considerations and a genuine outrage at the thought that teachers of children might in fact possess genitals and make use of them.

The Victorian upper class hypocrite who eulogises the sanctity of the family while he makes sexual use of working class girls after they have done a day’s manual work was seen by Marx as embodying the reality of bourgeois family life: prostitution.

Nowadays the same hypocrisy is at work in the handlebar moustached censor who seeks to deprive women and girls of the knowledge and control over their bodies that science has made available. Guilt and self-hatred that arise from sexual innocence can only serve to strengthen the ruling class, whose ability to influence people’s ideas about themselves has never been greater.

There is a sort of erotic reformism which suggests that quite literally ‘all you need is love’. Its attractiveness is as considerable as its ineffectuality.

But in reaction against it, socialist puritans are in danger of ignoring one of the most intimate of capitalism’s contradictions. Engels was right when he pointed out ‘that with every great revolutionary movement, the question of “free love” comes to the foreground.’

*

Note

1. Gerry Dawson was a pseudonym use by David Widgery.


Last updated on 22 October 2020