Northern Eye by BOB KIMMINS :The purge of pornography

Bob Kimmins

Wiping pornography off the face of Thailand is proving rather futile, as today, anyone journeying the information highway can easily access pornographic websites and failing that, dirty magazines and DVDs are always close at hand.

To effectively prohibit this form of entertainment, art, filth or whatever, all books, discs and computers would have to be banned, but even then people could draw on the wall, as they did so in the distant past.

Sexually explicit images have been ingrained in almost every civilisation since the year dot. Prehistoric cave paintings of a sexual nature can be traced back more than 12,000 years, and in Asian countries, erotic art has always had its spiritual connotations within native religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto and Taoism. And ancient Greeks and Romans used this form of sexual expression in their decoration, religious beliefs and cultural practices.

In those days, little was made of this form of art, but when Victorian England decided the time had come to "not corrupt the sensibilities of women, children and the working class", "pornography" was born in 1857 and prohibited under the Obscene Publications Act. Seven years later this word was described in Webster's Dictionary as "licentious painting employed to decorate the walls of rooms sacred to bacchanalian orgies".

But all prohibition achieved was a huge black market. In Paris between 1848 and 1860 the number of photo studios producing pornography rose from 13 to more than 400 - exporting worldwide to mainly England and the US.

Changing the ordinary into the illicit created enough interest to change pornography into a marketable major commodity.

Modern technology

In 1900, France began producing nude publications under the guise of "art magazines", which eventually led to glossies like Playboy and Penthouse. Regarded as soft porn, these magazines went into general circulation in the mid-1900s, but within a decade, illegal books and magazines were showing the full sexual act with all its variations.

Movies soon followed in reels and reels and by the 1980s videotapes had materialised. Today, the Internet and DVDs bring pornography into the home, and with it the sex stars.

Former door-to-door salesman and forklift truck driver John Holmes shot to porn stardom by sporting a manhood of between eight and 14 inches, depending on his mood. Earning up to $3,000 (Bt105,000) a day, Holmes made more than 2,000 movies, with an estimated 10,000 partners - both female and male. Finally, a drug habit, murder indictment and Aids caught up with him and he died aged 43 years.

But not all porn stars come to a sticky end. By 18, Traci Lords had made 100 adult films. But her arrest for performing underage sex heralded a turning point in her troubled career.

Lords rechanneled her life into mainstream B movies that led to a Best Actress Award at the US Comedy Arts Festival. After appearing in a number of TV shows and launching a successful singing career, she became pregnant to her third husband, Jeff Lee.

And let's not forget Mary Carey and Cicciolina, who both took a giant leap from porno into politics.

The opposition

Mary Whitehouse mounted her battle horse in Britain's sexually free 1960s and secured 500,000 signatures on her "clean up TV" petition. After such a good start, she went overboard by citing innocuous kid's shows and cartoons unfit for viewing.

Whitehouse suffered the height of derision; her name was used in jokes, song lyrics and a pornographic book logo. She tended to speak without thinking, and after publicly condemning the movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral", she reportedly added that she had never even seen it.

At around that time, Lord Longford launched a similar offensive, only to meet with the same sort of ridicule, and he became better known as Lord Porn.

A majority of people wouldn't openly admit to viewing pornography, but their attitude towards Whitehouse and Longford clearly stated their case. Denmark was the first country to legalise pornography in 1969, followed by Holland later that year, Sweden too 12 months after that and West Germany in 1973. The opposition had been severely weakened and today most countries accept most forms of pornography, but with conditions such as age limits and outlawing paedophilia and violent material.

In a Wikipedia survey of 38 countries, only six had a total ban on pornography, with only Vietnam strict in claiming total non-availability.

In 2001, a worldwide Internet survey carried out by Jupiter Media Metrix showed that 35 per cent of almost 100 million Internet users had logged into pornographic websites. And these users spent an average of 90 minutes a month viewing their sexual content.

Over recent years, one wonders which direction Thailand is heading. If the Internet is suppressed and other media stifled, we might have to go back to scrawling on the walls.