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Chauvanist (sic)
awakened by talk
on pornography
With IAN WARDEN
WEDNESDAY nigh's Lateline
(ABC, 10.30) was taken up
with a discussion of women
and pornography preceded by some foot-
age from an allegedly popular new porno-
graphic video in which a sturdy
blackamoor did exciting but unhygienic
things with a large, pale pink woman who
would, had he been alive, have interested
Peter Paul Rubens, the perverse dauber,
almost as much as she interested the
Othello lookalike she was with in the
movie.
The video, called Night Moves (in spite
of the fact that the passages shown by Mr
O'Brien showed the blackamoor and the
paleface making their moves by day and
beside a sunlit swimming pool), has al-
ready sold, we were told in a preamble
about the success of the pornography,
some 15,000 copies.
The observant reader who wrote some
time ago, I think from Tuggeranong, to
complain that I am "a drooling chauvan-
ist(sic)" will not be surprised to learn that
although I had been about to switch the
Toshiba off and go to sleep (10.30pm is
long after my bedtime but the balance of
my mind is disturbed, for the nonce, by
teetotalism) the glimpse of this welcome
example of racial harmony stimulated me
and gave me enough wakefulness to en-
able me to watch the program to the very
end.
The three guests quizzed by the urbane
Kerry O'Brien included the ubiquitous
feminist lawyer, Jocelyn Scutt, who was,
for a woman I have known to gnash her
teeth and roll her eyes when discussing
injustices against women, depressingly
calm and rational. Then there was a cere-
bral bimbo from the United States, a Ms
Nina Hartley, blonde star of more than
300 pornographic movies and now a
strong champion of the better movies (the
ones that show the orgasmic women hav-
ing enormous, equal fun and thereby
demonstrating that women can be sexual
beings) and a woman who has begun to
direct her own movies so as to make sure
that the message of utter erotic equality is
conveyed. Boyishly, I warmed to her, and
wondered if she had a fan club I might
join.
The other guest was a Ms Lynne Segal,
introduced as a feminist from the same
coven as Dr Germaine Greer and the
author of a book about women and por-
nography and currently in Australia to
extol it.
R-rated pornography presents signifi-
cant dilemmas for thoughtful, sensitive
men like this columnist.
Wc like to watch it and it makes our
testosterone warm and fizzy, and, ogled in
the company of a sexual partner who is
also tickled by it, it is hard to see what
damage it might do to the very fabric of
society. Perhaps it is because the balance
of the male mind is disturbed by porno-
graphy that men are not very good at
taking an objective look at the ways in
which it portrays women and perhaps this
is why Kerry O'Brien did not invite any
men to join in the discussion. And yet, on
those occasions when my testosterone has
not been so badly carbonated that I can
not think properly (I am, after all, 46½
and not quite the plaything of testoster-
one that I was) it does worry me that the
women in the movies do not seem to
resemble women in the real world but
seem to play the roles idealised for them
by priapistic chauvinists.
They are, as Lynne Segal made the
point on Wednesday, the same as the
women whose photographs appear in girl-
ie magazines in that they are portrayed as
endlessly available and endlessly arousa-
ble. Like men. This may mean that simple
or enflamed men may imagine that all
women everywhere are like that and are
suitable subjects for speculative harass-
ment or worse.
Ms Scutt wanted some censorship of
the porn videos by making it possible for
those movies that denigrated women to
be thought of as discriminatory, against
women, so that anyone outraged by a
pornographic video could do something
about it under the laws that prohibit sex
discrimination.
Ms Segal thought that it would always
be impossible to agree on what, in these
movies, demeaned women. Would it be
obvious, she wondered, that depictions
even of oral sex and anal sex demeaned
women if the woman engaged in these
things in the video was engaging in them
with a will. Ms Segal, bless her, veered to ||
Lateline's urbane Kerry O'Brien, quizzing feminists on pornography. Help
Lateline's urbane Kerry O'Brien,
quizzing feminists on
pornography.
|| the brink of saying something sympathet-
ic about men (Hell will freeze before. Dr
Scutt does that) when she said that porno-
graphy represents problems for men as
well as for women with men, imagining in
their silliness that it is manly to have what
she called, I'm afraid, "an ever active
prick" and relying on pornography to stir
that hitherto inactive organ into action.
Nina Hartley was a cheerful soul and
said that for her feminism meant that
women should have control of their bod-
ies which in turn meant that they should
be free to use their bodies to romp with if
it was what they wanted and that while
Hollywood movies tended to have stories
in which sexually assertive women are
punished by winding up dead, insane or
abandoned, the best porn movies and the
ones that she was going to make would
show women being sexually fulfilled and,
afterwards, alive and well and happy.
What adult things get discussed late at
night on television! I must try and stay up
late more often.
MEANWHILE, perhaps the best sus-
tained piece of children's television
drama ever made, Degrassi Junior High
(to be followed, one hopes, by a repeat of
its sequel, Degrassi High) has resumed,
without the fanfare it deserves, on the
Afternoon Show With Michael Tunn
(ABC, 5.00). Degrassi High begins at 5.30
after the unspeakable and speciesist Chip-
munks.
When Degrassi Junior High and then
Degrassi High were shown last year I
watched in awe as episode after episode of
this deft, moral, educating, liberating se-
ries dealt, through the school-based lives
of its characters, with every conceivable
problem and horror that might be expect-
ed to confront pubescent and post-pubes-
cent schoolchildren.
The Playing With Time Company,
makers of the series, baulked at nothing
and Degrassi tackles with fairness and
frankness and boundless sensitivity
everything from safe and unsafe sex, to
abortion and the case against abortion to
youth suicide to domestic violence to ho-
mosexuality to the sexuality of the handi-
capped. When it was shown last year and
when I found myself praising it and
urging every high school to tape it and to
use it to shore up and supplement any-
thing that schools might attempt to teach
about these vexed issues, some disap-
pointed fans, who look to my columns as
oases of malice and sarcasm in a paper
which sometimes seems a desert of
smarminess and bonhomie, wrote to say
that they hoped I would soon get better.
Alas, as far as the Degrassi series are
concerned, I remain an evangelist. They
are the only television programs I know
that do real good in the world. If you are
not encouraging your children to watch
them (mine have never needed any en-
couragement) then you are an inadequate
parent and should be reported to the au-
thorities.
$