By Jess McCabe | 11 February 2008, 17:33

Last month, Laurie Penny wrote fairly lightheartedly for us about censorship of porn. She got a fair few negative responses, as well as some from people in agreement with her.

Well, now she has expanded on her views a bit, over at her Red Pepper blog. She has an interesting perspective on the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, which readers may know includes a ban on some of the most extreme porn out there:

So why is it that pornography that appears to show necrophilia - a very rare and totally illegal practice that doesn’t really have much of a social discourse - is NOT okay, whereas pornography that shows live women appearing to be raped, humiliated and beaten to within an inch or their lives is totally fine?… The bill covers necrophilia, bestiality, ‘snuff’ movies and severe injury to the sexual organs. Rape, all other sexual violence, extreme female submission, double- and triple-penetration, humiliation, sexual cruelty - all of this fails even to make it into the draft bill, because it’s been normalised in western society.

The question of whether pornography directly causes or does not cause sexual violence somewhat evades the real issue. The reason that pornography is such a sticky problem, the reason that many feminists hate and fear pornography, is the same reason that many in the pro-patriarchal sphere are willing to go to the wire to defend it: mainstream, heterosexual pornography as it is mass-produced by western society holds up an accurate mirror to the violently misogynist world in which we are living.

Well worth a read!