Tag Archives: Abigail Bray

Anti porn activist responds to my Drum article

10 Nov
Dr Abigail Bray, whom I mentioned in my article on the Drum yesterday, left the following comments on Sheep last night:

 

Mr Wilson, having skimmed your prolific … blog… I find some of it ……

I was struck by your recent opinion that opposition to hardcore porn is a tyrannical middle class plot to censor the internet. What are you trying to say here? That working class people dig hardcore because they are working class and that as a champion of the oppressed one should defend the bent lusts of the lower orders ? Try knocking on the doors of a council estate in the UK and ask the women if they agree with you. As someone who grew up in a council house I have to warn you that they might greet your ideas with a short, succinct: ‘eff off you pervy pratt’. On the other hand if you go knocking on the doors of some well-heeled champagne socialists who have done lots and lots of expensive psychotherapy, studied Foucault (but skipped the bit about how the discourse of ‘choice’ operates as a dominant strategy of neoliberal governance) they might greet your ideas with a lot of ‘baaa baaaaa baaaaa’. (Which is the sound someone makes when they are eager to agree with correct displays of upwardly mobile neoliberal tolerance. It is also the noise a sheep makes btw). But of course this is ‘no place for sheep’. Sheep place for no, place no for sheep, for no place sheep, place for sheep no. There, I’ve done a little cut up to give you further proof of my hysteria. Now you can write a whole new blog about how MTR is associating with a cut up artist of dubious sanity. OMG!!!

Of course I have no scientific data to support my hypothesis that you will be greeting with a eff off or a baaa baaa which might make my hunch seem anti-intellectual or rapid, or even worse, like I am not as sexy as you. But please, do try a door knock and report back. Try Paulsgrove council estate.

Dear Dr Bray,

Thank you for taking the time to look me up and respond to my article.

You and I apparently share the experience of growing up on council estates – mine was in North Yorkshire, where I was raised until I was seven by my grandfather who was a coal miner, and my grandmother who had been “in service” prior to her marriage. I was then transferred to a professional family and educated.

Having established that my working class credentials are as solid as yours, let’s move on.

I have indeed read Foucault on the discourse of choice, and a range of feminist opinion on his theories. Because I don’t necessarily agree with a theory or count it as relevant at the time, does not mean I am unaware of it. I recall an earlier article of mine on the Drum where you left a comment claiming that I had never read Helene Cixous. You seem to want to engage me in some kind of intellectual pissing contest, as well as to trump me in a class war.

I made no mention of a working class in the latest article. I suggested that middle class anti porn activists are engaged in creating a deviant class, to whom they attribute a lower social status than they hold themselves. In my experience, “deviants” can emerge from any class, not least of all the middle, however when they embark on their “deviations” their class is likely to abandon them.

I have nowhere claimed that “opposition to hardcore porn is a tyrannical middle class plot to censor the internet.” This is a deliberate conflation on your part. I have no doubt that your opposition to such porn is founded in genuine concern, and I respect that concern. I do, however, oppose your beliefs that the way to address these concerns is to censor the internet. I have asked, many times, how you propose to put a stop to people profiting in any way from hard-core porn if you aren’t planning to censor the internet. Nobody has yet answered this question.

To return for a moment to the question of “choice.” I wrote the following in a post a couple of days ago:

If you want people to stop engaging in self-harming behaviour you don’t go about it by first shaming and marginalizing them. You first acknowledge their inalienable right to their subjective experience, however vastly it may differ from your own.

It’s a matter of respecting the human being without having to endorse her choices, and respecting her right to make those choices on the basis of  her life’s experiences. Anti porn activists totally fail to appreciate this. Instead they frame women in porn as a deviant underclass exploited by other members of that same class. They make them “other,” outside of what is considered mainstream “normality.” They construct women in porn as victims, brutalized, and incapable of choice and they seek to appeal to them as such. In this they are completely misguided. It doesn’t matter how damaged one might be, human beings still desire and need recognition of our inalienable right to totally fuck ourselves up, and unless we get it, we’re unlikely to hear anything else.

However conditioned our “choices,” and I agree that none of us escapes conditioning unscathed, they are still the choices we make within the parameters of our individual lives, and as such, they are to be respected as the decisions of a human being with the human right to act. Even if other people don’t agree with our actions, think they are destructive, or don’t consider them choices at all.

I seem to recall that Foucault also made some interesting arguments about power that might be well be applied here.

I must point out that I’m not a medical doctor or surgeon, I hold a PhD. Therefore I haven’t earned the right to the title “Mr,” but thank you all the same.

You are “not as sexy” as me? Isn’t that a reference to some kind of patriarchal sex contest designed to make us envy and hate one another as we fight for male attention?
Related articles

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Pornography, the Internet and class

8 Nov

On the Drum today, I’ve got a piece on anti porn activists and the internet filter. Thanks, Jonathan Green for publishing another point of view.

It seems reasonable when faced with strident action against a social more to require those opposing it to put forward their preferred alternative. In the case of anti pornography activists, it’s apparently impossible to persuade them to offer a framework of how they think sexuality ought to be expressed. Like Opposition Leader Tony Abbott they just say no, without proffering any other policies.

Viewed in the best light, anti porn activism is a cri de couer for the protection of women who some activists believe are exploited and degraded by the very existence of pornography; for the protection of children who may access internet content they are emotionally ill-equipped to process, and for the prevention of possible individual psycho-sexual harm that might interpolate itself into the fabric of society.

At its worst anti-porn activism is an attempt to control and shape the culture to fit particular religious, ideological and/or moral agendas. The moral entrepreneurs who are at the vanguard of the anti porn movement are overwhelmingly middle class, and it is from a middle class platform that they launch campaigns that express the horror, disgust and outrage evoked in them by pornography, as well as what they believe to be its ruinous effects on sexual relations.

All pornography is positioned by activists as deviant, regardless of the content. It’s extremely difficult to ascertain just what their range of “normal” sexuality includes. One activist, Professor Clive Hamilton, refuses to use the word “vagina” when attempting to describe close ups of “well, I don’t know what” in early editions of Playboy, for example. Many would find this male squeamishness towards female genitalia offensive. Are we to regress to such euphemisms as “down there?”

Those who produce, create and consume pornography are perceived as deviants who must be rescued, punished when appropriate, and hopefully redeemed to participate in non-pornographic sex. Global eradication of anything other than “normal” is the goal, without ever stating just what that “normal” might be.

Accounts written by activists of what they have seen in their forays into the netherworld of porn are like dispatches from Dante’s second circle of Hell:

The new porn zeitgeist is hard-core sadism. Hard-core porn turns misogyny into sexual fascism and sells it as freedom. There are countless “18 and abused” sites showing young girls being gang-banged while crying, drunk, vomiting, with guns and knives to their heads. Incest porn with girls being bashed about sexually by fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers. There is bestiality porn with dogs, horses, with eels. Torture porn, where young women are tied up and strangled, defecated on. There is Nazi fetish porn, lots of racist porn.

Feminised gay men being beaten and anally raped by hyper-macho gangs. Granny porn where older women are subjected to the now compulsory triple penetration and spat on for being old. There is even “retarded asian porn”, “retarded and horny”, “full on retard porn . . . legless sluts being triple penetrated”, amputee porn, dwarf porn, anorexia porn.” 

In this account of internet porn by academic Dr Abigail Bray the porn world is entirely comprised of victims. Young girls, women, grandmothers, feminised men, and animals are subjected to horrific violence, and all of it done to them by men.

I haven’t viewed any of these sites. Taking Dr Bray’s descriptions at face value and imagining myself part of such a world feels unspeakably awful, but that’s my personal reaction, not a universal absolute. Pornography is an expression of the vast and sometimes very frightening range of human sexuality, whether I like it or not.

It isn’t made clear if the victims (other than children and animals) have been forced to participate in these acts, but it is an assumption with which the reader initially co-operates. The description asserts “countless sites” depicting such pornography, so there must be correspondingly “countless” numbers of adult human beings engaging in its production, either by choice or under severe duress.

Who are these human beings and how did they arrive in the Second Circle? As yet there’s no comprehensive answers to those questions. Women who work in hardcore porn are, unsurprisingly, resistant to inquiries by outsiders

Women who have consented to interviews disassociate themselves from the kind of porn Dr Bray describes. They also express considerable aggravation with anti porn activists, who they feel are insulting and patronizing. They accuse anti porn activists of making life more difficult for them by portraying them as psychologically sick, morally bad, victimized, and in need of rescue. In so doing, the women claim, activists are in fact supporting porn producers in their opinion of the women they hire as disturbed, and highly exploitable. They also feel unfairly lumped in with women who endure more extreme hardcore violations. In the pecking order of the porn world, some women are proud of the choices they make and resentful of those who see them as part of an homogenous victimized mass.

Activists put forward hypotheticals in an effort to explain why women participate in violent and degrading porn. For example, they claim they are frequently women who were sexually abused as children. They are women who have developed high levels of tolerance for abuse, and have “abnormal” attitudes that permit them to accept degradation and violence others would find abhorrent. They are women who can’t or believe they can’t obtain employment in any other field. They are poor women, uneducated women, ignorant women. They are women who have sustained such damage that the question of choice doesn’t even arise: they don’t know that they are suffering because they have lost or never had the ability to recognize abuse.

There is little research available to confirm or deny these assumptions. The hypotheticals originate from middle class sexual morality and values, and/or religious beliefs about women and sexuality. There is often little attention paid to the social and political contexts in which the alleged early life abuses take place, or the economic systems that cause female poverty. This lack of analysis could lead to accusations of attempting to treat the symptoms while ignoring the cause, always an exercise in futility.

Assumptions about women who perform in porn need to be investigated through empirical research before they can be evaluated, rather than accepting classist, moralistic and religious prejudices as a basis for public policy. As things stand, a deviant underclass is constructed by anti porn activists, against which the moral values of middle classes voices raised in protestations of “isn’t it awful” and “what about our children” can be reassuringly measured. This is not helpful.

Very little hardcore porn is currently produced in Australia. There is not much homegrown activists can do to rescue women in sovereign nations that do produce it, and many of those countries already have legislation against some if not all the violence that is acted out.

However, activists are concerned that hardcore porn is easily accessed on the internet and is inserting itself into everyday Australian life. It’s claimed that a degradation of sexual values inevitably occurs, particularly amongst young people, many of whom are allegedly taking their sexual education from sites such as those described by Dr Bray, and enacting loveless, violent and genital-focused sex that uses women as objects for male gratification, and not as equal participants in a mutually satisfying act.

Anti porn activist and academic Gail Dines claims that 11 year-old boys are viewing violent porn that “deforms their minds,” though she offers no research to substantiate this claim. If 11 year-old boys are accessing hardcore internet porn, the responsibility for that must rest with their parents, who also bear the responsibility for offering their children intelligent sex education. Presumably middle class parents are considered more likely to do this, so are Dines and her followers referring to lower status families who apparently can’t be trusted to do the right thing? Where do Dines’ porn-consuming 11 year-olds come from? She doesn’t reveal the demographic.

Many activists such as Clive Hamilton see the problems presented by the internet as a matter for the state. They want internet censorship. In other words, the state must assume the role of disseminator of middle class religious and ideological sexual values, by imposing a ban on anything that class considers deviant and polluting. The activists apparently do not trust parents, or at least parents of a lower socio economic class to monitor their children’s internet adventures, for example with software that will filter content on the home computer. They argue that this responsibility belongs with government, and they seem to be entirely oblivious to the dangers of giving any government control over what its citizens may and may not view in the privacy of their own homes.

An Australian internet filter will do nothing to assist women who are unwillingly enslaved by pornography producers. It quite likely will exclude innocent sites, or be easily bypassed. The proposed list of banned sites is itself banned from public scrutiny, and that restriction alone should give us serious cause for alarm. As the link also reveals, there are already strict if somewhat mysterious classification laws in place in Australia.

But activists need to justify their existence, to show effectiveness, and to win respect from their peers. In this situation, the only possible measure of their “success” will be an internet filter. Their message is: you can have a sexual life like ours if you follow our sexual rules, (though we have yet to be told what they are) and our government will help you do that by forbidding you access to anything else. This places the government’s authority above God’s: at least God apparently permits free will, and the right to go to hell any way one chooses.

As the late Susan Sontag, American author, feminist, literary theorist and political activist, put it in her 1967 essay “The Pornographic Imagination”: If so many are teetering on the verge of murder, dehumanization, sexual deformity and despair, and we were to act on that thought, then censorship much more radical than the indignant foes of pornography ever envisage seems in order. For if that’s the case, not only pornography but all forms of serious art and knowledge–in other words, all forms of truth–are suspect and dangerous.


 

 

 

 

 

 

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Pornify this revisited

17 Oct

“The new porn zeitgeist is hard-core sadism. Hard-core porn turns misogyny into sexual fascism and sells it as freedom. There are countless “18 and abused” sites showing young girls being gang-banged while crying, drunk, vomiting, with guns and knives to their heads. Incest porn with girls being bashed about sexually by fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers. There is bestiality porn with dogs, horses, with eels. Torture porn, where young women are tied up and strangled, defecated on. There is Nazi fetish porn, lots of racist porn.

Feminised gay men being beaten and anally raped by hyper-macho gangs. Granny porn where older women are subjected to the now compulsory triple penetration and spat on for being old. There is even “retarded asian porn”, “retarded and horny”, “full on retard porn . . . legless sluts being triple penetrated”, amputee porn, dwarf porn, anorexia porn.” 

This is an extract from a piece written by Dr Abigail Bray in the Sydney Morning Herald last week on the dangers of pornography. Dr Bray is co-author with Melinda Tankard Reist of the latest Australian collection of anti pornography stories.

On reading this piece I was immediately reminded of a series of articles on the Drum written by Tankard Reist to which I responded with a contrary point of view. Given the publication of their book, and the spate of extracts from it recently, it seems timely to put up my Drum piece again.

One of the big problems I have with many anti porn activists is their apparent inability to distinguish between the rage they feel at the sight of an actor’s cleavage and the rage they feel at violent porn. If you happen to be someone who doesn’t care much about people showing cleavage and do care about violent criminal porn they can’t hear your point of view. It’s all or nothing with them. Problem is, when they get apoplectic about pole dancing and knickers, they’ve undermined their credibility when they come to protest the hard-core sadistic stuff that I’m sure is out there.

Pornify this

The recent Drum articles by Christian sexual conservative Melinda Tankard Reist are based on appeals to presumed universal truths and values. Melinda is in the business of creating totalising cultural narratives, rather than finding solutions to concrete issues women face.

Totalising narratives quite rightly arouse the healthy ire of thinking people, even more so when they are sexually proscriptive. Faced with these attempts to legitimise as universal the limited authority of one particular perspective, a thinking woman has to lodge her protest. So, Melinda, pornify this.

Censor and ban, ban and censor

It seems there is little in popular cultural representations of female sexuality that escapes Melinda’s disapproval. Even, I see on her website the US underwear company Victoria’s Secret,and twenty something TV star Lea Michele appearing on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine showing cleavage, offends her conservative values.

The latter incurs wrath because Michele is, in Melinda’s terms, “sexifying” herself, and in so doing setting a bad example to the teenagers who watch Glee in which she plays a considerably younger character.

Christian sexual conservatives seem to have embarked on a mission to pathologise the entire world, rather than realistically deal with inevitable and at times large pockets of dysfunction. Their solution? Censor and ban.

The problem with the censor and ban approach is that it addresses the symptoms while completely ignoring the cause. It’s the easy way out. Just have the offending song, video, advertisement removed from the public gaze, and then pretend the forces that led to its creation don’t exist anymore.

They do. They’ll erupt again. Repressing them will not make them go away. We have always known this.

The Patriarchy did it

Tankard Reist is about to surpass Derrida in her creative use of neologisms such as sexification, adultification, childification, and pornification, all terms she uses to describe what men are doing wrong to women, and what women are letting men do wrong to them.

Infantalizing women (a psychological action, as opposed to childifying us, which is sartorial) is part of the sexual conservative’s strategy. Women are acted upon. Even when we think we’re exercising agency we aren’t really, because our actions are predetermined by the overwhelming influence of the patriarchy.

This is where Christian sexual conservatism intersects with radical feminism, resulting in, dear God, I don’t know what. Every act of heterosexual intercourse is an act of rape unless it results in a baby girl?

If we follow this infantalizing to its logical conclusion, women aren’t responsible for anything. The only other human beings not required to take responsibility for themselves are babies, and those without the capacity.

Of course, women are also responsible for everything, which makes us goddesses. There’s no middle ground in these metanarratives.

Sexified, pornified women allegedly aren’t politically sophisticated or intelligent enough to recognise their collusion in their own process of -ification. Only unsexified women know what’s really going on. The process of sexifying yourself destroys your brain.

As with all lies that work, there is some truth in it. I recall occasions when I’ve severed contact with my mind and made decisions from another part of my anatomy entirely. But I fought my way back, and I can’t remember what I was wearing.

This attitude puts MTR in bizarre alliance with factions that hold beliefs such as: blondes are brainless. You can’t be a pole dancer and have a PhD. You’re being exploited and you’re only happy in your thong because you’re too ignorant know you’re being exploited. Female sexual power is an illusion, and the notion that it is an expression of assertiveness is false.

Well, if it is such an illusion, why the struggle to keep it in chains?

That which we most fear becomes our obsession, observed Hélène Cixous.

How to pornify yourself

A woman doesn’t have to do much to sexify and pornify herself in the world of MTR. Just wear lacy panties and an uplift corset from Victoria’s Secret, and you’re in.

If childification is more your thing, pull on a pair of white knee socks and suck on a lollipop while tugging at your t-shirt. You can also sit on a bench and show your panties. Either of these looks (and many others shown on her website) will incur MTR’s pity, and her undisguised contempt.

You may like these looks, or you may find them silly, but are they really part of an orchestrated patriarchal attack on women’s human rights? Think about the real attacks on women’s human rights round the globe, rarely mentioned by MTR, by the way, and only when they comply with her ideology as an anti choice feminist, and then answer that question.

The beast in them

The message I am taking from these articles is that for MTR there is no acceptable public representation and expression of female sexuality.

In holding a belief shared by, among others, the Taliban, she seems to feel that public (I don’t know why, but I hardly ever type “public” without leaving out the l) displays of female flesh lead inevitably to a culture of exploitation and rape, turning sane men into the beasts they all secretly are.

The beast in me, is caged by frail and fragile bonds…

Ergo, women must not reveal their flesh, or not the bits that could be seen as erotic. That’s pretty much everything, if you’re imaginative.

All those KanYe West and Brian McFadden lyrics churning round in men’s animal minds, causing them to lose what little sense of decency they might just have been born with, if they were lucky, and then, dammit, a woman in a sparkly thong hoves into view, and she’s not wearing it on her foot, either.

In the world the conservatives inhabit, not only are all women too stupid to know if they’re being exploited, all men are too base to think about a woman as anything more than a root, a drunken root if possible, or if it’s KanYe West we’re talking about, a dead root.

The discourse of sexual conservatism, like that of radical feminism, depends on stereotypes and generalisations. Without them, they both implode.

The contempt these attitudes reveal for humanity in general is disturbing. Add to that the conservatives’ insistence that young men in particular have no capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality, learning from the lyrics of pop songs and videos to behave very badly towards women, and the sexual conservatives are unmasked as religious and anti modern fascists.

As a mother of young men who negotiate popular culture and emerge with loving and generous hearts, I find their attitude offensive.

So, tell us the right way to show off our tits

If I’m doing you sexual conservatives wrong, just tell us what kind of public (oops, that wretched l again) representation and expression of female sexuality you do approve of. Show us a picture. You’ve shown us plenty of pictures of what you don’t like. Now show us a picture of something that fits your criteria. If you have a positive vision of how a woman can express her sexuality, now’s the time to share it.

This is important because it isn’t enough to tell young women what they shouldn’t emulate. You need to be able to offer a positive alternative model. So far, all we’ve heard is unrelenting negativity, and the ongoing, indiscriminate blaming of all men.

Are your husbands, sons, brothers, dads, uncles, cousins, boyfriends, lovers and friends included in the generic “men,” by the way? Or are you lucky enough to have scored the only good ones on the planet, and the rest of us copped the duds?

Some women want to show their bodies, and I can’t see a single thing wrong with that. The human body can be glorious. Breasts can be wondrous. Read the Song of Solomon. In itself the body is always wholly innocent, and tainted only by the perceptions and judgments we inscribe upon it. Prove me wrong.

Decades of feminist rage against men and the patriarchy has not solved our problems with each other. Rather than continuing to rage about what men shouldn’t do and should be, can we focus instead on what women can do and can be, and leave perceived male failings aside for a while?

It will take the whole village, rather than an individual sarcastically demolishing a hapless male writer of really stupid songs. But such a redirection of energy might just lead to empowerment in a way that victimology, complaint, ideology and blame never can.

This piece resulted in some 472 comments, the majority of which were in whole or partial agreement, except for someone hiding behind the screen of anonymity who pursued me round the blogosphere for weeks, and I finally figured out just who she is. Ha ha!

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Clive Hamilton needs a lesson in ethics and manners.

26 Sep

In June this year Hugh Hefner opened a new Playboy Club in London. When asked about the feminist demonstrators outside, Hefner said: “Playboy and the Playboy Clubs were the end of sexism.”

The sad thing about this statement is that Hefner probably believes it. Hefner is at one with those postmodern radicals who believe girls are empowered through the exploitation of their sexuality and that participating in the making and consuming of porn is a valid part of that. Clive Hamilton.

These are the opening paragraphs of ethicist Clive Hamilton’s essay “Rescuing sex from porn,” published in ABC Drum’s Religion and Ethics section last week.

The sad thing about Hamilton’s statements is that he apparently really believes anyone who disagrees with his understanding and definition of pornography and female sexual empowerment is automatically Hugh Hefner’s best buddy. In making sweeping (and many may feel insulting) assumptions such as that one, Hamilton signals his intention to frame the debate as a “George Bush: you’re with us or against us” battle between the forces of good (Hamilton and his buddies Gail Dines, Melinda Tankard Reist, Abigail Bray, et al) and evil (Hugh Hefner and everybody on the planet who disagrees with Hamilton and his buddies, even if we aren’t wild about Hefner either.)

Anyone who believes girls are “empowered” through what Hamilton considers “exploitation of their sexuality” is a “postmodern radical,” whatever that might be, clearly nothing good as far as Clive is concerned, and someone too ignorant to know there’s a difference between empowerment and exploitation to boot.

The “postmodern radical” also believes that the production and consumption of porn is a valid  part of female sexual empowerment. Really?

How does Clive get himself to these conclusions? Oh, silly me, it’s not difficult when all “postmodern radicals” share the same sensibilities as Hugh Hefner.

So, let me get this straight. A postmodern radical is someone who thinks that Playboy was the end of sexism?

A postmodern radical is someone who can’t tell the difference between empowerment and exploitation?

A postmodern radical confuses sex with pornography and needs Clive, MTR, Gail and Abigail to rescue him or her from that cesspool of confusion and filth?

A postmodern radical is a really, really bad thing to be?

If you don’t agree with Clive Hamilton you’re a postmodern radical and therefore probably really, really bad?

Excuse me while I get some air, I’m totally overcome by the ethical elegance of Hamilton’s arguments.

I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m getting seriously irritated by  Hamilton’s codswallop disguised as ethics. I’d like to know what exactly is ethical about stereotyping other human beings because they disagree with you? I’d like to know what is ethical about reductionism?

I’d like to know  what is ethical about an argument that lumps every dissenter in with every other dissenter and concedes no variation in their dissent, rather condemns the whole lot solely because it does not accord with your point of view?

Sweeping generalizations are the hallmark of many anti porn arguments, and their fatal weakness. Sweeping generalizations are intellectually lazy, and dehumanizing. They are the antithesis of ethical debate.

There are many decent, ethical, and generous people who have profound concerns about certain types of pornography and its possible effects, and many people who have serious concerns about the treatment and well-being of actors who participate in its production. It is disgraceful that Clive Hamilton should contemptuously dismiss such people because they may disagree with him on the definitions and understandings of pornography put forward by him and his fellow activists.

Nobody owns the rights to moral and ethical concerns about the production, consumption and effects of pornography. Mr Hamilton and his fellow activists do not determine for the rest of us what those concerns are or should be by high handedly assuming an imaginary right to legitimize and validate them, according to their own beliefs and values.

If Mr Hamilton and his fellow activists are to continue to complain about being described as “anti-sex wowsers” perhaps they need  to consider that their own acts of reductionist stereotyping are equally alienating, and serve equally little purpose.

If the attitude of anti porn activists continues to be one of “you’re with us or against us” they will achieve nothing lasting. Nobody will listen to them, except those who are already in agreement. They need to remind themselves that they are merely a part of society, not the whole, and that there is a wide range of opinion on this topic from people equally, and sometimes more, intelligent and informed as themselves.

That’s if they want to be ethical.

And if they don’t, then where do they get off, bagging Hugh Hefner?

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