What Porn Is Really For

By Clive James, BBC. Posted April 7, 2009.

Editor's note: Britain is currently being rocked by controversy over news that the husband of Jacqui Smith, Britain's Home Secretary (responsible for internal affairs for England and Wales) charged several porn films to her parliamentary expense account. Smith is already being investigated for expensing thousands of pounds worth of purchases for her home. Her husband's accidental use of taxpayer money for pornography has added fuel to the scandal. Below, author Clive James of the BBC presents some novel theories about why people watch porn.

Very few voices have dared to speak up in defense of the Home Secretary's husband, but let mine be one of them.

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is in an invidious position. Before I start defending her husband, Richard Timney, let me be blunt about just how invidious that position is. It always looked unduly cozy that the Home Secretary should claim £40,000 a year of public funds to pay him to run her constituency office.

Though it is common practice for parliamentarians to employ their spouses, the Home Secretary's employment of her husband was bound to draw scrutiny to her broad interpretation of what constitutes a legitimate expense.

A bedroom counted as a primary home. It looked even more unduly cozy when her husband started claiming his expenses, including the purchase of a bath plug and a home entertainment system. Some might have thought, the modern world being what it is, that although the bath plug might be morally neutral if used responsibly, the same might not apply to the home entertainment system.

And so, indeed, it proved.

While the Home Secretary was away on official business, on the evening of 1 April 2008 at 11.18 her husband watched an adult entertainment movie, and on the evening of 6 April at 11.19 he watched another adult entertainment move. Since these movies were available only on subscription, he had to pay for them. He charged the payment to the public.

Flushed Away

It is doubtful if the Home Secretary was entertained at all when she found out this was going to be made public at the very time in her career when she has legislation going through parliament to regulate such adult entertainment matters as businessmen putting visits to pole dancing clubs on expenses as if they'd just been to the pub.

Tough on pole dancing, tough on the causes of pole dancing -- it's a New Labour policy in the grand modern tradition, which takes a moral view that includes the economics, or, if you like, an economic view that includes the morality.

Either way, when you hold the position of Home Secretary and have been so outspoken on the topic of adult entertainment on expenses, it isn't the best moment for headlines to be telling the world that your husband has not only been watching porno movies, he has been off-loading the cost of doing so on to the tax-paying public.

Her husband has dropped her in it. Some would say that she was already in it, because she has patently never been able to judge the effect of an expenses claim in which a principal item is a salary for her husband's efforts in running her constituency office, a salary with an expense allowance down to and including bath plugs.

But he has dropped her further in it, as if that were possible. If she was already in it up to her lower eyelids, he has now stood on top of her head. From where her fringe was previously visible, bubbles are coming up, and it's all his fault. Is there no-one to speak for him?

Field Research

Let me be the one, because it just so happens that I know the truth about pornographic movies.

As a professional critic of the media I have always felt it was incumbent on me, as a public duty, to keep up with developments in all the means of expression however disreputable. So for purposes of research I began checking out the adult entertainment channels in hotel rooms all over the world. If I was filming in Hawaii or Tokyo or Berlin I would switch on the adult entertainment channels late at night to see what was on offer and make notes.

One of the first things I noted was that although there were hundreds and even thousands of pornographic movies, they all had the same few half-witted story structures. Almost without exception they were manufactured in Los Angeles, with a cast of characters that soon became recognizable, no matter where in the world you were watching.

Indeed that was the chief comfort they offered. If you were lonely in a hotel room in Sydney or Amsterdam, there on the screen were the same old familiar few faces from the San Fernando Valley, the men with their improbably low foreheads and permanently puzzled expressions, the women with their enhanced lips and strangely rigid chests, as if wearing a tungsten basque internally.

What's My Motivation?

For a student of bad acting, there could be no richer field. It's not as if the porno stars merely lack dramatic talent. They have the opposite of dramatic talent. Yet touchingly they're more interested in the acting challenges offered by the roles they play than the sex.

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