Porn Again

Happy slapping has arrived in Denmark and the Danish daily Politiken wants to know why. This leads to a journalist phoning me, naturally enough, but I sometimes think it would make more sense to ask the perpetrators why they are doing it.

Meanwhile Channel Four is half way through its 'Dark Side of Porn' series of documentaries (suggesting there's a light side...). Cynics might say this has become the standard use of the post-11pm jacking off slot, a standard feature of Channel Four and Five here in the UK, to show sexually explicit material to people who don't want the paper trail of having ordered pay-per-view muck. (Haven't they heard of the internet?)

Here's the final entry for this week:
"THE SEARCH FOR ANIMAL FARM: 11.05pmThe last programme in The Dark Side of Porn investigates the story behind one of the most infamous films in porn history, and reveals how it came to be made. The film was smuggled into Britain 25 years ago and contained images of such sexual depravity it was never officially released. No one is quite sure where the film came from or how it was made. The Search for Animal Farm reveals the people who made the film, the impact it had on Britain's porn industry and the dark secret of the woman who became known as the queen of bestiality." (At the time of writing, summary appears here, under the heading 'Weekly TV Highlights for Creatives'. Nice.)

From time to time the series seems to fudge issues of consent* while making spectacularly stupid claims e.g. about how Emmanuelle sparked a feminist revolution in the 1970s (buy the DVD here if you must). A more sensible episode was called DOES SNUFF EXIST? [Official blurb: "The existence of snuff movies remains one of the most enduring of urban legends. The latest film in The Dark Side of Porn, Does Snuff Exist?, investigates the truth behind the lurid myth and examines the ways in which fake snuff movies are alleged to have influenced real-life crimes. Directors and producers discuss the lengths to which they went to shock audiences, creating horrifying effects by fusing footage of real accidents and executions with their own mocked-up scenes. More recently, technology has brought a new kind of snuff closer to home, with video, internet and mobile phones providing the ultimate weapons of terror with real images at the click of a button."]

Quite rightly, the film mocked the way the fictional violence in Cannibal Holocaust was treated as real by pro-censorship forces in the 1980s (buy the DVD here). The film sensibly defined a snuff movie as one in which a person was killed on camera specifically for commercial distribution. This answering the titular question 'no'. The show then went on to speculate whether new technologies, including mobile phones with happy-slap capabilities, meant that they could exist in future. Why not have your cake and eat it too, Channel Four?

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*There's a thought-provoking discussion of sexual consent by Bernardo Alexander Attias in '"Police Free Gay Slaves": Consent, Sexuality, and the Law', Left History, Vol. 10, No. 1, Winter 2004, pp. 55-83.