Can Porn Be Ethical? Radio 4 | iPlayer
The Report: The ‘Pink Pill’ – the Female Viagra? Radio 4 | iPlayer
You Must Remember This | vidiocy.com
Sex sells, and naughty Radio 4 has scheduled a whole hour this week to getting inside our bedrooms (it’s also broadcast 75 minutes on the heroes of natural history so, you know, whatever turns you on). On Monday night, Nichi Hodgson tackled pornography. Not, thank goodness, in the “crikey, what is this?” manner of Jacqui Smith’s classic 5Live documentary, in which Smith admitted she’d never actually seen any porn. This, despite having a husband who claimed expenses for porn films, and having had a job – home secretary – which meant she’d had to legislate on it. No, Hodgson used to work as a dominatrix, and she quite likes watching porn. She is not a Jacqui Smith type.
Still, as is the way with programmes about pornography, as opposed to pornographic programmes, there wasn’t much in the way of yer actual in-and-out. Instead, in Can Porn Be Ethical?, we heard from various experts: professors, campaigners and those who try to make what is called ethical porn. Ethical porn proved a bit tricky. According to those Hodgson interviewed, it either doesn’t exist, or is defined by consent, or does exist but is so niche as to not make any difference to the vast, much nastier, commercial porn industry. I found myself in agreement with everybody at certain points.
Such discussions, while interesting, almost always turn academic. And high-minded concepts struggle to contain actual life actually lived. (“We don’t have the same relationship with our vaginas as we do with our feet!” exclaimed feminist campaigner Julie Bindel, when a fine-artist-turned-pornmaker tried to draw a parallel between working as a porn actor and working as a ballerina.) Hodgson wondered whether there could be proper regulation of the pornography industry, perhaps a kitemark stamp of quality. But regulation of such things always ends up in idiotic anomaly; as it did last year, when the Government passed a law that says that porn films cannot show “excessive” whipping or spanking, nor much in the way of bondage. Oh, and no – repeat NO – female ejaculation. Discuss, with reference to sex in mainstream films and to how many times the average porn film shows male ejaculation.
Not turned on yet? Don’t worry, there’s a pill for that … On Thursday evening’s The Report, Melanie Abbott discussed the evolution of Viagra for women. She took a very BBC approach, going in hard on the female head of a pharmaceutical company – Sprout – that has a patent for a drug that increases women’s libido. A campaign grew up around the drug, flibanserin, when its licence was initially denied by the US Food and Drug Administration. There was some question as to whether the campaign was at least partially funded by Sprout.
This programme wasn’t very sexy either. Instead, it was about health and safety, drug side-effects, big pharma money and paternalism. We heard that there are 26 legal drugs in the US that address male loss of sexual desire, and not one for women. But then we heard that those 26 drugs address loss of sexual function, not loss of sexual desire, and that there are drugs that combat the equivalent physical symptoms in women, such as vaginal dryness. (Are you turned on yet?) The Report ended with one expert saying that flibanserin should be legal, but that “it should be used by almost nobody at all”. All this over a drug that, research shows, increases female desire to such an extent that the average woman has one more “sexual event” a month. One more every month! No wonder ecstasy is making a comeback.
If all this sexy talk is distracting you – and I bet it is! – why not calm down with Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This, a podcast that goes into remarkable detail about the secret history of “Hollywood’s first century”. There are 12 50-minute episodes about Charles Manson’s Hollywood, for instance. It is astonishingly thorough. And, yes, sex – not having it, having too much of it, having it with the wrong person – comes into these histories all the time. I think I need a lie-down…
