Beyer disappointed by new porn-ban proposals

Every cloud… . Smut campaigner John Beyer, director of the pro-censorship
group Mediawatch-UK, is very disappointed by the government’s proposals to
outlaw “violent pornography”. The don’t go far enough:

Despite acknowledging that many respondents felt
the proposals should go further, with tighter restrictions imposed
on all pornography the Home Office has shied away from this and
decided not to strengthen the weak and ineffective Obscene
Publications Act but to bring forward measures to deal only with
serious violence, sex with animals and corpses. It is a
great disappointment that hard-core pornographic material,
classified R18 by the British Board of Film Classification, has not
been considered.

Aww…

These proposals will have no
impact at all on the deluge of pornography that is accessible on
television, on the Internet and on video and DVD. People are sick
and tired of being confronted with pornography and its false values
and would welcome a general clean up. The Government’s very limited
measures are simply not designed to achieve what the vast majority
of people want and this huge exploitative industry will be left
pretty much intact by New Labour.

There is an obvious piece of advice to offer someone who claims to be tired of pornography.

Interesting that, for once, Beyer is neglecting to link pornography and sexual violence. Could this just be an oversight on his part, or is he finally coming to realise the difference between correlation and cause? Or even better, that there is no evidence even for a correlation between the two?


4 Responses to “Beyer disappointed by new porn-ban proposals”

  1. Andy A says:

    ‘People are sick and tired of being confronted with pornography and its false values and would welcome a general clean up.’

    How the hell does he know? Which people? His people, no doubt.

    As for Monitor’s logical point about correlation and cause, it could, of course, be causal, but the other way. Have the Massahs of this world not thought that someone who is pathologically attracted to committing violence might satisfy some of that urge by getting his rocks off by watching some of it on TV or computer screen? Have there been any papers in Science or other worthy academic journals to say there’s conclusive, statistically compelling proof that A leads to B rather than vice versa? Or that neither leads to the other, but it is simply coincidence in those cases that throw up both A and B in the same person? I love picking holes in his argument, but someone well versed in argument (using all the philosopher’s tools of argument) would make mincemeat of him. It would be interesting to see him on TV up against, say, Anthony Grayling.

  2. Shaun Hollingworth says:

    Aye. Massah (concentration camp) Beyer wants to put half the adult population in prison for owning R18 porn… Is he going to pay for us all to remain locked up ?

    What a joke the man is.

    I don’t even know why he still retains any credibility…..

    The latest view is that porn reduces sex crimes…

    See:
    http://tinyurl.com/h5klc

    By an eminent Americam law professor, who has been involved in this debate for many years…

  3. Monitor says:

    Thanks for the direct link to that paper, Shaun. I just had a link to the abstract in the article above this one. Now I’m using yours.

  4. Ian Charles says:

    “It is a great disappointment that hard-core pornographic material, classified R18 by the British Board of Film Classification, has not been considered.”
    Well maybe because those are considered legal…..