Whitney, Clive and The Armageddon

Funny things, physician those internets. You might be innocently looking for porn and, this web damnit, what upturns instead is Clive Hamilton.

If you are Australian, it is likely that you know Clive well. For the past few years, he has evolved a professional suspicion that pornography, video games and unwholesome websites shape behaviour. Once, he wrote useful books about the paralysis of consumerism. Now, he frets that a money shot is the harbinger of doom.

Of course, he’s also developed a sideline in writing green Hallmark cards. Don’t get me wrong. I was all for saving the planet For Our Children, too. But this widely circulated correspondence to The Children made me want to have my ovaries electrosurgically removed.

Is this what happens to lefties past a certain age? Should I fear this conversion as well? One day, will I hand my gonads in at the desk and start coming off like the bastard issue of Whitney Houston and Al Gore too? Actually, strike that. I adore Whitney; much more now she has become an unlovable disaster.

Hamilton’s cheese, which includes the line, “Your life is going to be worse because of what your dad is doing when he goes to work each morning” is far sappier than anything Whitney has ever uttered in song.

Clive’s “Open Letter” is a bit like that Desiderata poster my mum used to have taped to the lavatory door following her diagnosis of Generalised Anxiety. “Go quietly amid the haste,” it said. To my mother’s credit, she never did. Still doesn’t. Proving that art, particularly bad art, has no real impact on the viewer.

Which brings me back to my point about Clive; a man who is stubborn in his belief that art can dissolve our morals. A man, let it be said, I once admired.

Clive has become an advocate for internet censorship. I’m haven’t. I wrote about it here and somewhat less convincingly here (they don’t pay as much). And a few other places.

Don’t bother reading them, actually. I can give you the essence now: I am not a fan of censorship. I think it’s paternalistic and vain. If you discount the few grand I’ve made writing about Senator Stephen Conroy’s embarrassing clean-feed for the paper, censorship has given the world nothing but an increased appetite for underwear catalogues.

Clive, however, is so worried about being on the wrong side of a secular Rapture that he wrote this for The Australian.

It’s almost funny to read this public thinker’s discomfort. He makes himself reproduce terms like “fisting”, “gang bangs” and “scat”. Ew. Don’t, Clive. You’ll ruin redtube for us forever.

Anyhow. His writing brings to mind a John Waters’ film full of clean-living caricatures forced against their will to utter things like ,“cum shot”.

Hamilton, although, presumably, sane enough to be godless, seems to need to believe in the apocalypse. Actually, he’s having a bet each way on doom. It’s carbon emissions or it is porn that will get us. We’ll either drown in an ocean of semen; or an actual ocean.

I won’t bother reproducing that quote about Voltaire here, as it so often used. To jog your memory, it roughly proceeds: I might think you’re disgusting, but I will defend to the death your right to play with your genitals.

It’s not all fun, games and gentle afternoons of bukkake being like this, you know. We permissive types will often encounter moments where our inner Voltaire is tested. That is, we are forced to defend that of which we disapprove.

For example, the movie Baise Moi was very bad. You don’t have to watch it to know. Just read the logline: a tale of the Violent Sexual Transition of a village naïf called Nadine. Really, French cinema? Is that the very best you could come up with in the shadow of Truffaut?

Nevertheless, when the movie came out, or, rather, didn’t thanks to Australian classification, I had to protest. Because, at my core, I believe in the liberty of expression.

(But not, needless to say, if the production of that liberty involves the abasement of others.)

And further, I feel it’s an obligation to protest in an era where even cranky old lefties are jumping off the Freedom Train and into a ditch full of cheese.

There is no evidence to suggest that pornography or console games end in violence any more than there is that the consumption of quality literature ends in one becoming James Joyce. Art can have no measurably negative effect on the behaviour of consumers. Particularly not the milquetoasts who go to see French films.

The narrative dreadfulness of Baise Moi notwithstanding, you cannot stop people from watching things because of an inkling.

And there is nothing more than an inkling driving this new Puritanism.

There is NO viable research to suggest that porn, literature or any art form has ANY negative impact on our behaviour. Other than making some of us nauseous. But, Clive, we cannot legislate from the gut.

Science has delivered us data on the consequences of emissions (of the industrial kind). It has not, however, given us anything on the upshot effects of College Sluts Vol. 4.

Don’t bother with that film, by the way. It’s awful. But, sheesh, even if you do: I’ll defend to the death your right to watch it.

It’s difficult being me.

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