New

NY Times 8 Mar 2015

• You can have a lot of fun with judges and porn. This week, three judges were sacked, and a fourth resigned, after they were found to have watched pornography on their judicial computers. “All rise?” suggested the comedian Elis James on Radio 4’s The News Quiz the other day, and we were off.
  
  Dwell further and even quite innocuous phrases, such as “on the bench” start to feel irredeemably dirty. Was anybody “going down”? Wigs, robes, “discharging a jury”, “laying down the law”, “banging your gavel”; anyone can play this game. All it takes is someone with a lot of self-motivation — like judges, for instance. Thrusting intellects. Blessed with a rare ability to grapple with the outstanding point, and cling on to it until the issue is resolved. And so on.
  
  Except it’s not really that funny, is it? Certainly not for them. Four middle-aged men, not only with their careers in tatters, but publicly shamed, too. Have a think about that. I won’t name them here, these now-former judges, but others have. Their families will know all about it. Their kids, if they’ve got any. Cousins, elderly aunts. Old friends, people who haven’t thought about them in years, seeing their names in the paper, picturing them at their laptops and thinking “Gosh”. Everybody in their lives will remember this, for ever.
  
  Look, I know what you’re thinking. Stop it. I do not watch pornography in the office. I swear. It’s open plan, and I sit next to Oliver Kamm; can you imagine? Nor do I feel it’s a right one ought to have, so let’s not go overboard the other way, either. No question, we’re talking pretty poor workplace etiquette, to the extent that I can completely see the sense in sacking somebody for it. And if you get sacked as a judge then I’m completely on board with the notion that the public ought to know about it, and also why.
  
  So really, the bit that interests me is not them, but us. Why, in a nutshell, are we so sniggeringly unforgiving of people who watch porn? When, in the end, so very many of the rest of us do?
  
  At the height of the MPs’ expenses scandal, you might remember, the husband of Jacqui Smith, then the home secretary, was found to have claimed for a couple of porn films. How Britain enjoyed that one. And we all pretended that it was the expenses claim that sparked the derision but it clearly wasn’t. Yet why should it be worse to claim for a porn movie than to claim for, say, Independence Day?
  
  And likewise, now, we pretend it’s the “on a work computer” that frees us up to snigger at these judges, but that’s a lie, too. Indeed, we do worse than snigger. We judge. We read that “the material did not include images of children or any other illegal content” and something about the very denial seems to intimate that it was a close-run thing, or might as well have been. As if everyone is on the cusp of proper, culpable, transgressive evil when they look at porn. Everyone except us.
  
  How bad is it, anyway, to watch porn in the office? Where does it sit, on the scale? Is it better or worse, for example, than being drunk in the office? Because in court, I think I’d rather be judged by the porn guy. Unless he was actually watching it at the time. How about having sex in the office? Surely, by any logic, that would be worse. Lots, lots worse.
  
  Only, think of Bill Clinton. Sure, he got impeached, but he survived. And anyway, he only really got impeached for lying about it. Would he have survived if it had been porn? With headlines about the Oval Orifice? And the whole world sniggering about him, you know, Woodrowing his Wilson . . . well, never mind, you get the gist. Because I don’t think he would. I don’t think anyone would.
  
  We are weird about porn. Weirder, even, than we are about sex. Did you read, a fortnight ago, about that 11-year-old kid who got into trouble on World Book Day because his mother sent him to school dressed as Christian Grey from the Fifty Shades books? The teacher made him pretend to be James Bond instead because, although Bond treats women in a similar manner to Grey, he also kills people, which makes it OK.
  
  Likewise, with these judges, imagine if they hadn’t been watching porn in the office. Imagine they’d been watching Game of Thrones. A sex scene, perhaps, featuring one of the many actual porn stars who appear in the show, because if you want somebody to act out a nude, lesbian, blood-drenched snuff-scene for a psychopathic teenage boy holding a crossbow, what do you know, porn stars are more up for it than most. Would that have been so much better? Why?
  
  It’s not just embarrassed ex-judges, though, who are the victims of our weirdness about porn. It’s others far more vulnerable.
  
  Being too old to have grown up with the internet, let alone a smartphone, I’ve no real idea just how many pubescent children have watched porn, but the stats suggest it’s basically all of them. At some point we, as a society, have got to become realistic about that. At some point, we need to accept that this stuff exists in the world, and won’t go away, and thus has to live in the light.
  
  I won’t pretend I know how we do it. The sort of attitudes they have towards pornography in places such as the Netherlands — where they’ll pop to a peepshow like we might to the chiropodist, perhaps in their lunch hour — makes me twist up in British, knuckle-biting agony, like a pretzel. Porn isn’t nice. Its stars so often seem to have backstories of desperation and abuse, and its effect upon its viewers, particularly the young, is nothing to be flip about.
  
  Yet porn is here, and will stay being here, and our smirking hypocrisy, I think, makes none of the bad things about it any better. If anything, I think it rather makes them worse. So before you judge these judges, is my point, take a look at yourself. Although don’t touch. Particularly if you’re at work.