Two excellent pieces of journalism appeared in the press today though I suspect few commentators will choose to make a connection. Firstly, The Times 5/1/11 chose to run with a damning front page expose on UK sex gangs where young vulnerable white working class girls in Britain’s northern cities are being lured into prostitution by Asian gangs, principally of Pakistani origin. The hidden agenda to this story being that British authorities have been complicit in a ‘conspiracy of silence’ for fear of being accused of racism. Fortunately for the present and future victims of this ugly piece of domestic human sex trafficking, a prominent member of the Muslim community in Britain has had the courage to speak out, even it transpires, at the risk to his own safety.

Plaudits must go to Andrew Norfolk for his thorough investigative journalism and to Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation for having the courage and principle to draw a line. It should be added though, that no one ethnic, religious or national group has a monopoly on sexual abuse and trafficking. This is a global crime damning all cultures and all nationalities.

The second piece of journalism, in my mind inextricably linked to the first, is delivered by a Gail Dines, who is professor of sociology at Wheelock College in Boston The Guardian 5/1/11 and has just produced a book entitled, ‘Pornland: How porn has hijacked our sexuality’. In her article, Dines outlines in some graphic detail, the comings and goings of The Adult Entertainment Expo currently being held in Las Vegas where, pornographers from all over the world descend on Las Vegas to participate in seminars, learn about industry trends, network with peers, meet the new “creative” talent, and keep up with the latest technology.

The direction and purpose of the article and her book is clear enough; to highlight “the pornification” of our culture, ‘wherein porn images, messages and stories seep into our sexual identities and relationships’. You don’t need to be a professor of sociology to recognise how the sexualisation of virtually every aspect of our society has gathered pace over the past few decades. Young girls walking around with T-shirts bearing the slogan, ‘Porn Star’ is just one of countless examples. Another daily example, now so commonplace that few now even bother to comment, is the Page Three culture within our tabloid press.

I wonder if Andrew Norfolk of The Times ever bothers to ponder the contradiction between his newspaper’s outstanding piece of journalism and the never ending drip, drip, drip of soft porn that his boss Rupert Murdoch serves up every day in his tabloid publications. This is the same Rupert Murdoch of course who controls vast swathes of our TV sporting diet via his Sky TV Empire. And least we think that Murdoch is the only villain, remember too that West Ham Football Club has recently been purchased by two businessmen who made their money in the porn trade. There was hardly a murmur on this front from any quarter. And we should not forget a certain Mr Desmond, infamous for his publications like, ‘Asian Babes’, who recently took control of The Daily Express. There seems to be no escaping the reach of the pornographer.

Now the whole question of pornography becoming mainstream in western society is complex to say the least. There is a popular school of thought that argues that pornography is a harmless and healthy diversion that helps liberate us from our repressive Victorian upbringings. There is even one school of thought, amongst those who would consider themselves militant feminists, who argue that pornography can be liberating for women and that women are taking ever greater control of the industry, particularly via the internet. Gail Dines, reporting from Las Vegas paints a very different picture, where in all the seminars and workshops she attended, they were all predominantly businessmen as opposed to women. And in all the videos on display, it was principally pornography aimed at male gratification where women were portrayed in cruel and demeaning situations and invariably in a position of submission.

But even if we momentarily concede that pornography could, in some obscure way, help liberate female sexuality from the clutches of a centuries old oppressive patriarchy, an argument of which I am far from convinced, one still has to ask the question; where is this all this highly sexualised culture leading us? Will Murdoch soon provide us with family style pornography at half time in the Premier League? I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t already working on the possibilities. And what is the highly sexualised cheer-leading so popular in American sport (now making its way into British schools) if not cheap sexual titillation for a male audience. And then we have the uplifting spectacles of female mud wrestling which has very little to do with the noble ancient sport of wrestling, and beach volleyball, an obviously sexualised mutation of the original format.

We know that pornography is the second most used service on the internet, just behind shopping, so it can only be a matter of time before the stuff is being downloaded via our kid’s mobile phones. Or am I already too late with this little piece of prophesy? Get your Premier League results downloaded on your phone and if the results aren’t to your liking you can always summon up some porn to give you a quick lift. And let’s face it, many music videos that the youngsters watch today are little more than thinly disguised porn.

It is very easy to take the moralistic high ground when debating pornography, but it doesn’t get us very far. After all, morality is nothing but a social construct that is convenient for the present-day status quo. Never forget that it was not so long ago that our esteemed religious leaders were telling us it was morally acceptable for white people to own and trade in black people. These same guardians of morality also told us it was ok to carry out murderous inquisitions to root out heretics and non believers. And even today, in our so called enlightened times, one cabal of religious leaders make one set of moral pronouncements and another cabal quite a different set. So it is clear enough that there is no such thing as a universal morality – just a bunch of crooks and charlatans posing as moral guardians for their own nefarious gain.

So leaving aside any moral considerations and dictates from on high, we are left only to contemplate the nature of our biological urges and in this we should never underestimate just how powerful the base sexual drive is. Over the past ten thousand years of human settlement and ‘civilisation’ the sexual drive has been one of the few constants in human affairs, the net result being that there are now seven billion of us as opposed to a scattered few million. Soon there will be twelve billion of us and if it were not for the recent developments in contraception, not to mention China’s one child policy, there would be a considerably lot more. We just can’t help ourselves.

The only thing that has changed over the millenia is how our sexual drive has expressed itself. Under the classical slave owning societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, women were forced into slavery both for menial work and male sexual gratification. Under the thousand years of feudal life that followed, women were again reduced to the status of a chattel, on much the same social status as a plough, again for the sexual and economic benefit of their male lords. Under capitalism, the predominant socio-economic mode of the past five hundred years, women are once again the victims of a patriarchal dominance, only in keeping with the capitalist mode of production, women have been ‘freed’ to sell their labour power, but at the same time reduced to little more than a commodity, to be bought and sold on the open market. As Gail Dines notes in her article, it quickly became clear that what excites these guys is not sex but money.

So, if Dines is correct, we must conclude that the driving force behind the gigantic world wide pornography industry is not actually sex but the hunger for profit. The insatiable human sexual drive has simply been co-opted in the pursuit of profit. And under capitalism it is not just women that become the victims, both genders eventually succumb to the objectification and commodification of their sexual desires, though it is patently obvious that women suffer two-fold; both physically, as in the scenario outlined by Andrew Norfolk and ‘spiritually’ as in being deprived of their sense of humanity.

But what exactly is it to be human? The young Marx spoke of humans, under class society, being alienated from their true natures and that only by transcending class society could we hope to end that alienation. It is not entirely clear whether the older, more ‘mature’ Marx abandoned this uplifting view of a future humanity. What does seem clear is that Marx’s concept that the culture of humans will inevitably reflect their own economic epoch has remained stubbornly true.

But to talk of a humanity that has once and for all overcome its alienation and reconnected with its ‘true’ humanity does strike me as youthfully utopian and even a tad religious. Based on what we have witnessed of ourselves over the past ten thousand years, if we humans have any true self, it is the ability to be anything that circumstances allow. So when Dines talks of, ‘authentic desire’ we must reluctantly admit to ourselves, painful as it might be, that there is no truly ‘authentic desire’, only what we choose to make it. And as our material conditions improve and our consciousness of our human potentiality increases, we may reach the point where we can all, collectively and individually, define how we wish to express ourselves, both socially and sexually. We will no longer be at the mercy and whim of the high priests, the rabbis and the mullahs. We will finally have outgrown them.

Richard Dawkins makes the point in ‘The Selfish Gene’ that humans are no longer the product of blind evolution. We have reached the point, he argues, where we can control and manipulate, for better or worse, the evolution of our species. Similarly, it can be argued that as the material conditions develop for humanity, the blind economic determinism of our lives can be increasingly moderated by our subjective will. How we choose to exercise that will no one can predict, but on the question of pornography, there is a simple but powerful question that every male and every female must ask themselves now and forever in the future: do we want our own daughters, our sisters or, for that matter our mothers being ‘porn stars’? I suspect the answer is self evident.