Censorship and Pornography

This speech was given by Harold T White, Chairman of the NZ Federatoin of Film Societies, at the New Plymouth Central School Parent Teacher Association. It received brief coverage on TV news, and a fairly long excerpt was printed in The Dominion, which prompted a spate of letters, mainly praising the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards which Mr. White had criticised for their stand on censorship. Sequence also printed some excerpts, concentrating on aspects The Dominion had omitted. The address is here presented in full.

It would be good if we could agree on what censorship is and is not about. Whether this is feasible remains to be seen but I ask you to consider the possibility that 'censorship has nothing, or very little, to do with morals and moral standards. To say that censorship is required to maintain moral standards does not bear close examination. First because nobody can point to any way in which censorship has improved such standards, maintained them, or stopped them from declining. Second because moral standards do not originate in the media with which censorship is concerned. Nor do the things we dislike in Society go away if the media are obliged to pretend they do not exist.

Moral standards are instilled and maintained rather by positive steps, that is, by the teaching and example of family, school, church and all social, economic and political institutions. When I mention institutions I am not talking of abstractions - I am talking of their individual members and leaders. It is they, and not the Courts, the Police or the Censors, who between them set the moral tone for the community and determine what is acceptable to Society. I can perhaps illustrate my point by reference to the practice of corporal punishment in schools. Most teachers used to believe, and some still do, that corporal punishment is necessary if discipline is to be maintained in the school. The only thing wrong about that belief is that it is entirely wrong, as those schools which have stopped using corporal punishment can testify. Discipline, like morality, gains little from prohibition, force or legal sanction.

Ah, you may say. But what about those in the wider community in need of protection? To frame the question in this way one must believe that pornography is commonplace in New Zealand or that it is lurking, ready to sweep us off our feet if we relax our vigilance, and that it has a depraving and corrupting effect, harmful to individuals and to society. Somebody out there, somebody else, needs the protection that we more mature and intelligent beings do not. As the prosecutor in the trial of Lady Chatterly's Lover asked 'Would you want this book to fall into the hands of your servant?'

By observation and the employment of common sense we can dispel the notion that pornography is readily obtainable in this country or that it corrupts. When we look at those exposed day in and day out to what is so corrupting - the censors themselves - the only change apparent in them is an increased tendency to cynicism. There is more substantial evidence to hand, however. The U. S. Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, despite diligent research, could find no satisfactory evidence that pornography causes harm and even the Longford Committee, which would dearly have loved to find such evidence, was unable to do so. Put another way, is it books, or films, that put ideas into young heads, or is it nature?

If censorship is not about moral standards, what is it about; how are we to account for its persistence, despite its demonstrable ineffectualness? After centuries of use the Catholic church finally abandoned its Index of Forbidden Books and few would claim that the Church's current problems stem from this. For the purposes of this occasion I will ignore, by and large, the political uses of censorship to suppress the spread of information and ideas and to prop up authoritarian regimes. I will just note in passing that such use of censorship has closer links with its use to reinforce sexual authoritarianism than is commonly thought.

Censorship, I suggest, is about avoiding offence or shock and the subversion of ideas. From an historical perspective this conclusion is inescapable. Socrates, Christ, Galileo, Darwin, Solzhenitszyn - these are just a few of those who in their day were regarded as blasphemers and immoral and who have been censored, silenced or even killed by the righteous.

Do I see you smile at these examples? Yes, of course, we live in enlightened times and in a free society. How silly to equate the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards with those who put Socrates to death for corrupting the young; with the Inquisition which forced Galileo to recant; with the reactionary church-men who feared Darwin's teaching because, as they knew beyond any doubt, the world was created in 4004 B. C.; how fanciful to link their attitudes with those of the authorities who are trying to silence the Soviet Union's greatest writer because his writing does not meet with their approval and because he is therefore immoral. Let us not be smug however; we have skeletons in our own cupboard and cannot afford to be complacent. The examples I have given have one thing in common. They were all shockers and blasphemers in their day. Other examples abound in the arts, and it is a bold person who, in the light of the respectability later acquired by a Stravinsky, a Picasso, a James Joyce or an Ingmar Bergman, can be dogmatic about the merit or worthlessness of today's shockers.

Society stagnates unless it is frequently disturbed and shocked by those who are ahead of their time. Censorship tries to prevent our being disturbed and panders to our irrational fears; fear of alien ideologies, fear of a radical, disenchanted youth which refuses to share the beliefs that have given us comfort and fear of young people with their new economic and sexual freedom. These are the fears that the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards is preying on. Speaking its nonsense with such confidence they appear to have the answer to today's social ills. All will be well, they say, if their taste in books and films is imposed on the community. All else is pornography. Should their prescription be ignored, on the other hand, civilisation will collapse just as Ancient Rome did!

Perhaps a few words on the subject of the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards would be in order. I have been criticised at times by otherwise rational people for attempting to answer statements by the Society, whose spokesmen are quick to assume the mantle of martyrdom and insist that to argue with them is to attack them personally. The wicked giant must not defend himself against a virtuous David. Medieval monarchs used to exempt their court fools from the consequences of their outrageous statements but I see no reason for granting the Society this indulgence. The sensitivity of the Society comes oddly from an organisation that has indulged freely in ad hominem argument and which has been quick to impugn the motives of those who disagree with them.

Recently I noticed a former Cabinet Minister join the debate. He is reported as attacking 'Advocates of permissiveness, pornography, deviant sexual practices, liberalisation of the drug laws, abolition of censorship and other similar practices.' Advocates of the new morality were small in number but articulate he said; society was in danger of heeding their voice. How impertinent of the man! The Federation of Film Societies is in favour of abolition of film censorship _for adults_ but neither its members nor its spokesmen advocate permissiveness, pornography, deviant sexual practices, liberalisation of the drug laws or other similar practices. They are not advocates of 'the new morality' if this is what it is. The Federation would be obliged if its critics would attack their arguments and not their morals or the company they are wrongly believed to keep.

Since so much is made by the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards of its concern for morality, albeit of a marvellous narrow kind, its methodology could also perhaps bear examination. Recently we have seen attempts made to subvert the rule of law, usually on the basis of a panic assiduously catalysed by the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards. When The Little Red School Book was declared not indecent by the Indecent Publications Tribunal somebody photo-copied two pages and sent them anonymously to mayors and religious leaders, some of whom were ingenuous enough to try to persuade the Prime Minister to over-rule a statutory court of law.

The Prime Minister rightly refused to act, and here is the instructive aspect of the matter. It was stated dogmatically that books obtain their greatest sales when they obtain the notoriety of submission to the Tribunal. The truth is otherwise. The Little Red School Book sold far more copies after the Tribunal ruled it not indecent. Its peak sales, 12,000 in one week, immediately following the outburst of the foolish mayors. Did the people responsible for this brouhaha feel proud of their actions? The other instructive aspect of the case is that the book was a seven-day wonder. Life goes on in its accustomed way and yet mayors took to their beds and predicted doom. That is one case.

What about The Clockwork Orange? The Censor, to his credit, passed this film but there was an immediate outcry from people who had not seen it and whose knowledge of it came from Playboy. With letters from the Society's friends piling up on his desk the Minister of Internal Affairs took the unprecedented step of viewing the film to see whether he would appeal against the Censor's decision or authorise some other person to appeal. Here was back-door interference once more, this time with a statutory officer, the Censor. The appeal provision in the Act was designed to allow review of the Censor's decision _after_ a film had been publicly screened and possibly caused public outrage, but the Minister, weakly advised by his Department, allowed himself to be panicked into showing his lack of confidence in the Censor's judgement. Who felt proud of themselves in this episode? What irreparable harm was done to the community by screening this film? In the one case the publisher, and in the other, the film distributor should have paid generous commission to the S. P. C. S. for quadrupling the readership of the book and for increasing the film's audience perhaps tenfold.

A more recent example. When the Censor rejected Last Tango in Paris I immediately protested. Not because I knew whether the film was good or bad. I protested because I knew that at least some well respected film critics had taken the film seriously and I believed that the Censor had no business stopping people seeing what was evidently a serious film by an important director. Since then the Society has organised a letter-writing campaign directed at the Film Censorship Board of Appeal, apparently designed to force them to uphold the Censor's ruling. Again, back-door interference and an attempt to undermine a court of law. This is just one of several letter-writing campaigns started by the Society and designed to give an impression of spontaneous shock to right-thinking people throughout the community. The Society in all its righteousness has even tried to have editors sacked; not openly, mind you, but secretly.

Some people would be unkind enough to suggest that there is something shameful and dishonest about tactics such as these. I will merely observe that whereas the Society seems to advocate very rigid sexual standards its moral standards are otherwise elastic indeed. Perhaps elastic is not the right word either since the idea of elasticity suggests an eventual return of that which is stretched to the normal.

Whatever appeal the Society's nonsense has appears to be to those who are not in very close touch with life, to the non-readers and non-filmgoers of the community, the conservative elderly. The case rests on the proposition that society is going to the dogs, that there was a golden age when everything was all right and that since we learn of society's ills in the media the media must cause them or at least contribute to them.

Let me look for a moment at the argument about declining moral standards. As far as I know every generation from at least the days of Aristotle has been told that its standards are declining. This obviously makes no sense at all. I am bound to agree that in many ways we have nothing to be proud of but when I am also asked to agree that matters are getting worse I cannot. By most standards things are incomparably better than they were.

Let us look at the age of Victoria, a time of much greater literary and public decorum than our own. The statistics of the period are of course inadequate but there was so much rampant vice behind the facade of public decency that present-day society can only represent an enormous improvement. Prostitution, and especially child prostitution; venereal disease, and especially the infection of children; ex-nuptial pregnancies and births; incest; perversions; you name it, the Victorians leave us far behind. At one time there were estimated to be 80,000 prostitutes in London alone - and London had a much smaller population than it does today.

Who patronised the army of prostitutes and child prostitutes? Who applauded Dr Acton's teaching that it was unthinkable for a woman to enjoy sexual intercourse and who bought painful devices designed to stop boys masturbating, awake or asleep? Who raped their women and their women servants with such indiscriminate abandon? Who beat the living daylights out of their children and used them in the coal mines? Why, none less than those upright upholders of all the Victorian virtues!

Perhaps you think I am presenting my case unfairly. After all, you may say, some shocking things must always be harmful. But to say this is to confuse those harmful things with their depiction. Murder is harmful but few would cavil at a thriller in book or film. Sex is not usually harmful so why then is it to be so strangled by taboo as the Society seems to insist? It is not lost on the young that so many older people who are affronted by the open treatment of sexual matters and four-letter words are titillated by Up Pompei and On The Buses. The daily parade of violent obscenity in the press and on TV and the growing callous indifference to large-scale violence and even genocide are evil indeed compared to the open treatment of sex and its realistic portrayal.

I said before that censorship is about avoiding offence and shock. The quaint thing about film censorship in this country however is that as far as adults are concerned it operates to protect from shock those who don't normally go to the cinema. I recall one bitter complaint about The Graduate, a film starring Dustin Hoffman, some five years ago. In ignorance of the nature of the film this lady had taken her 86 year old mother to see The Graduate as a birthday treat and her mother had, naturally, I suppose, not cared for it. But people like these demand that films like The Graduate be suppressed for others.

The only evidence of public opinion about film censorship that will bear scrutiny consists of two recent pieces of research that show clearly that most people in this country do not approve of what the Censor is doing to films for adults. The majority of those who actually go to the cinema is overwhelmingly disapproving. To cater for the presumed wish of a presumed absent majority the Censor snips out pieces of film regardless of whether they are necessary to the director's purpose and regardless of the merit of the film as a whole.

That four letter word which forms a staple part of the conversation of so many and which, though offensive to many others, has a certain effectiveness when used with discretion, is barred from the silver screen. Adults are treated as children by the Censor even though we may now read the word freely in books and hear it from the stage, since the prosecution of Hair. The Censor says he is obliged to excise this word because its use in a public place is an offence under the Police Offences Act but this is of course a mere rationalisation in the light of the Hair verdict.

Drama and literature have been very largely freed from the shackles of outworn gentilities but not the film. Why should this be? At the moment we are saddled with a Cinematograph Films Act designed for a time when the cinema provided almost the only form of mass entertainment, when everybody went to the 'flicks' on Saturday night and large numbers went twice or more in a week, when most children were regular attenders. In 1949 every man, woman and child went to the cinema 19 times; an astounding figure! Today the figure is 4.6. Where once the cinema provided a truly mass entertainment today it must compete with TV, evening drinking, a proliferation of sports and other pastimes. The film patron today is a more discriminating viewer and the result is that films are very much more realistic and related to the events of life as the viewer sees and understands it. It is this type of film that is suffering badly at the hands of the Censor and which is making film distributors for the first time so dissatisfied with the Censor.

Miss Bartlett may lament the absence of the Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald type of musical so popular 30 years ago but the demand for it has gone. She is seemingly completely unaware that even these were exceptional films in their day. The typical film has always been of dubious moral standard, just as it is today I but today there is a better chance than ever of seeing an honestly made film that may teach us something of what actually goes on outside our own narrow circle and help us learn about life and ourselves. But this is the trouble with censorship today, it has not kept pace with the film industry or the public. A worthwhile film with straightforward treatment of sex will be cut in the name of public decency while films that treat sex in a prurient or leering manner, such as Percy, or The Statue are able to draw large audiences.

The Film Censor and his Department believe that he acts in accord with the public wish and they give two reasons. First, that he is at the mid-point between two extreme groups and second that he has his ear close to the ground, meeting lots of community groups and finding little dissatisfaction I amongst them. Both reasons are nonsense and they immediately concede my assertion that censorship is not about moral standards. It is about expedience, the middle ground and nothing more. What about all these community groups then? Here the technique is simplicity itself. If you go to groups predominantly composed of parents of school age children and show them some of the lurid things you have cut out of films you are bound to win their sympathy. Nothing could be easier than to appeal to the natural desire of parents to protect their children from harm. But it does not follow that they have knowingly given their blessing to what you do with films for adults. What are we to make of the majority which does not approve of what the censor is doing on their behalf. That such people do not know what is good for them? That they are perhaps already depraved? That the Society, or big brother, is better capable than they are of determining what is good for them?

The Cinematograph Films Act, well regarded in its time, has ossified and is today hopelessly anachronistic and out-of-date. The Department of Internal Affairs, the Censor and succeeding Ministers have shown not the slightest interest in reform but rush to the barricades at the slightest provocation. The Department has now been 'reviewing' the Act for five years with no serious thought of change. Unlike the Indecent Publications Act, a model, until last year at any rate, of what should be done if you must have censorship, the Films Act makes absolutely no provision for artistic or any other merit to be taken into account when considering whether a film, or parts of a film, are indecent. Indecency is not even defined but the Censor is enjoined not to pass any film or part of a film which in his opinion is contrary to public decency or public order or the exhibition of which for any other reason would not be in the public interest. Isn't that incredible!

When it comes to appeals only the film distributor can appeal and he will naturally do so on commercial grounds or, worse still, refrain from appealing if he is not likely to recoup his appeal costs with public screenings. What a shabby way to treat a serious work of art. The Appeal Board itself does a conscientious job but of its three members one is 70 and one 68. The Act does not require the appointment of anyone because of a special interest or expertise in film, again unlike the Indecent Publications Tribunal which has five members, a better size. Small wonder that those who take films seriously are seriously disturbed.

They also ask why a film, once restricted to adults, should be cut at all. What demonstrable harm is avoided by cutting out certain scenes or language or, put another way, what positive good is served by so doing? Another major cause of dissatisfaction is the secrecy of the Censor's work. He is a public servant purportedly working in the public interest and it is quite intolerable that his reasons for cutting or banning films should not be open to discussion. Reasons are given in Australia but the Federation of Film Societies has met with pettifogging obstruction in seekjng this necessary reform. Our final quarrel with the Censor is that by overseas standards he has gone berserk with his scissors. The Censor in Australia has passed, uncut, films like The Decameron, Slaughterhouse Five, Steptoe & Son. The Last Picture Show, Taking Off,Hannah Caulder, The Mechanic, Pope Joan, Fuzz, The Honkers, and numerous others which are cut here. The Censor in Australia cuts about 6% of films restricted to adults, the New Zealand Censor, 50%.

Having been so critical of the Censor it is pleasant to be able to say that his work in classifying films is very well done and is of great help to parents. It is just a pity that the protection of children and the susceptibilities of the older people, who do not go to the cinema but who are politically more potent than the young film-goers, have been allowed to diminish the rights of the film-going public at large.

I have outlined some very modest proposals for improving the most pernicious aspects of film censorship today. Reasonable people will have no difficulty in seeing that they make sense and do not herald the return of the Dark Ages. Surely we have enough confidence in ourselves to work with due deliberation towards the day when we can throwaway the crutch of censorship entirely, when education and public opinion will operate in such a way that what is meretricious and unsavoury will be discarded by choice and starved of profit. Better this than being obliged to read and see only what is deemed fit for us by censors and self-appointed custodians of our morals.

Until that day, no more censorship should be permitted than can be publicly justified and assented to.

- as submitted to Sequence, September 1973.