UPDATE Students voted 231 to 187 in favor of the motion (“This House believes pornography does a good public service”) with 197 abstentions
by Hugh Morris from http://www.cambridgefirst.co.uk/
PORN has the Cambridge Union’s blessing.
During a heated debate in the society approaching its 200th year, there were images conjured up that would make a sailor blush. But underneath the lewd aesthetics of pornography lay a serious issue.
“This house believes that pornography does a good public service” was the proposition, and it passed by 44 votes.
For this much-publicised debate, the proposers were Britain’s first female porn director Anna Span, teacher-cum-porn star Johnny Anglais, and self-professed ‘sexademic’ Jessi Fischer; the opposers, born-again-Christian and ex-porn star Shelley Lubben, feminist activist Dr Gail Dines, and child psychologist Dr Richard Woolfson. The debating hall was sweltering despite the cold outside as students sought to find any corner they could squeeze into to watch the debate.
Anna Span, or Anna Arrowsmith, opened the debate. She accused “moral entrepreneurs” of using “thinly-veiled, conservative arguments” to inflict a “fully-fledged moral panic”. And so, the tone of the debate was set.
Both sides fired statistics at each other, each claiming the others were biased or unfounded, each tried to interrupt the other with points of information, each was ignored, each put forward very compelling arguments.
Broadly-speaking, the proposers arguments were based around two points – pornography empowers woman and is a good education tool.
‘Sexademic’ Ms Fischer noted a long history of sex guides and porn’s ability to “spark passion and create debate about sexuality”, and an eloquent speech from Mr Anglais served to show porn stars are intelligent human beings rather then pieces of meat. “The problem is not pornography,” he said. “The problem is our immature national attitude to sex.” (NL- Such a great line!)
Despite the porn’s eventual victory in the house, the opposition’s argument’s seemed the stronger up until the home straight. Broadly-speaking, there counter-points were pornography harms children and degrades women. Dr Dines cast porn as an unnatural commodity which applies market forces to an intimate act. She attacked porn’s ability to distort reality and degrade women – “In Pornland boys can be boys. In Pornland there are no woman, only hot girls.” She drew emotive reactions by highlighting crude terminology used in hardcore porn, or ‘gonzo’ porn, which represented the depths of adult entertainment – terms that shall not be repeated.
Similary, Dr Woolfson’s connections between watching pornography and unhealthy sexual attitudes resonated around the chamber.
But when Ms Lubben took to the floor, arguably the headline act, her passion and anger hid her argument. The audience did not react well to this. Resting on the lectern, her high-heeled shoe subconsciously beating on the floor, her impassioned attack on the porn industry strayed from the academic debate. “This is nothing funny or glamorous about this industry,” she said. “Pornography doesn’t do a good public service because it is lying to you. I have the evidence. It’s lying to you. It’s modern day slavery.”
And with that, the Cambridge students voted for porn.