Stand by Your Manhood by Peter Lloyd Read Free Book Online

little difference between the two groups: they use the same tactics and the same kinds of language.
    According to him, the next big crackdown is mobile phone content.
    ‘We also have very repressive content possession laws. To restrict what can be distributed is one thing, but to restrict what people possess is another – it means you can have something sent to you in a WhatsApp message and you become a sex offender.’
    To flesh this out I approach an expert. ‘Let me tell you a legal joke,’ says leading obscenity lawyer Myles Jackman.
    A man walks into a court. He’s charged with an offence under Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 of being in possession of an ‘extreme pornographic’ video of a woman having sex with a tiger.
    The video was sent to him by a friend, unsolicited, as a joke. He had no idea what the content of the video was before opening it. Yet the defendant was arrested at his home address, interviewed by the police under caution, charged, then bailed to the Magistrates’ Court and finally sent to the Crown Court. It was here that the judge requested the video be played in full, with the sound on, in open court.
    The play button was pressed.
    It turned out the ‘tiger’ was a man in a tiger-skin costume, who turns to the camera and says: ‘That’s grrrreat!’ Hilarious. Except that the joke was on the defendant, Andrew Holland, of Wrexham, north Wales, as the story was on the front cover of the
Daily Telegraph
and in numerous articles published across the globe. His name became synonymous with the joke, which had a devastating impact on his reputation.
    The Crown Prosecution Service are now reviewing the law.
    But what is everybody so afraid of? Porn barely even has a rebellious streak anymore. What was once subversive and exciting (why was it always in bushes and broken shop windows?) is now turning academic, with scholarly publishers Routledge printing the new, official
Porn Studies
journal. Like Hugh Hefner guest-editing
The Lancet,
it’s ‘the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts’. Blimey.
    Specifically, one of their key findings is that at least 30 per cent of online porn users are women, which helps destroy the myth that it is simply sexist.
    The people behind it, university professors ClarissaSmith and Feona Attwood – women! – studied more than 5,000 people on their sex-viewing trends. Among their findings they also found that men’s use of visual material can’t simply be dismissed as an aggressive, one-way exercise of projecting their hardcore fantasies onto wipe-clean pages. In fact, the opposite is true. It reaffirmed something we, as men, have always known: that it’s more multi-faceted than that.
We
are more multi-faceted than that.
    Aside from feeling horny, which is an obvious incentive, men view porn for a variety of valid reasons: to get in the mood (with, or for, their partner), to reconnect with their body or, sometimes, just because they simply can’t sleep (oh, come on, we’ve all been there!). Additionally, hundreds said they viewed porn because they were inquisitive about acts they’d consider doing in the future, which means they were exploring their desires in a safe, consequence-free way – something
Nuts
was part of.
    ‘At their height, lads’ mags offered men a space in which to consider their bodies, relationships and identities in ways that weren’t really available anywhere else,’ says Jude Roberts of Birkbeck College.
    Traditional ideas about masculinity don’t allow much space for consideration of men’s anxieties about their bodies, their sex lives or their relationships, so whilst lads’ mags are far from a bastion of progressive genderpolitics, they do provide their readers with a more complex view of masculinity than many other types of