No porn on TV

We must hope that pornography will not be allowed on our airwaves when the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) rules on subscription broadcaster Top TV’s application to launch three 24-hour porn channels.

The coalition against the transmission of pornography on South African television has been broad, ranging from religious bodies to the Congress of Trade Unions.

The Catholic Church welcomes this reaction. The Catechism states the Church’s objection to pornography with reference to moral fundamentals and natural law—“it offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other”—and to the harm it does to the dignity of the individual and the common good of society. The Catechism therefore demands that “civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials” (2354).

This then is the call the Church has been making to Icasa: Do not allow broadcasters to become part of the porn distribution chain.

Those who endorse the notion that pornography should be allowed to be transmitted on TV have argued, among other things, that its prohibition would somehow compromise the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression. This is a false argument.

Firstly, pornography does not intend to make a social, political or creative point. It is a utilitarian commodity, much as an insurance policy, an automobile or a hamburger.

Secondly, South Africans may legally produce, obtain and consume pornography (within a legal framework). Excluding television from its distribution does not negate these rights. South Africans have the legal freedom to seek it out where they can find it, but they have no right to expect porn to be delivered to them.

Owing to the Internet and proliferating adult stores throughout South Africa, pornography is already easily available. This has led to a demystification and consequently wider social acceptance of sexually explicit images, to the extent that some teenagers even produce pornographic images of themselves. Today porn is easily circulated through cellphones, in workplaces, social settings and even in schoolgrounds.

Old taboos about pornography are being steadily eroded, and the sexually explicit is becoming socially acceptable, even in mainstream television programmes. The genie is out of the bottle.

Defenders of the porn-on-TV proposal will argue that those who believe that pornography is morally objectionable can exercise the option not to subscribe to or tune into channels transmitting it. But that misses the crucial point that permitting the porn channels would legitimise and, indeed, institutionalise commercial sexual activity as, in the words of the Catechism, “an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others”.

A core of our objections to televised pornography must be the notion that the commodification of sex should not be beamed into the privacy of our living rooms, even less so as a service offered by a provider of entertainment. Pornography is sexual activity performed, produced and distributed for commercial purposes. By broadcasting pornography, Top TV would become part of that industry.

While one may presume that the material which Top TV proposes to broadcast features consenting adults, it must be noted that some pornographic productions use coerced (often trafficked) women. Social acceptance of pornography in general, which would be an inevitable consequence of its legitimisation through TV broadcasts, may have the unintended consequence of fuelling the extreme, violent areas of the industry.

A society as marked by sexual violence as South Africa’s can ill afford to institutionalise debased sexual activity, especially when it by definition demeans women.

There is no statistical evidence to show that pornography causes rape—in the United States, the Internet porn boom has been reported as having led to a decrease in rape. Nonetheless, the broadcast of images that reduce women to dominated and often humiliated sexual objects will be of no aid in addressing those sexual and cultural attitudes that feed our culture of rape, sexual harassment and other forms of misogyny.