Demeaning

First published in Column Eight on the 19^th May, 1993

Demeaning is the new in-word. Warren Cooper tossed it around like a hollow caber a few weeks ago when he claimed that the media is demeaning the Government. With all due respect it isn’t hard to do this, particularly when one minister (who shall be nameless) on the radio modestly declared he was ‘sincere and hardworking.’

However, demeaning the Government is child’s play compared with some of the more heavy duty demeaning that’s presently going on.

The Demeaning (formerly the Indecent) Publications Tribunal ruled recently that in pornography men are harder to demean than women. This rather curious ruling compares the treatment of men in a series of homosexual magazines with that of women in ‘heterosexual’ pornography mags.

Thus while women are ‘always’ treated as objects in heterosexual mags, the men in the homosexual ones were treated as both objects and subjects. So that’s okay. Follow? I must admit it took me several careful readings of the news report to understand what was being said.

Why do I have this niggling feeling that there’s something awry in all this wordplay?

I agree that an all-male porno mag doesn’t reinforce negative male attitudes to women, or reinforce gender-based inequalities. Of course it won’t. But surely that isn’t what the Indecent Publications Tribunal was set up to judge!

The IPT was set up to rule on indecency, not on inequality between the sexes, and I think it’s failed to do this. I also think it no longer understands the meaning of the word demeaning.

Demeaning has the sense of debasing. These days we usually understand it as an action on the part of one person or group which demeans another human being or group.

Surely, therefore, indecency itself is demeaning, quite apart from whether it debases women or men. And magazines are pornographic when they display human genitalia in such a way as to treat them merely as objects with no sacred worth, showing human bodies impersonally and without regard for their dignity.

The borderlines are being stretched constantly, of course, even in magazines that in no way would call themselves pornographic. But I think the average person has a fairly good idea, with or without the help of ITP, of what constitutes pornography.

In Melbourne the same curious double-standard as that used by the IPT recently appeared. A billboard of a naked 17-year-old youth with smutty words across his private parts was considered by women to be okay. However, it would have showed a ‘dominant and repressive’ social attitude if the person had been a young girl.

In New Zealand we have a naked man walking down the street on a television ad: in fact men dropping their pants on TV has become almost commonplace. Those who complain are told it’s only humorous.

Female strip shows are called degrading, yet women now attend male strip show in droves. How can it be demeaning for one half of the human race and not for the other?

The over-emphasis on exposing the human body in our society is excused on the basis that we’ve somehow matured from attitudes of the past. In fact it’s typical symptom of a society rapidly heading toward un-civilisation, and towards the decay, erosion and ultimate overthrow that normally follows such behaviour.

The Demeaning Publications Tribunal, meanwhile, contributes to our downfall, by allowing indecent publications to be sold. And the pornographic merchants of the world sit back and laugh, and rake in the dough.

 

The IPD was dissolved a few months after this column was written, and replaced by the Office of Film and Literature Classification – now called the Classification Office. It covers a wide range of areas, in part as a result of the huge changes that have come about due to digital information.