15. Look don't touch
On catching yourself thinking
A strange thing about being a journalist: you’re constantly catching yourself in the act of thinking. However tightly crafted and impermeably argued I think a piece is at the time of filing, after a few years it will inevitably appear to me as less a whole construction and more a fragment snatched from the general flux of ideas. The experience is a bit like carefully posing for a series of selfies and checking your photo roll later to find nothing but a collection of smudges and blurs.
Last week, my friend Phil phoned and asked if I was aware that one of my old columns — something I’d written a few days after the Brexit vote — had been referenced in the book Brexitland. “Oh nooo,” I groaned, because I knew the piece he meant and it was pretty apocalyptic, written out of the ashen time when close to everything I thought I knew about politics had been disassembled by the shock and I hadn’t yet started to put things back together. It’s a piece that argues, essentially, that we should imagine the worst happen. Only by imagining the worst can we conceivably deal with it.
Some of what I’d imagined at that time was overheated. There was an increase in racist incidents immediately post-vote — but medium-term, the effect was to neutralism migration as a political issue. Some catastrophes are slower-moving but becoming visible now — for example, migration has recently come back as a political issue, and that’s partly because leaving the EU has done for cross-Channel coordination. Other problems have just been accepted as minor irritants of existence — I was talking to a wine merchant recently about how the new bureaucracy damaged her imports, but she’s now adapted her business around it. Things are slightly worse than they were, but life goes on.
This is the problem with being a prophet of doom: when the world doesn’t end, you look kind of silly. (And if the world does end, there’s nobody to say “well done”, so what’s the point?) But I will defend my apocalyptics, at least on a personal level. The world didn’t end, but the way I understood it did. For a few days — maybe longer — I fought against the fact that my instincts had been hopelessly faulty. I was having to reinvent my mental map of everything, and it’s that process that the column records, or at least the howl before that process begins. “I thought I was writing about the world but really I was just reporting from the inside of my skull,” I laughed to Phil. “Classic columnist.”1
The day after that conversation, this 2003 column by David Aaronovitch resurfaced on Twitter. David had criticised the Spectator for running a softball interview with a French racist, and Freddie Gray responded by sharing that column and calling it a “defence of watching child pornography”. It is, you will be surprised to hear, not actually a defence of watching child pornography. It’s a piece I disagree with, although at the time he wrote it I would have agreed with more points than I do now. But I thought Gray’s commentary was particularly unfair because it’s a piece that very clearly catches David in the act of thinking.
He’s thinking about his experience of being a child desired by an adult, and emphasising the ambivalence he felt around that — appalled, but also flattered. This is, I think, brave, because the ambivalence of victims is not always easy to acknowledge — and had he been drawn into sexual activity by the adult in this story, he would have been a victim, regardless of whether he felt damaged by it at the time or later. So I think he’s wrong when he says “had I decided to let Big John have his wicked way with me, I don’t really think that he would have deserved prosecution,” but I value him writing about the complicated subjectivity of being groomed, which is a concept that wasn’t really in use then.2
The other thing he’s thinking about is the relationship between “child pornography” (which I reflexively correct now to “child abuse imagery”, and then reflexively uncorrect because I don’t care anymore about whether using that phrase makes the porn industry feel bad), and I also disagree with his conclusions here. He writes:
The advent of the internet and the ubiquity of computers have shortened the distance between fantasy and its expression. This is a very dramatic change. It's not just about being able to access pictures and stories that once were the territory only of seedy sex-shops (though that's part of it), or even the realisation that there are people out there who are as weird as you may be. It is the ability, in the most unrestricted way, to explore simultaneously the inner and the outer world.
It is easy to see that this search can be motivated as much by a strange curiosity as by a desire for arousal or release. Some 'perversions' such as shoe fetishism have always existed and are relatively straightforward, but others are not. These, however, are now imaginable and available. It surely can only be in the age of the web that you could look up the phrase 'goat-fisting' and get 81 references. And if you follow them up, are you a goat-fister? I believe that some of those who have sent their credit card details off to child-porn providers have simply lost sight of themselves and of reality, and are actually no more likely to abuse children than any of the rest of us.
A mere 81 hits for “goat-fisting”! What a sweet innocent time 2003 was. But the part where I think he’s really wrong is where he argues that the act of purchasing child pornography imagery of child sexual abuse child pornography has no relationship to the likelihood of someone committing sexual violence on a child. 18 years later, I think it does. I think that because I’ve read and written about multiple cases of rape and murder where the use of sexual material played an inciting role.
I think that because I’ve subsequently known men who were prosecuted for possession of child pornography imagery of child sexual abuse child pornography, and can feel with queasy viscerality the onion-skin membrane between them looking and them doing. Having “lost sight of themselves and reality”, the possibility of them graduating to contact offences may still be small, but it’s greater than it was before.
The position David takes here, though, is one that I would have once been fundamentally sympathetic to: people don’t become nonces because of the internet.3 The idea that this was not merely a new medium through which to express our fundamental nature, but would transform our fundamental nature — that seemed absurd. And yet it’s true. Because of the internet, there are essentially too many men implicated in child pornography imagery of child sexual abuse child pornography to give prison sentences to even extreme offenders.
The way we think and feel now is not the same as the way we thought and felt before, and this is a particularly grim instance of that. The internet changed us, and the ways it changed us were only imagined by the most alarmist and apocalyptic of commentators at the time.
Well that was a heavy one. Comments and replies always very welcome!
Gimme, gimme more…
Remember reality exploitation nightmare There’s Something About Miriam? There’s a new podcast looking back at the show and the star, and I’ve written about it for the Telegraph.
The return of Sex and the City is a good moment to reread this oral history of spectacularly cynical pre-finale episode episode “Splat!” (Even if I am pretty suspicious of And Just Like That.)
This is a good essay about a good writer on the complications of victimhood.
I probably said a less articulate version of this tbh.
I’ve not done a great job of tracking the history of “grooming” as a term so far — my memory is that it only became widely understood and used in the UK at least post-Savile. This 2018 paper argues that “the concept has gained significant popularity in the last two decades”, i.e. beginning around or just before 2000.
Blocked and Reported listeners will know that there’s a lively discussion to be had about paedophiles vs child sexual abusers. In short, some men (it’s pretty much always men) are sexually aroused by children, but not all of them will go on to commit contact offences; of the men who do commit contact offences, some will be opportunistic or sadistic rather than strictly motivated by arousal (a distinction that will mean very little to victims but is potentially helpful for prevention approaches). But since I’m talking about offenders here, “nonces” is the technical term.
I think that it was Ray Wyre who discovered the amount of time that abusers were willing to spend on making children (and vulnerable adults) their victims and accordingly named it grooming.