Jane Austen's Emma Says "Yes" To Extreme Pornography

In Jane Austen's Emma, the plucky eponymous heroine remarks: "One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

Two hundred years later, Austen's words are being quoted in a surprising context: to support the morality of violent pornography... specifically pornography that purports to show women being tortured, mutilated and raped.

The Times Online reports on a conference at Durham University in the UK, where proposed legislation on whether or not to make viewing such pornography a crime was debated. In this debate, Emma's words were a minty fresh breath of common sense from the putrid air of ignorance that prevailed:

...according to Clare Phillipson, of Wearside Women in Need. “I’m not going to sit here and be an apologist for a psychopath’s right to w***,” she said. “This is about real women. You people need to get real.” She went on to claim that hundreds of African women had been trafficked into Europe, then sold, mutilated and murdered, their deaths being filmed and photographed to cater for the market in extreme pornography.

“Anyone turned on by the glorification of extreme violence is sick. It sends a message to abohorrent individuals that it is acceptable. What [the Government] are doing is censoring evil. I will not get lost in a debate about human rights on this. There are some things that are just wrong.”

This is, of course, despite the fact that the British Government admits themselves that there is no causal link between extreme pornography and violence against women.

"I will not get lost in a debate about human rights on this. There are some things that are just wrong." The statement of an intelligent person giving themselves up to reactionary ignorance. Why can't more British women be like Emma?

Jane Austen and the case for extreme porn [Times Online]