Edel Coffey: Your 'right' to watch porn in public ends with others' right not to
Edel Coffey: no-one wants to feel like a prude, but there's a time and a place for everything
It sounded like the beginning of the latest bingeworthy Netflix show.
A sexagenarian male MP gets caught – twice — watching porn on his phone in the House of Commons chamber and within a week he has resigned from the seat he has held for 12 years. A week is a long time in politics, as they say.
It’s one of those classic Tory stories. Deeply stupid and publicly humiliating with an added frisson of sex and the delicious detail that the remorseful MP Neil Parish claimed he was initially innocently looking at videos of tractors before he fell down the rabbit hole of internet porn. Anatomy of a Scandal indeed!
We’ve come a long way from shuffling ‘dirty’ magazines out of newsagents in paper bags but last week I wondered if perhaps we could do with a little more covert behaviour in our lives.
Viewing porn in public places is a reportedly common experience, particularly on buses, trains and planes. Some people even watch it with the sound on, no headphones. I thought things were bad when I had to listen to a woman watching hour after hour of TikTok videos at full volume on a bus to Dublin, but I realise now it could have been so much worse.
There is a suggestion that some people who watch porn in a public place are being titillated not by the porn itself but rather by the power trip of making women in their vicinity feel uncomfortable. It’s not the women writhing on screen that they’re interested in but the women around them writhing with embarrassment.
It reminded me of recent sexual scandals with celebrities like Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein who masturbated in front of women without their consent. It also made me think that these acts are clever and subtle in that they can make women feel violated without laying a finger on them.
Nobody wants to feel like a prude or a party-pooper, I’m sure those parliamentary sessions can be very tedious indeed, but we need to remind ourselves of a sense of decorum and that old underrated idea that there is a time and a place for everything.
Have we really arrived at a place in our culture where watching porn sitting beside someone on the bus is okay? Have we become so inured to it?
I remember walking through Pigalle on a trip to Paris about 15 years ago.
It’s a particularly seedy area of Paris, home of the Moulin Rouge and the red-light district, and I remember how shocked I was as very young children were walked home from school, hand-in-hand with their parents, past the giant and very sexually explicit posters of naked women on the windows of the stripclubs lining the streets.
The children didn’t seem to notice, nor did their parents. Or maybe they had just become used to them.
The late Justice Oliver Wendell Jones once said ‘the right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.’ This quote came to mind when I was thinking about our right to view whatever we want wherever we want on our personal devices.
I’m happy for everyone to watch whatever they enjoy watching but when we’re in a shared space there’s a social contract that we will all behave in a way that won’t disturb each other and keep the more intimate parts of our day to the confines of our private space.
I have as much of a problem with people clipping their nails or applying make-up or nail polish on the bus as I do with people watching porn. It’s all about boundaries.
When it comes to porn, the very least we should have is a choice and the ability to consent to whether we watch it or not. If we’re sitting beside someone who whips out PornHub to pass the time on the commute, we don’t really have much choice in the matter.
In the UK, the Indecent Displays (Control) Act covers this area by law but in Ireland, strangely, there are no laws covering watching porn in public. It could conceivably fall under the consent laws – if you’re exposed to porn but haven’t agreed to watching it, can you be deemed to have given consent?
But perhaps we could just all behave a little better? Just as it is everyone’s right to watch porn if they want to, so too is it everyone’s right not to watch it, particularly not without consent on the top deck of the 202 bus.
The saying comes to mind again: ‘my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.’ It comes down to basic respect for each other. Don’t watch porn in shared public spaces because your right to watch it ends where someone else’s right to not watch it begins.
