Porn Producer Fights Ban of ‘precious Cultural Asset’ From French Tv
France’s best-known pornography producer mounted a passionate defence of his industry yesterday in the face of increasing threat to ban x-rated films from the nation’s TV screens.
France’s best-known pornography producer mounted a passionate defence of his industry yesterday in the face of increasing threats from conservative politicians and the broadcasting standards authority to ban x-rated films from the nation’s television screens.
"Porn’s subject matter is physical love, a theme that has produced countless chefs-d’oevre in painting, in sculpture and in literature," said John B Root, a pseudonym that makes a pun of one of the many French words for the male member.
"If celluloid sex has never succeeded in hoisting itself to the rank of a cinematographic or televisual genre, it is because we have denied it the right to be economically viable," he wrote in an eloquent open letter published in the daily Libération.
"We would not be having this debate if porn was what it should be: joyous, well-made, aphrodisiac art… respectful of its actors and audience, portraying real people and making sense of its subject matter," said the colourful Mr Root who, under his real name, Jean Guilloré, writes successful childrens’ novels and screenplays.
Christine Boutin, a campaigning family-values MP, said last month that she would table legislation this autumn calling for pornography to be banned from French television, which currently airs an average of 990 hardcore films a month on terrestrial, cable and satellite channels.
The influential head of the French broadcasting standards authority, Dominique Baudis, has also backed calls for an outright ban, saying it was "not a question of moral order or prudery, but simply of protecting our children".
A number of highly publicised recent surveys have found that nearly half of all French children have seen an adults-only sex film by the age of 11.
By 16, 90% of French boys and 81% of girls have seen one or more hardcore porn movies.
Some child psychologists have suggested the phenomenon may explain a recent increase in cases of adolescent gang rape, some involving children as young as 12.
The Child-Media Collective said in a recent report that for young children, "watching this kind of programme can induce psychological disturbances and behavioural problems analogous to those produced by sexual abuse".
But Mr Root, whose relatively upmarket movies are highly popular with the discerning French porn audience, warned that banning x-rated films from TV screens could be counterproductive.
"Adolescents will just get far more pleasure out of watching a forbidden videocassette," he said. "When I first saw a Scandinavian film in 1973, when x-rated films were still banned in France, the pleasure of the transgression multiplied the sexual pleasure by 10."
Above all, the porn producer wrote, banning pornography from television will drive the quality down further by depriving film-makers of funds.
"In Germany, where porn is outlawed on television, the sex video output is by far the most voluminous and by far the lowest grade in Europe," he said. "Porn is one of the fruits of the youth uprising of May 1968, and it is a precious cultural asset."