The suspects are in charge of the case

John O'Connor:

News International and the Metropolitan Police are looking into corruption at Wapping. But face-saving is their priority

Sunday, 10 July 2011 The Independent

Scotland Yard is facing its worst corruption crisis since the 1970s, when senior police officers were found to be controlling London's pornography industry. The investigation and subsequent purge left many detectives out of a job and in some case serving prison sentences. The gloom that surrounded the Yard in those days is similar to the atmosphere that pervades it today.
Each day reveals more details of misconduct by the press and the police. The investigation is going to be looking for heads to roll, and the higher the rank the better. This extraordinary state of affairs has its roots back in the Eighties, in the days when News International was dependent on the police to protect its new premises in Wapping.
Violent demonstrations occurred each night and the police were able to assist News International in getting its product out on to the streets. This was a complete turnaround for The Times newspaper, which only a decade earlier had launched the huge inquiry into police corruption that shook Scotland Yard to its foundations. News International was now best friends with Scotland Yard, and senior executives and top policemen wined and dined together on a regular basis.
Nobody could see the potential problems of a free lunch. This mutual admiration society worked very well for a time. Information passed freely both ways. The police benefited from undercover operations run by the newspapers, and in return the papers got their exclusive stories. This comfortable arrangement was cemented by regular briefings from Scotland Yard's press bureau to the national press directly and sometimes through the Crime Writers Association.
The culture of police officers mixing with journalists was encouraged, and little thought was given to the potential of misconduct. Crime writers were expected to know lots of police officers, and there was great competition to get the inside story. If only things could have stayed the same.
The News of the World began to pursue a strategy of aggressively targeting celebrities. The use of "the Fake Sheikh", Mazher Mahmood, was very effective, and produced some exclusive exposés on the greed and stupidity of people who should have known better. They were able to obtain confidential information on individuals including criminal records but they were in too much of a hurry to research public records.
Some private detective agencies realised that there was money to be earned from celebrity stories and confidential crime stories. Some of these detective agencies were run by former Metropolitan Police officers who maintained good contacts with serving officers. Some ex-police officers set themselves up as stringers, and provided a conduit for confidential information supplied by officers directly to the press. Once the Rubicon had been crossed, it was comparatively easy for police officers to contravene the Data Protection Act and supply information from the Police National Computer.
Short cuts adopted by the News of the World put them closer to the coalface. The strategy of using several intermediaries was abandoned and they employed private detectives such as Jonathan Rees of Southern Investigations and Glenn Mulcaire. This was clearly cheaper but the drawback was that if the private detectives came unstuck so did those who hired them.
The Department of Professional Standards at Scotland Yard has not been standing idly by. A number of undercover operations were mounted against ex- and serving police officers who were suspected of receiving corrupt payments. Nobody in authority was prepared to recognise the endemic nature of this corruption and each case was dealt with as a stand-alone incident. Much the same attitude was adopted when Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman were convicted of hacking messages of members of the royal family.
At this stage, the number of police officers involved is unknown. News International's attempts to switch the focus of the inquiry onto the police by releasing details of payments to officers raised more questions than answers. The obvious questions are "What about payments to intermediaries?" and "What were the payments for?" Hospitality and gifts must also be probed.
The two organisations that are carrying out the investigations are... the Metropolitan Police and News International, both of whom are the subject of these allegations.
It is with breathtaking cheek that News International announced its own investigation. It is quite clear that getting to the truth is not a goal, its real objective is damage limitation and face-saving. It is quite clear that any number of junior staff will be sacrificed in order the save the skins of the real decision-makers. The News International investigation should be laughed out of court, not that it is ever likely to get there.
The new police investigation is even more curious. Everybody wants to know why the original hacking investigation was curtailed after the convictions of Mulcaire and Goodman. It seems unlikely that this decision was made solely by the police, but it is a possibility, and if so, why?
The suspicion must be that pressure was brought to bear by either News International, the Crown Prosecution Service or a very high-ranking police officer, or perhaps a combination of all three.
The new police investigation into hacking has been running since January 2011 and the police corruption enquiry has only just begun. It seems to me that this is a classic situation whereby an outside police force should be used, under the supervision of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. There is clear precedent for using an outside force, and if the public are to be convinced that this is a fair and unbiased investigation then that should clearly point to using an independent force outside of London.
This is no reflection on the skill, determination or ability of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, but the pressure which killed off the first enquiry might still exist.
The Metropolitan Police had one go at this and fell very short. At risk is the reputation and integrity of the service. It cannot afford to get it wrong again. The problem is that senior officers did not recognise the extent of the corruption and were probably unwilling to upset their new found pals in the media.
They must accept their responsibility for what has happened. It is astonishing that with so many resources being spent on anti-corruption, they could not see it when it was right under their noses.
John O'Connor is former commander of the Flying Squad at Scotland Yard

War porn in Libya

By Pepe Escobar

Forget "democracy"; Libya, unlike Egypt and Tunisia, is an oil power. Many a plush office of United States and European elites will be salivating at the prospect of taking advantage of a small window of opportunity afforded by the anti-Muammar Gaddafi revolution to establish - or expand - a beachhead. There's all that oil, of course. There's also the allure, close by, of the US$10 billion, 4,128 kilometer long Trans-Saharan gas pipeline from Nigeria to Algeria, expected to be online in 2015.

Thus the world, once again, is reintroduced to war porn, history as farce, a bad rerun of "shock and awe". Everyone - the United Nations, the US, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) - is up in arms about a no-fly zone. Special forces are on the move, as are US warships.

Breathless US senators compare Libya with Yugoslavia. Tony "The Return of the Living Dead" Blair is back in missionary zeal form, its mirror image played by British Prime Minister David Cameron, duly mocked by Gaddafi's son, the "modernizer" Saif al-Islam. There's fear of "chemical weapons". Welcome back to humanitarian imperialism - on crack.

And like a character straight out of Scary Movie, even war-on-Iraq-architect Paul Wolfowitz wants a NATO-enforced no-fly zone, as the Foreign Policy Initiative - the son of the Project for the New American Century - publishes an open letter to US President Barack Obama demanding military boots to turn Libya into a protectorate ruled by NATO in the name of the "international community".

The mere fact that all these people are supporting the Libya protesters makes it all stink to - over the rainbow - high heavens. Sending His Awesomeness Charlie Sheen to whack Gaddafi would seem more believable.

It was up to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to introduce a note of sanity, describing the notion of a no-fly zone over Libya as "superfluous". This means in practice a Russian veto at the UN Security Council. Earlier, China had already changed the conversation.

In their Sheen-style hysteria - with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton desperately offering "any kind of assistance" - Western politicians did not bother to consult with the people who are risking their lives to overthrow Gaddafi. At a press conference in Benghazi, the spokesman for the brand new Libyan National Transitional Council, human-rights lawyer Abdel-Hafidh Ghoga, was blunt, "We are against any foreign intervention or military intervention in our internal affairs ... This revolution will be completed by our people."

The people in question, by the way, are protecting Libya's oil industry, and even loading supertankers destined to Europe and China. The people in question do not have much to do with opportunists such as former Gaddafi-appointed justice minister Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, who wants a provisional government to prepare for elections in three months. Moreover, the people in question, as al-Jazeera has reported, have been saying they don't want foreign intervention for a week now.

The Benghazi council prefers to describe itself as the "political face for the revolution", organizing civic affairs, and not established as an interim government. Meanwhile, a military committee of officer defectors is trying to set up a skeleton army to be sent to Tripoli; through tribal contacts, they seem to have already infiltrated small cells into the vicinity of Tripoli.

Whether this self-appointed revolutionary leadership - splinter elements of the established elite, the tribes and the army - will be the face of a new regime, or whether they will be overtaken by younger, more radical activists, remains to be seen.

Shower me with hypocrisy
None of this anyway has placated the hysterical Western narrative, according to which there are only two options for Libya; to become a failed state or the next al-Qaeda haven. How ironic. Up to 2008, Libya was dismissed by Washington as a rogue state and an unofficial member of the "axis of evil" that originally included Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

As former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark confirmed years ago, Libya was on the Pentagon/neo-conservative official list to be taken out after Iraq, along with Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and the holy grail, Iran. But as soon as wily Gaddafi became an official partner in the "war on terror", Libya was instantly upgraded by the George W Bush administration to civilized status.

As for the UN Security Council unanimously deciding to refer the Gaddafi regime to the International Criminal Court (ICC), it's useful to remember that the ICC was created in mid-1998 by 148 countries meeting in Rome. The final vote was 120 to seven. The seven that voted against the ICC were China, Iraq, Israel, Qatar and Yemen, plus Libya and ... the United States. Incidentally, Israel killed more Palestinian civilians in two weeks around new year 2008 than Gaddafi these past two weeks.

This tsunami of hypocrisy inevitably raises the question; what does the West know about the Arab world anyway? Recently the executive board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) praised a certain northern African country for its "ambitious reform agenda" and its "strong macroeconomic performance and the progress on enhancing the role of the private sector". The country was Libya. The IMF had only forgotten to talk to the main actors: the Libyan people.

And what to make of Anthony Giddens - the guru behind Blair's "Third Way" - who in March 2007 penned an article to The Guardian saying "Libya is not especially repressive" and "Gaddafi seems genuinely popular"? Giddens bet that Libya "in two or three decades' time would be a Norway of North Africa: prosperous, egalitarian and forward-looking". Tripoli may well be on its way to Oslo - but without the Gaddafi clan.

The US, Britain and France are so awkwardly maneuvering for best post-Gaddafi positioning it's almost comical to watch. Beijing, even against its will, waited until extra time to condemn Gaddafi at the UN, but made sure it was following the lead of African and Asian countries (smart move, as in "we listen to the voices of the South"). Beijing is extremely worried that its complex economic relationship with oil source Libya does not unravel (amid all the hoopla about fleeing expats, China quietly evacuated no less than 30,000 Chinese workers in the oil and construction business).

Once again; it's the oil, stupid. A crucial strategic factor for Washington is that post-Gaddafi Libya may represent a bonanza for US Big Oil - which for the moment has been kept away from Libya. Under this perspective, Libya may be considered as yet one more battleground between the US and China. But while China goes for energy and business deals in Africa, the US bets on its forces in AFRICOM as well as NATO advancing "military cooperation" with the African Union.

The anti-Gaddafi movement must remain on maximum alert. It's fair to argue the absolute majority of Libyans are using all their resourcefulness and are wiling to undergo any sacrifice to build a united, transparent and democratic country. And they will do it on their own. They may accept humanitarian help. As for war porn, throw it in the dustbin of history.

Porn stars to take part in Cambridge University Union debate

 

The historic Cambridge University Union has shocked students by inviting adult film stars to take part in an organised debate.

Anna Arrowsmith, who is the UK's first female adult movie director and once stood as a Liberal Democrat MP candidate Photo: PA

10:23AM GMT 12 Jan 2011

The Cambridge Union Society, which was founded in 1815, is famed for inviting international politicians and academics to its regular debating sessions.

But the union has raised eyebrows by organising a debate where students will be entertained by guest speakers including three adult film stars.

First on the bill is stripper and pornographic film actor Johnny Anglais, who was suspended from his teaching job after his work as a porn star was revealed.

He will be joined by Anna Arrowsmith, who is the UK's first female adult movie director and once stood as a Liberal Democrat MP candidate.

US porn actress-turned-chaplain Shelley Lubben will also join the debate and discuss the question: ''This house believes that pornography does a good public service.''

Incoming union president Lauren Davidson told Cambridge student newspaper The Tab that she believes pornography is a ''hot topic'' in modern society.
She said: ''The issue of pornography is prevalent in today's society; it's easily accessible online for people of any age, and seems to be increasingly covered in the news and on TV programmes.
''At the Union this term we've got the traditional debates on politics, foreign policy and the media, but I thought it was important to look at the bigger picture and debate a wider range of hot topics.
''Sexuality is something that everyone is very aware of and I want to create a proper discussion around it.
''But I am not making the debate controversial for the sake of it. I hope it will be both academic and lively.''
The groundbreaking debate will be held on February 17 in the Cambridge Union Society's historic debating chamber on Bridge street.
Anglais, real name Benedict Garrett, was suspended from his teaching post in Illford, Essex, in July last year after he was revealed as a porn star.
Ms Arrowsmith, 38, stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate in Kent in the last general election.
She said: ''I'm glad they are taking the topic seriously now. This issue is important for feminism, culture and censorship.
''I do well at these debates as when people really think about this issue they realise that porn is not the root of all our social problems.''
But Shelley Lubben, who appeared in 30 adult films and worked as a prostitute before becoming a born-again Christian, will argue against pornography.
She said: ''Porn is not glamorous. It destroys lives and is an industry of human trafficking and rampant sexually transmitted diseases that is destroying our nations and families of the world.
''Porn is a huge lie and I intend to expose it.''
US writer and self-proclaimed "Sexademic" Jessi Fischer, child psychologist Richard Woolfson and feminist sociologist Dr Gail Dines will also appear at the debate.
Since it was founded the society has played host to top politicians and celebrities including Sir Winston Churchill.
Guest speakers appearing at other debates this term will include Ashes-winning captain Mike Brearley and actor Sir Ian McKellen.

Economic Growth and Well Being

 

Consumerism has, as Huxley feared, changed all of us – we'd rather hop to a brave new world than rein in our spending

 

• George Monbiot
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 January 2010 20.30 GMT

 

Who said this? "All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness." Was it a) the boss of Greenpeace, b) the director of the New Economics Foundation, or c) an anarchist planning the next climate camp? None of the above: d) the former head of the Confederation of British Industry, who currently runs the Financial Services Authority. In an interview broadcast last Friday, Lord Turner brought the consumer society's most subversive observation into the mainstream.
 
In our hearts most of us know it is true, but we live as if it were not. Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life. Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country's most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.
 
As the Guardian revealed today, the British government is now split over product placement in television programmes: if it implements the policy proposed by Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, plots will revolve around chocolates and cheeseburgers, and advertisements will be impossible to filter, perhaps even to detect. Bradshaw must know that this indoctrination won't make us happier, wiser, greener or leaner; but it will make the television companies £140m a year.

 

Though we know they aren't the same, we can't help conflating growth and wellbeing. Last week, for instance, the Guardian carried the headline "UK standard of living drops below 2005 level". But the story had nothing to do with our standard of living. Instead it reported that per capita gross domestic product is lower than it was in 2005. GDP is a measure of economic activity, not standard of living. But the terms are confused so often that journalists now treat them as synonyms. The low retail sales of previous months were recently described by this paper as "bleak" and "gloomy". High sales are always "good news", low sales are always "bad news", even if the product on offer is farmyard porn. I believe it's time that the Guardian challenged this biased reporting.

 
Those who still wish to conflate welfare and GDP argue that high consumption by the wealthy improves the lot of the world's poor. Perhaps, but it's a very clumsy and inefficient instrument. After some 60 years of this feast, 800 million people remain permanently hungry. Full employment is a less likely prospect than it was before the frenzy began.

 

In a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Sir Partha Dasgupta makes the point that the problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure to be as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales.

 
Most important, no deduction is made to account for the depreciation of natural capital: the overuse or degradation of soil, water, forests, fisheries and the atmosphere. Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, for instance, his rough figures suggest that while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. Amazingly, there are still no official figures that seek to show trends in the actual wealth of nations.

 

You can say all this without fear of punishment or persecution. But in its practical effects, consumerism is a totalitarian system: it permeates every aspect of our lives. Even our dissent from the system is packaged up and sold to us in the form of anti-consumption consumption, like the "I'm not a plastic bag", which was supposed to replace disposable carriers but was mostly used once or twice before it fell out of fashion, or like the lucrative new books on how to live without money.

 

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley proposed different totalitarianisms: one sustained by fear, the other in part by greed. Huxley's nightmare has come closer to realisation. In the nurseries of the Brave New World, "the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. 'I do love flying,' they whispered, 'I do love flying, I do love having new clothes … old clothes are beastly … We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending'". Underconsumption was considered "positively a crime against society". But there was no need to punish it. At first the authorities machine-gunned the Simple Lifers who tried to opt out, but that didn't work. Instead they used "the slower but infinitely surer methods" of conditioning: immersing people in advertising slogans from childhood. A totalitarianism driven by greed eventually becomes self-enforced.

 
Let me give you an example of how far this self-enforcement has progressed. In a recent comment thread, a poster expressed an idea that I have now heard a few times. "We need to get off this tiny little world and out into the wider universe … if it takes the resources of the planet to get us out there, so be it. However we use them, however we utilise the energy of the sun and the mineral wealth of this world and the others of our planetary system, either we do use them to expand and explore other worlds, and become something greater than a mud-grubbing semi-sentient animal, or we die as a species."

 

This is the consumer society taken to its logical extreme: the Earth itself becomes disposable. This idea appears to be more acceptable in some circles than any restraint on pointless spending. That we might hop, like the aliens in the film Independence Day, from one planet to another, consuming their resources then moving on, is considered by these people a more realistic and desirable prospect than changing the way in which we measure wealth.

 
So how do we break this system? How do we pursue happiness and wellbeing rather than growth? I came back from the Copenhagen climate talks depressed for several reasons, but above all because, listening to the discussions at the citizens' summit, it struck me that we no longer have movements; we have thousands of people each clamouring to have their own visions adopted. We might come together for occasional rallies and marches, but as soon as we start discussing alternatives, solidarity is shattered by possessive individualism. Consumerism has changed all of us. Our challenge is now to fight a system we have internalised.

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The dark side of the internet

 

 

In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography.

• Andy Beckett
• The Guardian, Thursday 26 November 2009

 

 

Freenet means controversial information does not need to be stored in physical data havens such as this one, Sealand. Photograph: Kim Gilmour/Alamy

 

Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.

 
"It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about – freedom to communicate," Clarke says now. "But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn't the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail." His pioneering software was intended to change that.
His tutors were not bowled over. "I would say the response was a bit lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky … they said, 'You didn't cite enough prior work.'"
 
Undaunted, in 2000 Clarke publicly released his software, now more appealingly called Freenet. Nine years on, he has lost count of how many people are using it: "At least 2m copies have been downloaded from the website, primarily in Europe and the US. The website is blocked in [authoritarian] countries like China so there, people tend to get Freenet from friends." Last year Clarke produced an improved version: it hides not only the identities of Freenet users but also, in any online environment, the fact that someone is using Freenet at all.
 
Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few terse instructions, and answer a few questions ("How much security do you need?" … "NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country" or "MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse"). Then you enter a previously hidden online world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official Freenet index lists the hundreds of "freesites" available: "Iran News", "Horny Kate", "The Terrorist's Handbook: A practical guide to explosives and other things of interests to terrorists", "How To Spot A Pedophile [sic]", "Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more", "Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal rights activists". There is material written in Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are disconcerting blogs ("Welcome to my first Freenet site. I'm not here because of kiddie porn … [but] I might post some images of naked women") and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference: "If you're reading this now, then you're on the darkweb."
 
The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness – its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. "Many many users think that when they search on Google they're getting all the web pages," says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. "I think it's a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don't know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know."

Unfathomable and mysterious

"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" – the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet", "invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working.
And yet, in a sense, they are all part of the same picture: beyond the confines of most people's online lives, there is a vast other internet out there, used by millions but largely ignored by the media and properly understood by only a few computer scientists. How was it created? What exactly happens in it? And does it represent the future of life online or the past?
Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he undertook research to try to gauge its scale. "I remember saying to my staff, 'It's probably two or three times bigger than the regular web,"' he remembers. "But the vastness of the deep web . . . completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and discovering things."
 
In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet … The value of deep web content is immeasurable … internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available."
 
In the eight years since, use of the internet has been utterly transformed in many ways, but improvements in search technology by Google, Kosmix and others have only begun to plumb the deep web. "A hidden web [search] engine that's going to have everything – that's not quite practical," says Professor Juliana Freire of the University of Utah, who is leading a deep web search project called Deep Peep. "It's not actually feasible to index the whole deep web. There's just too much data."
But sheer scale is not the only problem. "When we've crawled [searched] several sites, we've gotten blocked," says Freire. "You can actually come up with ways that make it impossible for anyone [searching] to grab all your data." Sometimes the motivation is commercial – "people have spent a lot of time and money building, say, a database of used cars for sale, and don't want you to be able to copy their site"; and sometimes privacy is sought for other reasons. "There's a well-known crime syndicate called the Russian Business Network (RBN)," says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a leading online security firm, "and they're always jumping around the internet, grabbing bits of [disused] address space, sending out millions of spam emails from there, and then quickly disconnecting."
 
The RBN also rents temporary websites to other criminals for online identity theft, child pornography and releasing computer viruses. The internet has been infamous for such activities for decades; what has been less understood until recently was how the increasingly complex geography of the internet has aided them. "In 2000 dark and murky address space was a bit of a novelty," says Labovitz. "This is now an entrenched part of the daily life of the internet." Defunct online companies; technical errors and failures; disputes between internet service providers; abandoned addresses once used by the US military in the earliest days of the internet – all these have left the online landscape scattered with derelict or forgotten properties, perfect for illicit exploitation, sometimes for only a few seconds before they are returned to disuse. How easy is it to take over a dark address? "I don't think my mother could do it," says Labovitz. "But it just takes a PC and a connection. The internet has been largely built on trust."

Open or closed?

In fact, the internet has always been driven as much by a desire for secrecy as a desire for transparency. The network was the joint creation of the US defence department and the American counterculture – the WELL, one of the first and most influential online communities, was a spinoff from hippy bible the Whole Earth Catalog – and both groups had reasons to build hidden or semi-hidden online environments as well as open ones. "Strong encryption [code-writing] developed in parallel with the internet," says
Danny O'Brien, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-established pressure group for online privacy.
 
There are still secretive parts of the internet where this unlikely alliance between hairy libertarians and the cloak-and-dagger military endures. The Onion Router, or Tor, is an American volunteer-run project that offers free software to those seeking anonymous online communication, like a more respectable version of Freenet. Tor's users, according to its website, include US secret service "field agents" and "law enforcement officers . . . Tor allows officials to surf questionable websites and services without leaving tell-tale tracks," but also "activists and whistleblowers", for example "environmental groups [who] are increasingly falling under surveillance in the US under laws meant to protect against terrorism". Tor, in short, is used both by the American state and by some of its fiercest opponents. On the hidden internet, political life can be as labyrinthine as in a novel by Thomas Pynchon.

The hollow legs of Sealand

The often furtive, anarchic quality of life online struck some observers decades ago. In 1975, only half a dozen years after the internet was created, the science-fiction author John Brunner wrote of "so many worms and counter-worms loose in the data-net" in his influential novel The Shockwave Rider. By the 80s "data havens", at first physical then online locations where sensitive computerised information could be concealed, were established in discreet jurisdictions such as Caribbean tax havens. In 2000 an American internet startup called HavenCo set up a much more provocative data haven, in a former second world war sea fort just outside British territorial waters off the Suffolk coast, which since the 60s had housed an eccentric independent "principality" called Sealand. HavenCo announced that it would store any data unless it concerned terrorism or child pornography, on servers built into the hollow legs of Sealand as they extended beneath the waves. A better metaphor for the hidden depths of the internet was hard to imagine.

 
In 2007 the highly successful Swedish filesharing website The Pirate Bay – the downloading of music and films for free being another booming darknet enterprise – announced its intention to buy Sealand. The plan has come to nothing so far, and last year it was reported that HavenCo had ceased operation, but in truth the need for physical data havens is probably diminishing. Services such as Tor and Freenet perform the same function electronically; and in a sense, even the "open" internet, as online privacy-seekers sometimes slightly contemptuously refer to it, has increasingly become a place for concealment: people posting and blogging under pseudonyms, people walling off their online lives from prying eyes on social networking websites.
 
"The more people do everything online, the more there's going to be bits of your life that you don't want to be part of your public online persona," says O'Brien. A spokesman for the Police Central e-crime Unit [PCeU] at the Metropolitan Police points out that many internet secrets hide in plain sight: "A lot of internet criminal activity is on online forums that are not hidden, you just have to know where to find them. Like paedophile websites: people who use them might go to an innocent-looking website with a picture of flowers, click on the 18th flower, arrive on another innocent-looking website, click something there, and so on." The paedophile ring convicted this autumn and currently awaiting sentence for offences involving Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth met on Facebook. Such secret criminal networks are not purely a product of the digital age: codes and slang and pathways known only to initiates were granting access to illicit worlds long before the internet.
 
To libertarians such as O'Brien and Clarke the hidden internet, however you define it, is constantly under threat from restrictive governments and corporations. Its freedoms, they say, must be defended absolutely. "Child pornography does exist on Freenet," says Clarke. "But it exists all over the web, in the post . . . At Freenet we could establish a virus to destroy any child pornography on Freenet – we could implement that technically. But then whoever has the key [to that filtering software] becomes a target. Suddenly we'd start getting served copyright notices; anything suspect on Freenet, we'd get pressure to shut it down. To modify Freenet would be the end of Freenet."

Always recorded

According to the police, for criminal users of services such as Freenet, the end is coming anyway. The PCeU spokesman says, "The anonymity things, there are ways to get round them, and we do get round them. When you use the internet, something's always recorded somewhere. It's a question of identifying who is holding that information." Don't the police find their investigations obstructed by the libertarian culture of so much life online? "No, people tend to be co-operative."
The internet, for all its anarchy, is becoming steadily more commercialised; as internet service providers, for example, become larger and more profit-driven, the spokesman suggests, it is increasingly in their interests to accept a degree of policing. "There has been an increasing centralisation," Ian Clarke acknowledges regretfully.
 
Meanwhile the search engine companies are restlessly looking for paths into the deep web and the other sections of the internet currently denied to them. "There's a deep implication for privacy," says Anand Rajaraman of Kosmix. "Tonnes and tonnes of stuff out there on the deep web has what I call security through obscurity. But security through obscurity is actually a false security. You [the average internet user] can't find something, but the bad guys can find it if they try hard enough."
As Kosmix and other search engines improve, he says, they will make the internet truly transparent: "You will be on the same level playing field as the bad guys." The internet as a sort of electronic panopticon, everything on it unforgivingly visible and retrievable – suddenly its current murky depths seem in some ways preferable.
 
Ten years ago Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the web, wrote: "I have a dream for the web in which computers become capable of analysing all the data on the web – the content, links, and transactions between people … A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines." Yet this "semantic web" remains the stuff of knotty computer science papers rather than a reality.
 
"It's really been the holy grail for 30 years," says Bergman. One obstacle, he continues, is that the internet continues to expand in unpredictable and messy surges. "The boundaries of what the web is have become much more blurred. Is Twitter part of the web or part of something else? Now the web, in a sense, is just everything. In 1998, the NEC laboratory at Princeton published a paper on the size of the internet. Who could get something like that published now? You can't talk about how big the internet is. Because what is the metric?"

Gold Rush

It seems likely that the internet will remain in its Gold Rush phase for some time yet. And in the crevices and corners of its slightly thrown-together structures, darknets and other private online environments will continue to flourish. They can be inspiring places to spend time in, full of dissidents and eccentrics and the internet's original freewheeling spirit. But a darknet is not always somewhere for the squeamish.
 
On Freenet, there is a currently a "freesite" which makes allegations against supposed paedophiles, complete with names, photographs, extensive details of their lives online, and partial home addresses. In much smaller type underneath runs the disclaimer: "The material contained in this freesite is hearsay . . . It is not admissable in court proceedings and would certainly not reach the burden of proof requirement of a criminal trial." For the time being, when I'm wandering around online, I may stick to Google.

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Sowetan

 

Published by TiCam- 04-10-07

In South Africa, women now rape men

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It is strange but true. In South Africa, women are now raping men. If you are tall, handsome and huge, you may likely be a target. Moreover, if you love walking alone in the open field or at night, you may be taking a big risk and chances are that you may fall a prey to the gang of women rapists.

Nevertheless, if a man is not in the right mood for sex, the rapists have a way of creating one. They caress, suck and rub the victim's penis with a lotion. And before you say rape, the penis is erect and ready for action.

Penultimate Tuesday, the South African police arrested a 30-year old woman for allegedly luring a young man into an open field and then raped him while her two other friends stood guard, waiting for their turn. The police confirmed that after the incident, the victim's bruised penis was treated at a local hospital.

In another incident widely reported in the local media, two women allegedly lured a 21-year old job seeker away from a brick company by pretending they were equally looking for work. While walking across an open field, they pounced on the young man and raped him. According to report, police arrested a woman while the other escaped.

The victim told the police thus: "They threatened me, forced me to take off my pants, and then rubbed lotion on my penis to get an erection. The other woman kept watch while the arrested woman had sex with me."

Modus operandi

According to Sowetan, a South African newspaper, the rapists operate in a group of two or three. They ride in posh cars and look out for a man walking alone. Once they spot a potential prey, they pull up beside him and offer to give him a ride. If he accepts their offer, the women would take him to their house and at gunpoint, take their turn to rape him.

Only recently, the police confirmed the incident of a 24-year old man, who after being abducted at gunpoint by three women traveling in a white BMW, was forced to kneel face down on the back seat of the car. He was prevented from looking up and was only allowed to look about him when he was inside the house. For three days, the young man was kept in the house and gang raped.

According to Inspector Manyadza Ralidzhivha, the victim, who was dumped in the township after the incident reported that, "the women who were older than him, made him drink some liquids and then took turns having sex with him. They did not talk too much, but had sex with him as he lay face-up on the bed in a house."

Major problem

For Thembi Hlatshuiayo and Phindile Morewwa, both students of a popular secondary school in Johannesburg, apart from being a major problem in South Africa, women raping men has become a source of embarrassment to the womenfolk.

"The issue of women raping men is now one of the major problems in South Africa. In fact, it is a source of embarrassment to us," Thembi said.

Giving AIDS back to men

Saturday Sun investigation, however, revealed that the alleged rapists are mostly AIDS infected women, who believed that they have contacted the killer disease from men and have decided to pay them back in their own coins.

Lebo Leburu, a shop assistant in Johannesburg, told Saturday Sun thus: "The rapists are AIDS infected prostitutes. They are angry that men have given them the disease and have decided to give it back to them."

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Slumdog Millionaire could only have been made by a westerner

  After its rapturous reception in Britain and America, knives are being sharpened for Slumdog Millionaire. "Vile," is how Alice Miles described the movie in The Times. "Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn" that invites the viewer to enjoy the miseries it depicts, she adds.
 
Even that old iconic Bollywood blusterer, Amitabh Bachchan, has thrown his empty-headed two rupees' worth into the mix. "If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as a third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations," he bellowed. "It's just that the Slumdog Millionaire idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative global recognition," he added.
 
Bachchan is no doubt riled, as many other Bollwood no-talents will be, about the fact that the best film to be made about India in recent times has been made by a white man, Danny Boyle. Just as Spike Lee got hissy with Quentin Tarantino after he proved he could make hipper films about black people than Lee could (Lee ostentatiously criticised Tarantino's use of the word "nigger" while littering his own films with the same language), so many Indians will be upset about a westerner having a better understanding of their country than they do. Bachchan gave one of the worst English-language performances in cinematic history with his embarrassingly stupid portrayal of an ageing thespian in The Last Lear. Having failed miserably at cultivating a western audience, it must hurt him to be so monumentally upstaged by white folk on his home turf.
 
The bitter truth is, Slumdog Millionaire could only have been made by westerners. The talent exists in India for such movies: much of it, like the brilliant actor Irrfan Khan, contributed to this film. But Bollywood producers, fixated with making flimsy films about the lives of the middle class, will never throw their weight behind such projects. Like Bachchan, they are too blind to what India really is to deal with it. Poor Indians, like those in Slumdog, do not constitute India's "murky underbelly" as Bachchan moronically describes them. They, in fact, are the nation. Over 80% of Indians live on less than $2.50 (£1.70) a day; 40% on less than $1.25. A third of the world's poorest people are Indian, as are 40% of all malnourished children. In Mumbai alone, 2.6 million children live on the street or in slums, and 400,000 work in prostitution. But these people are absent from mainstream Bollywood cinema.
 
Bachchan's blinkered comments prove how hopelessly blind he and most of Bollywood are to the reality of India and how wholly incapable they are of making films that can address it. Instead, they produce worthless trash like Jaane Tu, Rock On!! and Love Story 2050, full of affluent young Indians desperately, and mostly idiotically, trying to look cool and modern.
 
Slumdog Millionaire is based on the novel, Q&A, by Vikas Swarup. I know Vikas – an Indian diplomat, he loves his country as much as anyone and did it the service of telling its truth with great warmth and humanity. And Danny Boyle's film continues in precisely the same vein. His innovative brilliance, fresh perspective and foreign money was vital. As an outsider, he saw the truth that middle-class Indians are too often inured to: that countless people exist in conditions close to hell yet maintain a breath-taking exuberance, dignity and decency. These people embody the tremendous spirit and strength of India and its civilisation. They deserve the attention of its film-makers. I have no doubt that Slumdog Millionaire will encourage many more honest films to be produced in India. But they should be ashamed that it took a white man to show India how to do it.

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What women don't get about men

By Michael Bywater
Monday, 22 September 2008

The answer, for men, would seem to be castration. Better than drink: it takes away both performance and desire. Plato, in The Republic, has Sophocles say that the end of sexual yearning is like escaping from a vicious tyrant, usually quoted as "being unchained from a lunatic". Visions of the madman vary; I always picture him naked, wild-haired and bearded, a bit like Terry Jones in Monty Python, capering and scampering into the distance across a rain-swept Clapham Common. The writer Guy Kennaway, in his memoir Sunbathing Naked, writes: "The chain broke, and I was the madman."
Better have them off. A couple of half-bricks, a moment's exquisite agony and then peace descends.
Because when it comes to desire, we only have two choices now, here in the West at the beginning of the third millennium AD: we're madmen, or we're history.
And if we're madmen, we're one of two sorts: buffoons or psychotics. Men's desire, emotional or sexual, must either mimic women's or be classed as deviant, probably deliberately so. No self-control. Evil instincts. Clumsy. Emotionally inarticulate. Weak. Predatory. A perve.
Let's take my own case. I truly believe that the peak of nubility for a woman is around the age of 12 or 13. I believe that a pubescent boy can only be honoured, and learn from, the erotic attentions of an older man. I believe that it is the natural duty of a woman to serve the sexual needs of her man, and that she must never refuse; if she does, out she goes. As for her own feelings... I believe that a normal woman is little troubled by sexual feelings of any kind; her desires focus upon looking after her man and caring for his children and otherwise just keeping quiet. I can't see what the fuss over prostitutes is all about. I believe that a man is quite entitled to keep a mistress providing that he chooses a social inferior within his financial means and, when he tires of her, helps her find a husband of her own class. I believe that black women are libidinous and immoral. I believe that one of the duties of my female staff is to accommodate my sexual urges whenever required. And I believe that a grown man who allows himself to be buggered is as much of a criminal pervert as one who performs cunnilingus.
And I know nobody who disagrees.
Or, at least, I would have believed all these things had I been born into different societies at different times in history. The existence of sexual and erotic desire is a given; but what it points itself towards seems almost entirely cultural.
It's a mystery, to be honest. Our Renaissance forebears thought nothing of taking a 12-year-old wife, and it didn't occur to their neighbours to dob them in, beat them, bang them up, chip the sods, deport them, make them sign the sex offenders' register and plaster their faces all over the tabloids ("Leering Gary", though the "leer" was the rictus common to all terrified anthropoids). The gentlemen of classical Athens valourised pederasty. Rich men had ceramic jugs, cups and punchbowls decorated, at vast expense, with picture of middle-aged men and beardless (the beardlessness was crucial) "beautiful boys"; Plato (again) named homosexuality as the highest desire in one episode of the Symposium, yet would have been repelled by the civil partnerships (with adopted children) that we now applaud (despite the fact that just over 40 years ago, the same men would have been put in prison).
And those same classical Athenians, as their symposium drew to a close, would have called for the euphemistically named "flute-girls", or tottered off to an expensive hetaira, or perhaps humped the slavey in the peristyle. Romans in their bath-houses bathed promiscuously, and more, and our very word "fornication" comes from the fornices – the arches – of the amphitheatre where low-rent prostitutes plied their trades; the Victorian gentleman-artists who painted them so lovingly also had an eye for a tart, a shop-girl or a pubescent, not to mention the cult of "passionate friendship" with the inevitable mental images of entangled bushy beards and twanging sock-suspenders. Slave-owning Americans extolled the compliancy and enthusiasm of their female property (and, in a curious reversal, contemporary American pornography has a minor obsession with depicting white men watching their wives being transported to bliss by the superior powers and sensual vigour of black men: Google "cuckold" and see for yourself).
On it goes... and the curious thing is that, to our imagination now, so much of it seems horrid. Yet it can't have seemed horrid to them (though there must have been the odd Athenian gentleman who had to grit his teeth to get through the awful pederasty business, and the odd one whose heart sank as the bloody flute-girls appeared just when he wanted to go home to bed) or they wouldn't have done it, let alone made it into the normal, the done thing.
You have to conclude that while our sexual and erotic (they're different, of course) urges are instinctive, their manifestations are as much a matter of time, place and custom as what we eat or how we dress. If everyone else is doing it, one would be a fool to do otherwise. And any sexual behaviour, for men at least, with our relatively easy route to orgasm, is going to be reinforced by pretty powerful rewards.
Yet now we are not guilty until proven innocent, but guilty. Academic tutors are given little lectures on how they mustn't ever let their eyes drop below their students' collarbones, while the 20-year-old woman who faces her, let's say, 30-year-old tutor in a short skirt, plunging neckline, and no underwear (it has happened, and not infrequently) is an innocent victim who will yell the place down if his glance flickers. A friend of mine, at the top of his profession, had to resign because after a couple of drinks over the eight, he flattered a junior colleague on her appearance ("leching").
Not only are our desires wrong, they are also risible. To start at the bottom of the moral chain, in a trade which knows precisely what people want, a porn film of a woman masturbating is considered both erotic and inherently beautiful; a man wanking is risible and vile, conjuring images of the unsprung sofa, the scattered pizza cartons, the solitary sock for afterwards. Almost every woman knows what it is to be desired, in a way that hardly any men ever do. I remember talking to the actress Kathleen Turner about this; on a good day, she said, she knew she could have nine out of 10 men in the room. I pointed out that there are only a few men who could say that, on a good day, they could have one out 10 women. And, of course, most of them are gay, and don't want to have any.
The rest of us are just... baggage. Young men now seem to have reached a sort of affable affectionate ease with women that escaped earlier generations. They share beds happily and chastely. They are best friends. They talk about their feelings. But lust and libido and passion seem strangely absent. They're dreadfully held-in-check, and prey to the body dysmorphias that for so long in the Age of the Image have victimised women. They go to the gym endlessly; they buy magazines devoted to the abdominal muscles; they gel and tan and sack-back-and-crack, vogue and pose, fret and pump iron, eat cabbage leaves and nibble on dry biscuits... but unlike women, who hope that this horror will end with them being desired, the young men just hope, I suspect, to be forgiven. If they can make themselves nice enough, in a parody of manual-labour masculinity plus beauty-salon pubescence (body hair a no-no), it might not be so terrible that, at the end of it all, they are still men.
But how do you get to be a man now? Not by submitting to the embraces of an old dude round the back of the Temple of Hephaistos, for sure, nor by going off and tupping the nubile ancilla. You get to be a man (if you get to be one at all) by acquiring the "virtues" of fidelity, emotional articulacy, sexual discrimination and social co-operating. In other words, you get to be a man by imitating a woman, except with a six-pack. But no body hair.
You do this because, first, the social roles for the "manly" man have faded with our manufacturing economy. It doesn't require courage or physical strength to poke at a computer screen, which is what most work (and much flirtation) now consists of. Aggression and decisiveness count for nothing in a call centre (or at least, not decisiveness).
And you do this, secondly, because masculinity is evil and the phallus – once a symbol of fertility, fun and good fortune – has become a lethal, corrupt and infecting agent of violence. The phallus ravages children. The phallus injects HIV. The phallus, if uncalled for, destroys lives, and never mind how. It injects children who must be borne and nurtured by lone, unsupported women. And – Sophocles's vicious tyrant – it drags its possessors (or its slaves) about the place, heartlessly. Gray Joliffe's Wicked Willy cartoons about sum it up; except, unlike Joliffe's affable, happy little chap, the real thing is vicious and unheeding. A madman.
Any man, then, is a sort of zombie with a loaded revolver. Lock up your wives, your daughters, your sons. Lock up the dog. There may be a man about.
Yet the idea of a man as an imitation woman ignores some fundamental truths. First, that, like any culture, we get the sexuality we deserve. Second, and more importantly, women and men are fulfilling, above all, their evolutionary destiny. Social Darwinism is a horror, but you can say, for sure, that if you're going to evolve an intelligent, sexually reproducing species, the first damn thing you have to evolve is sex. EQ, compassion, quadratic equations and sushi come later; or, if you fail to evolve sex, they don't come at all. The bit of us that has sex isn't the bit of us that thinks, and behind every bishop raving about homosexuality is not only a bishop who hasn't noticed that Jesus says damn-all about sex (and when he does mention it, it's to go against Mosaic law), nor only a bishop who has too much time on his hands, but a bishop who is both culturally and biologically ill-informed.
The odd thing is where this has all come from. I don't know a single woman (except, fleetingly, a couple who were seriously deranged) who hate men or want us to be like them. Most women seem to quite like men, and resent as much as we do the prevailing culture of contempt and suspicion. They don't want articles asking "Are Women Really Bored By Men (Yes Of Course!!!)". They don't like the portrayal of men in the media either as violent, raping, child-abusing, monosyllabic incompetents just waiting to whip out their wangers and wreck someone's lives.
Nor is it simply a matter of intolerance. I don't want you to tolerate me, or anything about me. That's not in your gift; to say you are prepared to tolerate me is simply arrogant. Intolerance? No; though W H Auden, in arguably the most beautiful love-poem of the last hundred years, "Lullaby" (ostensibly a hymn to gay promiscuous sex) speaks to all our erotic hearts when he writes of
...lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slopes
In their ordinary swoon
But that's a different tolerance: a tolerance closer to the original meaning of the word: a bearing of the burden of our common humanity.
Who's doing this? Who's responsible? I don't know, but I don't like it and neither do you and it's not true. We aren't hateful nor are we vile; I don't even think we're particularly ugly, though I wouldn't fancy one myself. Men and women are really quite like each other. The thing is, we're also utterly different. It's the culture's task to negotiate that paradox, and right now I don't think it's doing a very good job.

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In praise of perversion

Few instincts are so strong or so widely shared as the urge to condemn other people for their sexual idiosyncrasies. And yet, argues Howard Jacobson, it is when we explore the outer boundaries of our sexual desires that we become most fully human

Wednesday, 17 September 2008


"We are all sick in our own way," Felix Quinn declares. Felix Quinn is the hero of my new novel, The Act of Love, and he, admittedly, has an axe to grind. He is a cuckold and he likes it. His idea of a good time is lying lonely in his bed, knowing that his wife is out on the night, enjoying the embraces of her lover. This will be incomprehensible to some men, and not to others. But we shouldn't, where the daemon of sex is concerned, be surprised by anything. I don't always agree with the heroes of my novels but I agree with Felix: we are all sick in our way. In the erotic life of men and women there is no such thing as health.


A new book about Franz Kafka discloses that he was more than casually interested in hard pornography. Lovers of literature shudder inwardly, as they did when they discovered something similar about Philip Larkin, and as an earlier generation shook their heads in disbelief over Charles Dickens's indiscretions with women young enough to be his daughters. Though we want our writing muddied, we like our writers clean. But what else should we have expected of the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial, those bleakly comic unforgiving tales of ignominy, guilt and shame? This is not to say that pornography is the only explanation for his temperament or the only route he might have taken to explore it, but it makes sense to me that such a man would have found something congenial to him I don't say pleasant or even satisfying in the act of perusing it. "The sense of the tragic increases and diminishes with sensuality," Nietzsche wrote. Meaning that the more the senses engross us, the more philosophically serious we become. It is an important formulation: we are philosophers by virtue of our sexual appetites, not despite them.

Pornography is not, of course, the only expression of sensuality, but some extreme sorts of sensuality tend inexorably in its direction. In its written form, pornography's only convincing conclusion is death, for ecstasy without restraint wants nothing less. Pictorially, too, in the mortuary fixity of its imagery it is essentially morbid, refusing change of mood or flux of feeling. Either way, pornography is a trance, demeaning all parties to it, those looked at and those looking, locking them into a perpetuity of shame. There is nowhere to run to in pornography as there is nowhere to run to in the novels of Kafka. On the last page of The Trial, Joseph K watches impassively as the mysterious "partners" thrust a knife into his heart. "Like a dog!" he says. "It was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him." That could be pornography he is describing..........

It is not, I hope, perverse of me to cite the above as prime among the reasons along with what we owe to curiosity why we should acquaint ourselves with pornography, in whatever form it takes. In its ominous nothingness, pornography familiarises us with humiliation and humiliation with despair and loss. And loss stimulates the imagination. Winning is a dead end, in sex as in everything else. It is only out of a keen sense of loss that we tell stories, write poems, and learn to liberate ourselves from damagingly misleading optimistic fantasies of sex as purposeful and joyous, whether purposeful in God's sense of procreation in the divine image, or in Darwin's sense of selecting what's best of us for futurity. Sex is for nothing, pornography teaches. Unless you call ignominy something.

When he wasn't looking at pornography or writing The Trial Kafka visited brothels, which if you like is just putting pornography into action. I am glad for his sake and for literature's that he did. I feel about prostitution as I do about pornography that a man ought to avail himself of whatever is on offer. Paid-for sex, in all its varieties sex stripped of responsibility and sentimentality (though even with a prostitute it will not always be so simple) answers to imperatives which respectable courtship and marriage prefer to ignore. Whenever I encounter a man who says he has never visited a prostitute, either because the thought appals him or, as is more commonly asserted, because he doesn't need to pay for sex, thank you very much, I believe that he is lying, or, worse, that he is a fool. Among the many reasons for paying for sex the most salient is the wanting to pay for sex; and that "want" is not to be confused with need. We know that from the examples of famously glamorous men who have all the women their hearts' desire but still routinely get caught and who is to say don't hope to get caught? with a hooker in the back seat of their automobiles. All the women one needs do not satisfy the desire to pay for a woman one does not need.

So what does drive a man to pay for sex, when paying must negate so much of the romantic baggage and vanity with which sex is laden? Loneliness explains some of it, but the lonely are obviously needy, and we are addressing needs which are less apparent. Feminist opponents of the institution of prostitution see paying for sex as an expression, pure and simply, of male aggression. The man shells out to subject a woman to his will. I don't doubt that some men pay to feel in charge, though it's a paltry authority that must be bought and men of this sort will soon discover they can impose themselves more effectively (in their own eyes at least) through violence that doesn't cost a penny. Those who go on paying do so not to assert their masculinity but to demean it. It is an ironic or self-defeating transaction, an act of mockery and submission, a species of masochism whether the man asks the prostitute to beat and degrade him or not. Catherine Millett, author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M, says she took on promiscuity to show that sex is separable from feeling. This is nonsense. The attempt to find feelinglessness in sex is an ambition loaded with feeling. To those who aspire not to feel in the course of a sexual encounter, the attainment of the illusion of feelinglessness is exquisite.

Thus the nothingness one goes in search of in a brothel is, by the wonderful inverse law of eroticism, not a nothingness at all. Beyond a certain stage the stage at which many of us call time on eroticism and pour what's left of our desires into work or an allotment sex functions as an exchange of shame and power: merely functional procreation giving way to the longing to pass from person into thing, to be the instrument (or controller) of another's will, to be less (or more) than human.

"In the end," the great French philosopher of eroticism Georges Bataille wrote, "we resolutely desire that which imperils our life." Not accidentally, not half-heartedly, but resolutely. I do not say we want to die (though on occasions we think we do) but we want sex to take us as close to death as life allows, the paradox being and this is a paradox which most sexual perversions celebrate, whereas love, sweet love does not that we are never more alive than when we are staring into loss..........

Not quite true that love, sweet love does not. Allow love to be its own perversion and it too can take one to the precipice. This is the principle by which my hero Felix lives his life. Imperilled by love and the hold it exerts on him, he embraces the very thing he dreads - embraces it because he dreads it - which is his wife Marisa's infidelity. He is never more alive than when she is in the arms of another man. Othello is, of course, the same: a man energised by jealousy. The difference being that Othello doesn't know that jealousy energises him whereas Felix does. And here's a question: could it be that what appals us most when we descend to jealous rage is not the thought that we have been betrayed, but the kernel of sickly pleasure we discover in it? Is Othello, in other words, more disgusted by himself than he is by Desdemona? The question isn't only academic. Had Othello taken the Leopold Bloom route, or indeed Felix's, and fetishised his fears, might not things have turned out differently for all parties? I don't say happily, I simply say otherwise. Better, anyway, to be familiar with one's nature and accepting of its shameful depths, than to flounder hopelessly as Othello does. Though I accept that tragedy might still await the complaisant husband whose taste for cuckoldom demands ever more extravagant betrayal - a spiral from which the hero of my novel is unable, or unwilling, to break free.

Or is that the moralist in me talking? The masochism into which Felix hurls himself is without doubt self-destructive and tyrannical, but what is not. Perverted or obsessive sex lands up in an emotional cul-de-sac, rubbing at its single itch, finding pleasure only in the one thing endlessly repeated or exacerbated - more and more pain, more and more pornography, more and more visits to houses of ill repute - but that which we call respectability fares no better. When I was growing up it was common to hear husbands call their wives "mother". Whether this was an allusion to their own mother or the mothers of their children their wives had become I doubt they knew. Either way, the wife was locked into her role and the husband into his script. The endearments of the long happily married fulfil the same function, and in the narratives of their cheerful longevity one always detects the cruelty of opportunities foregone, disappointment, equivocation, compromise, and a haunted curiosity as though they know they will go to their graves with the majority of their questions unanswered. You cannot enjoy the consolations of calm if you are an obsessive: but nor can you attain the poisoned bliss vouchsafed to the dissolute and the deranged if you are cautious and well-adjusted. Sex lets no one off.

It is for this reason that we are fools ever to be censorious about the sexual lives of others. It is fair enough that a Catholic bishop should castigate Max Mosley for his romps with prostitutes dressed in pantomime military uniforms. Churchmen exist to excoriate the fleshly. But the rest of us have no business being superior. And no business laughing either. It's true that the banalities of life the cups of tea, the prattle of the whores, our own sad bodies unflattered by the uniforms of fantasy will always compromise our frenzied worship of the god Dionysus. But in desire tomorrow is another day; we wake to find Dionysus every bit as demanding as he was the night before. What's odd is not how Max Mosley passes his time away from motor racing administration but why more of us don't turn our hands to something similar, given the agitation of our curiosity. Which raises the question of where we draw the line between fantasy and fact. Felix acknowledges no such distinction - for him, to want is to do - but then a cuckold is the least dangerous of men. Other sexual preferences are more menacing. That Max Mosley, whatever he intended, was in some measure exorcising his family's ghosts, parodying (to erotic end) their ideology, it is reasonable to surmise; but how would we have felt about such exorcisms had they spilled into actual, un-negotiated violence? It is tempting to take the safety-valve view of pornography and fantasy and see them as licensed liberty, sex's version of carnival. But that consigns the erotic life to an eternity of pretence. And we cannot live forever in pretence. Some doing, outside the mind, is necessary. Thereafter, it is up to society to decide what it can and cannot allow to happen. The best eroticism can do against the law, in so fas as it has a choice in the matter, is to keep pushing the boundaries of the imaginable. We grow a little freer when we read De Sade's One Thousand Days of Sodom, though we know we cannot live up to its lawlessness. The imagination is an unbordered continent. In art, which is the province of the imagination, we do not judge as we judge municipally, as magistrates or policemen. Which is why, whatever our education and our civic institutions try to lull us into believing about the nature of desire, we must find the space to think, and where possible to act, rebelliously, refusing all attempts to confine us to the hell of the normative.

We are strange creatures, part angels of reflection, part beasts that claw the earth. It is too cruel that an accidental species as peculiar as we are should ever have been made to think there is a right way and a wrong way of conducting ourselves sexually, as though there were some divine pattern we were framed to follow. I don't say that giving ourselves over to the demoniacal, or just the deviant, will necessarily make us happy - why should it when it is so rarely happiness we seek in sex? - but the straight and narrow has never yet made anyone anything but miserable.


Howard Jacobson's new novel, 'The Act of Love' is published by Jonathan Cape (17.99)

Consummation: A very peculiar practice

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Once you reach a certain age, Confucius makes perfect sense

 

Howard Jacobson

Among this philosophy's attractive elements is its insistence that respect be shown to elderly men

Saturday, 6 September 2008

Here's an exciting thing – I've discovered Confucius. A bit late in the day, given that he is of the sixth century BC, but what's two and a half thousand years in the history of wisdom? I'm a confirmed Confucian now, anyway, though I can claim only second-hand knowledge of him, courtesy of Daniel Bell, a Canadian sociologist teaching in Beijing. And my knowledge of Daniel Bell is a bit circumscribed too, having only spoken to him down the line in a recording studio while making a programme for the World Service. I was there, since you ask, publicising my new novel, of which you can expect to hear more in future columns. But it is not set in China, that much I can tell you.

Monica Gray, a professor of planetary and space sciences, was also in attendance, carrying around with her a small particle of rock, very much like the grit I wake up with in my eye after a heavy night's drinking, the difference being that her rock was from somewhere in outer space while the mote in my eye is crystallised shiraz. I found myself envying Monica because she has an asteroid named after her. "Monicagrady", it is somewhat prosaically called. "Monicagradyprofessorofplanetaryandspacesciences" would have been more respectful but the asteroid might not be big enough to bear so many characters. Either way, I wouldn't mind having one named after me and my novel. "Howardjacobsontheactoflove". Or, more simply, if it won't take advertising, "Howardjacobsonconfucian".
Among the elements of Confucianism that attracted me in Daniel Bell's account were a) its Conservatism: a world-view which irons out the flaws of Liberal Democracy, that's to say its Liberal Democracy, but is not to be confused with Cameronism, a world-view that irons out world-views; b) its insistence that respect be shown to elderly men; and c) its reservations in the matter of educating the young to exercise critical judgement before they have the requisite knowledge and sagacity to exercise critical judgement with.
This latter goes against the grain with most Western educators for whom the exercise of the critical faculties is the very essence of a liberal education. Question everything before you know anything, we believe in the West. Knowledge exists only in your responses to it, therefore nothing "is"until your opinion grudges it into being. I held to this pedagogical principle myself once upon a time. "I have no interest in your regurgitating what you have gleaned from authoritative sources," I would tell a student, holding up his essay as though his dog had not only brought it in but written it. "I want you to demonstrate your capacity for critical thought. I know what others think. Only you can tell me what you think." And then when he told me what he thought, I wished he hadn't, so ill-informed, belligerent, and inconsequential was it.
I never solved the problem of inviting critical judgement from students whose critical judgements weren't worth inviting. I thought I was just unlucky in the students it fell to me to teach. But Confucius's point is that no one under 40 is ready to deliver what I asked for. And since I was under 40 at the time myself it is no doubt Confucianly true that I was not ready to ask for it.
Even outside the academy people ill-equipped to pass judgement on any matter whatsoever are empowered by our liberal democracy to believe their views have value. Only look at what passes for conversation on that cesspit of ignorance and vituperation we call the blogosphere. Confucius he say, "Get a life before you get an opinion." To which, were he to post it on the internet, he could expect responses raging from "You're a disgrace to Shandong Province", to the more considered "Up yours, you slant-eyed fuckwit".
But then, to return to the academy, how do you distinguish intellectual possession requisite to the slow formation of critical judgement from plagiarism? And is it quite the case, anyway, that you can possess knowledge, of a poem or the work of a philosopher, say, that does not entail evaluation of some sort? How Confucianism sorts these thorny issues out I will report when my studies are further advanced.
Confucius he also say, in the meantime, "I have yet to meet anybody who is fonder of virtue than of sex." This makes it a trifle tricky for him to proceed with his other proposition that the over-40s are likely to make sounder moral judgements because they are less enslaved to sexual desire. But perhaps he means that while everybody remains fonder of sex than they do of virtue, the fondness of the over-40s is tempered by repetition and fatigue. Though not, apparently, if you are David Duchovny who has just put himself into rehab for sex addiction.
Help me here, Confucius. What's sex addiction? The question is not designed to solicit salacious detail, I simply wonder how you can tell sex addiction apart from living, of which a sizeable component is today, as it must have been in sixth century China, sex. Questioned by The Washington Post, an organisation called the Mayo Clinic – which sounds more like a place for treating addiction to Prêt à Manger sandwiches – cites rampant promiscuity, an over-interest in pornography, the use of sex to escape stress or depression, and difficulty with emotional intimacy. You see my problem. Who ever didn't use sex to escape stress or depression? And since sex can often leave you even more stressed and depressed than it finds you, who was ever free of the cycle which the Mayo Clinic calls addiction?
And who, come to that, finds emotional intimacy easy? Isn't it meant to be difficult? Isn't that what adds value to it? And don't we call those who can't stop drifting into emotional intimacy promiscuous, which sets up a nice little circle of sex addiction, from which none of us – neither the imperturbable nor the vexed – can ever claim to be free. It's life. But then no doubt there are clinics out there which treat addiction to that.
My new novel, as it happens, is about addiction. Sex addiction, life addiction, wife addiction. I suspect it would not have been to Confucius's taste. He argued in favour of polygamy and a polygamist can't really be a wife addict in the sense of being addicted to just one. So it could be there are advantages to living in a Western liberal democracy after all. Or it might simply be that we are all more comfortable with the socio-sexual derangements we know.

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