MY PERSONAL VIDEO LIBRARY 3

The 2006 documentary L’Age d’Or du X analyses the liberalisation of French censorship and the ensuing golden age of hard-core porn films that flourished in France from the mid-1970s until video took over in the early 1980s. It’s a study on the mentality shift that took place as a result of the rise of ultra-liberalism, the availability on the market of the contraceptive pill, and the ideas paraded in 1968 (when AIDS was still in the future).

Pornography didn’t start in the 1970s. The 1993 book The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800 edited by Lynn Hunt, is an excellent collection of essays on the subject. But more important in my eyes is the 1981 essay by Ronald Dworkin called Is There a Right to Pornography? in which the American legal philosopher argues that there is indeed such a right. But liberal thinkers, I believe, live in a world of fantasy. Psychological studies show that pornography consumption is deleterious.

This summer, the right wing in neighbouring Italy tried to impose some sort of control on access to pornography. Giuditta Pini, an MP from the Partito Democratico (Muscat’s best friends in Italy), cried foul on Facebook: “Perché va bene tutto, ma se dopo il lockdown vogliono toglierci anche il porno, io non so davvero più cosa dire”: “We’re ready to accept a lot, but if after the lockdown they also want to take porn away from us, then I don’t even know what to say”.

The University of Exeter now offers a course on pornography and the University of Sunderland publishes a journal called Porn Studies. Others propose courses to teach youngsters how to interact with pornography given the ease with which they access porn and the distorted ideas about sex that it conveys. Some studies demonstrate that exposure to pornography is a significant factor in teenage premarital pregnancy.

All said and done, our ancestors were right about onanism and eyesight: living in fantasy makes one blind to the real world. Muscat is a case in point. He was so blinded by his political masturbatory frenzy that he couldn’t see that the mess he presided on – not only corruption but also the murder of a journalist who was investigating it – shattered his ultimate fantasy: high European office.