LONDON — The Commissioning Editor for The Spectator, the U.K.’s leading conservative magazine, published a sensationalizing editorial attempting to link adult content to the entirely unrelated current prosecution of a rapist in France.
Spectator’s Mary Wakefield seeks to frame the media-saturating prosecution of admitted rapist Dominique Pelicot — a Frenchman who drugged and raped his wife Gisèle for years, and also invited other men from their area to participate in the abuse — with a number of generalizations and debunked notions about the supposed effects of watching adult content online.
Wakefield’s piece, grandiosely titled “Pornography and the Truth About the Pelicot Case,” offers no new evidence or actual context about the case itself, instead devolving into a diatribe about porn, which includes implications that adult content online is like a cancer, the usual dubious anti-porn claims about brain science — including a bizarre reference to bonobo-human behavior correlation — and the writer’s own musings about why people watch taboo content.
“Pelicot is a monster, a modern-day Bluebeard,” Wakefield declares. “But what has shocked France most is how very many normal Frenchmen he was able to find, in and around his Provencal village, who were up for having sex with an unconscious woman. If the feminists of France really want to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain from porn.”
The conservative Wakefield lambasts French feminists for targeting France’s systemic patriarchy or the lack of proper sexual education at home and in schools. According to Wakefield, the real target should be found elsewhere.
Strangely comparing feminist marches in France condemning the incident and the culture which produced it to “hounds inexplicably swerving away from the scent and setting off in entirely the wrong direction,” Wakefield finally reaches her moral panic thesis. “What happened to Gisèle has zip all to do” with a lack of sex education,” she proclaims. “It’s not patriarchy that’s to blame, but pornography. It’s porn which leads a human down into the sludgy gutters of his own psyche – and if the feminists of France really wanted to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain. Not just from the obviously illegal stuff, but from all of it.”
A Litany of Absurd Generalizations and Notions
Among Wakefield’s outlandish claims and generalizations are that Pelicot’s “atrocities themselves are bound up in and emblematic of the porn industry’s central operation: the monetization of taboo” (admittedly borrowed from another anti-porn theorist); and that all of pornography is a “whole great, growing, metastasizing, $100 billion mess” single-handedly devoted not to “selling sex so much as selling transgression.”
Wakefield’s rhetoric then swerves into pseudo-brain science overload. “The dopamine hit that drags human bonobos back to their laptops time after time is a result of busting through a taboo,” she writes, “and that’s why it’s progressive. Once a taboo is normalized, it loses its transgressive power, so you look for another. And some men (not all men, but enough men) keep chasing that feeling until they end up in a chat room with Dominique Pelicot.”
Wakefield endorses the debunked “slippery slope” theory stating that porn watchers — despite decades evidence by thousands of webmasters profitably running specific niche sites with loyal customers — are like junkies always searching for a more intense high. Her completely anecdotal evidence is a previous porn panic article published by The Spectator itself — then edited by none other than Boris Johnson — where a conservative writer claimed that he had “lost control” over his porn searches and concluded that “most male sexuality is designed by evolution to be an unscratchable itch; a desperate, unsatisfiable urge.”
Despite the non-stop War on Porn waged international by religious conservatives and their political and media allies like herself, Wakefield concludes by claiming that “instead of developing a clear understanding of how porn acts on a brain, we’ve all become slowly habituated to it, slowly boiled alive in porn culture like frogs,” wrapping up her tirade by preposterously condemning Pride events and kink communities as somehow connect to and complicit with Pelicot’s crimes.
Wakefield’s COVID-Era Hypocrisy
Wakefield herself is a controversial figure in her own right, following her involvement in one of the key scandals that undermined the Conservative government of Boris Johnson in 2020.
Wakefield and her Tory politician husband were pilloried by most of British society when it was revealed that they had used their influence to bypass the country’s extreme social isolation protocols during the COVID pandemic.
“The Spectator’s incestuous ties with the governing elite have thrust it into the murky heart of an uproar over a 260-mile drive that Mr. Johnson’s most influential adviser, Dominic Cummings, and his wife made to his parents’ house in northern England, violating Britain’s lockdown rules,” the New York Times reported at the time, noting that Wakefield even “wrote a vivid account of how she and her husband both fell ill with the coronavirus.
“The trouble is, she did not mention that they had actually gone to Durham, a journey that brought charges of hypocrisy and calls for Mr. Johnson to dismiss Mr. Cummings, at a time when the government was already under fire for Britain’s rising death toll, ravaged nursing homes and hapless test-and-trace program.”