What I still don’t understand about this story is the bit about “watching porn in public”.
Yes, he was in public. But was his phone-screen also?
Are the contents of every MPs phone visible to others every time they look at it? To which others?
Bryan Dale
1 year ago
There’s nothing pro-growth about the Conservative Party. It has spent the last two years deliberately crushing small business and is wrecking the economy with big government and oppressive regulations particularly concerning energy.
Lesley van Reenen
1 year ago
I had to suspend my disbelief when I read this headline. Does Mary Harrington really believe that Labour leaders and supporters don’t do porn?
The article is specifically about old-school Tory values and how they’re devoured by capitalism/gowth fetishism, illustrated by the particular case of a Tory MP. There’s no obligation to bring in the Labour Party.
I don’t think she does believe that and she certainly doesn’t say so. I suspect their reasons for turning to it, assuming that they do, would be quite different and would definitely not involve tractors as a precursor.
Jonathan Nash
1 year ago
I’ve just started reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, out of curiosity really. Its a better book than I expected, and shot through with a very serious morality about sexual relations between men and women. Its ironic that a book which is now mostly remembered for the obscenity trial, is anything but obscene, certainly compared to what is laughingly called “adult” content now.
But this might actually be the problem – what was once considered obscene is no longer, because, just maybe, we have (or at least most of us in the West) have become coarsened by this constant feeding of “adult” content. I have always found this term “adult content” bewildering because mostly it contains the sort of stuff that an adolescent boy (and perhaps some girls) would find titillating.
I think porn has turned to society. And it drips down into everything. One may “turn” to drugs, but one may click on porn – and be accused of having “turned” to it. Porn has gained a sheen of respectability in modern pop videos: that kids watch. (That Cardi B nonsense, for example, merely heralded a new explicitness to come, no doubt). And nobody of importance ventures to say anything about that. What a ghastly world we live in now.
“And he did so in public view”. Spoken like Mary Whitehouse! Well, at least that’s something. No stone must be left unturned in the indictment.
Tony Price
1 year ago
Just as contentious, ir seems to me, is the fact that he was looking at tractor sites in the House, presumably while at ‘work’ taking the Queen’s shilling. Why are MPs allowed phones at all in the Chamber?
He was apparently waiting to pass through the voting lobby.
Last edited 1 year ago by opn
aaron david
1 year ago
In the States, at least, one of the issues that lead directly to Trump realigning the conservative half of politics (and causing quite the reaction on the other half) was that the Republican “leaders” had completely lost their ability to see what the party base was seeing. They had led themselves into what sounds like a similar place that the Tory leadership is now occupying. And that is not a good space to be in.
Now, I am not a Tory, nor an Englishman even, but it seems that Brexit was one more sign of how the western world was realigning itself, and how the political leaders were being left behind. That is what it was on this side of the Atlantic, and I am sure that the same forces, the failure of Globalization hinted at in this piece is a good example of which, are still churning, still need to be taken account of.
Jake Prior
1 year ago
Great article. The whole thing is sad more than outrageous. Sex and farming are both doomed to lose their subtlety and innocence to the march of technology. Dominators will rule in the field and the bed.
Fragmentary Gadabout
1 year ago
I mean it *might* have happened because of this convoluted, florid, over-intellectualised explanation.
Or maybe he just had urges that every man has since the beginning of time – the noonday daemons of medieval monks – and didn’t have the self-discipline to control them.
But probably not, the conclusions of some pretenious cod-literary criticsm essay must be a better explanation.
Last edited 1 year ago by Fragmentary Gadabout
Al M
1 year ago
Very entertaining essay as ever. But surely Satan’s rectangle should be banned from the chamber? Would have saved Mr Parish from making a chump of himself, that’s for sure. Not as good as Ron Davis ‘observing badgers’, but still a great moment of madness.
Last edited 1 year ago by Al M
Mechan Barclay
1 year ago
He foolishly got caught. All MP’s and for that matter, humans, intrinsically know when they are doing something that should not be done at particular moments outside of of the confines of your home. If anything, his Sin was to not be careful enough to hide his addiction. If the value of his actual work(I don’t claim to know if he is worthy of re-election or not) is worth sacking him or not, then sack away!
Perhaps he stumbled on a new breed of ‘dominators’ who wear pant suits and have learned far more severe (and permanent) forms of domination and humiliation than whips and handcuffs. There’s nothing sexual about such things though, right? And only men have such dark impulses to destroy other people, just for the sport of it, right?
Max Price
1 year ago
He’d be addicted porn.
ARNAUD ALMARIC
1 year ago
O for the Bacchanalian days of Ancient Rome. They would find our* prurient, neurotic obsession with pornography laughable in the extreme.
(* The product of a Semitic, desert death cult, now known as Christianity.)
What I still don’t understand about this story is the bit about “watching porn in public”.
Yes, he was in public. But was his phone-screen also?
Are the contents of every MPs phone visible to others every time they look at it? To which others?
There’s nothing pro-growth about the Conservative Party. It has spent the last two years deliberately crushing small business and is wrecking the economy with big government and oppressive regulations particularly concerning energy.
I had to suspend my disbelief when I read this headline. Does Mary Harrington really believe that Labour leaders and supporters don’t do porn?
The article is specifically about old-school Tory values and how they’re devoured by capitalism/gowth fetishism, illustrated by the particular case of a Tory MP. There’s no obligation to bring in the Labour Party.
Precisely, the late Jack Dromey for example.*
(*Died January, 2022.)
I don’t think she does believe that and she certainly doesn’t say so. I suspect their reasons for turning to it, assuming that they do, would be quite different and would definitely not involve tractors as a precursor.
I’ve just started reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, out of curiosity really. Its a better book than I expected, and shot through with a very serious morality about sexual relations between men and women. Its ironic that a book which is now mostly remembered for the obscenity trial, is anything but obscene, certainly compared to what is laughingly called “adult” content now.
But this might actually be the problem – what was once considered obscene is no longer, because, just maybe, we have (or at least most of us in the West) have become coarsened by this constant feeding of “adult” content. I have always found this term “adult content” bewildering because mostly it contains the sort of stuff that an adolescent boy (and perhaps some girls) would find titillating.
…
Thank you – that’s a fine quotation!
“… turn to porn”? (From the headline).
I think porn has turned to society. And it drips down into everything. One may “turn” to drugs, but one may click on porn – and be accused of having “turned” to it. Porn has gained a sheen of respectability in modern pop videos: that kids watch. (That Cardi B nonsense, for example, merely heralded a new explicitness to come, no doubt). And nobody of importance ventures to say anything about that. What a ghastly world we live in now.
“And he did so in public view”. Spoken like Mary Whitehouse! Well, at least that’s something. No stone must be left unturned in the indictment.
Just as contentious, ir seems to me, is the fact that he was looking at tractor sites in the House, presumably while at ‘work’ taking the Queen’s shilling. Why are MPs allowed phones at all in the Chamber?
He was apparently waiting to pass through the voting lobby.
In the States, at least, one of the issues that lead directly to Trump realigning the conservative half of politics (and causing quite the reaction on the other half) was that the Republican “leaders” had completely lost their ability to see what the party base was seeing. They had led themselves into what sounds like a similar place that the Tory leadership is now occupying. And that is not a good space to be in.
Now, I am not a Tory, nor an Englishman even, but it seems that Brexit was one more sign of how the western world was realigning itself, and how the political leaders were being left behind. That is what it was on this side of the Atlantic, and I am sure that the same forces, the failure of Globalization hinted at in this piece is a good example of which, are still churning, still need to be taken account of.
Great article. The whole thing is sad more than outrageous. Sex and farming are both doomed to lose their subtlety and innocence to the march of technology. Dominators will rule in the field and the bed.
I mean it *might* have happened because of this convoluted, florid, over-intellectualised explanation.
Or maybe he just had urges that every man has since the beginning of time – the noonday daemons of medieval monks – and didn’t have the self-discipline to control them.
But probably not, the conclusions of some pretenious cod-literary criticsm essay must be a better explanation.
Very entertaining essay as ever. But surely Satan’s rectangle should be banned from the chamber? Would have saved Mr Parish from making a chump of himself, that’s for sure. Not as good as Ron Davis ‘observing badgers’, but still a great moment of madness.
He foolishly got caught. All MP’s and for that matter, humans, intrinsically know when they are doing something that should not be done at particular moments outside of of the confines of your home. If anything, his Sin was to not be careful enough to hide his addiction. If the value of his actual work(I don’t claim to know if he is worthy of re-election or not) is worth sacking him or not, then sack away!
You are discussing UK but it could soon be Australia as we imitate both US and UK trends: As usual entertaining and insightful.
.To illustrate, consider a by no means exhaustive list of things I’ve seen condemned lately as “problematic” or as having “shades of fascism”: farmers’ markets, going to the gym, beauty, classical architecture, talking about England before the Norman Conquest, Greek and Roman literature, gardening, sex dimorphism, punctuality, objectivity, enjoying the natural world, and mums. In other words: the stuff most ordinary people, and all ordinary conservatives, believed until about five minutes ago made life worth living. yes, well put. this is all lacking commonsense too.
Perhaps he stumbled on a new breed of ‘dominators’ who wear pant suits and have learned far more severe (and permanent) forms of domination and humiliation than whips and handcuffs. There’s nothing sexual about such things though, right? And only men have such dark impulses to destroy other people, just for the sport of it, right?
He’d be addicted porn.
O for the Bacchanalian days of Ancient Rome. They would find our* prurient, neurotic obsession with pornography laughable in the extreme.
(* The product of a Semitic, desert death cult, now known as Christianity.)