To the Editor of the Manchester Guardian

Sir,- Mr Holbrook in his letter dated February 26 shows he is seeking an ideal which is probably unattainable. It is likely that sexually abnormal people occur in a population in the same way as very short or very tall ones do. “Improving” the environment of future generations may reduce the numbers of abnormals but cannot be expected to eliminate them. Donne must obviously have been resigned to being diminished by the deaths of others while pointing out that he was so, and Mr Holbrook must be content, I fear, to live with his diminishment.

To do so he must accept the world as it is or accept that only limited changes can be wrought among human beings. He must build his life strongly in that environment and must expect to be accused himself of failure if he cannot.



It is possible that pornography corrupts few people, for perhaps only those who are already disposed to it seek it. Others ignore it. In any case the loneliness and sadness of those who are addicted to it are probably no more than are experienced by the predisposed murderer, thief, swindler, or traitor. Mr Holbrook takes the risk of accepting more of other people’s burdens than he can manage. I suggest he gives them all a calculated concern this side of obsession.



Yours &c.,

GORDON LINES.

Boundary, Cockshoot Hill,

Reigate.





To the Editor of the Manchester Guardian

Sir,- Mr Holbrook’s spirited defence of true love is admirable, but as an argument for the suppression of pornography it is fallacious on two counts.

Assuming that the resort to pornography is an “index of sexual failure” and that the existence of the pornography trade is “an index of our dangerous immaturity,” how is the flight “from tenderness and compassion into hardness and selfish sensuality” to be checked by law? If Mr Holbrook believes it not only can but should be, would he say the same of the other symptoms he mentions - homosexuality (which hardly “flees from tenderness and compassion”), sadism, cheese-cake, and sex-kitten culture, and prostitution?



Secondly, is not Mr Holbrook’s view of “normal” sexual love idealised? Is not the very existence and popularity of these various manifestations an index rather of the failure of conventional sexuality to satisfy the reasonable urges of a large number of ordinary people? His solution would restore the restrictions and taboos that were in force a century ago. Would he say that married (let alone unmarried) life was happier and fuller then? Or that literature was truer? Would it not be wiser to accept - indeed, welcome - obscenity frankly as a part of normal sexuality, as did most Western writers up to about 1800, rather than to think of it as no more than an index of failure?



Obscenity rejected and divorced from tenderness becomes the squalid pornography deplored by Mr Holbrook and the rest of us; surely Mr Conquest’s naive tolerance is a better solution than Mr Holbrook’s high-minded abhorrence.



Yours &c.,

NICOLAS WALTER.

83 Belsize Park Gardens,

London N.W.3.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A sex shop in Copenhagen, Denmark, 1969. Photograph: Mondadori via Getty Images

To the Editor of the Manchester Guardian

Sir,- Is pornography “an index of dangerous immaturity” as Mr Holbrook says? The more primitive the society, the less has pornography currency; the more complex then the more widespread pornography is, until we get sexual aberration in many of its best minds.

Is society to be measured by breeding success? Has the sexual variant no triumphs to offer? Are we to have no Tchaikovsky, no Degas? The sexual variant may behead the chance of the next generation. But what does that matter - so often he is civilisation’s triumph within himself.



Pornography may be many things: a drug, an escape, a relief, and - to complex minds - a sanity. It can never be the measure by which the height of a man’s life is cast. For are we to judge people by fractions of their lives?



Yours &c.,

MARK BOURNE.

Garth, Machynlleth, Montgomeryshire.

The debate surrounding pornography ran on the letters page for several weeks, including these contributions on 9 March and 12 March.