The strategy of Mr. Griffith-Jones for the prosecution was precisely to appeal to that popular sense of respectability. He dismissed the opinions of the expert witnesses, asking “are they really of such value as the views which you… hold and can see from the ordinary life?” And that ordinary life he suggested was constantly under threat: “you only have to read your papers to see, day by day, the results of unbridled sex.” His case rested on a reading of sex in literature as unavoidably dirty, impure, corrupting and contagious. The reader would only have to come across an erotic passage to be overwhelmed by feelings so fierce and disruptive, he would be blinded to its context and meaning. Moral depravation would only be a step away.

What was being proposed here was a whole new response to sexual material, one that operated through curiosity, not prurience, and that sought information, not titillation.

The defence took up the battle for the mind of the “common reader,” and argued instead that a more measured and contained reading of sexual matter was within the reach of all — including, radically for the era, women and the lower classes. Gerald Gardiner for the defence suggested that “there are students of literature in all walks of life,” and that Penguin Books were fighting an old attitude of elitism, “the attitude that it is all right to publish a special edition at five or ten guineas so that people who are less well off cannot read what other people read.” Wasn’t it perfectly natural for everyone to be interested “in the problems of human relationships, including sexual relationships?”

What was being proposed here was a whole new response to sexual material, one that operated through curiosity, not prurience, and that sought information, not titillation. One that might also be freed from the taint of misogyny contaminating all disturbing erotic feelings, ever since the word “pornography” evolved from the Greek for “harlot” or “female whore.” It took the combined might of clever legal minds and the most intellectual element of the ruling class to win the day on the basis of a belief that readers from every walk of life were capable of seeing more in sexual encounters than just a compulsion to sex.

The question of what we actually see when looking at sexual images was uppermost in my mind when I was writing the book on pornography. Colleagues often sent me links or contacts that they thought would be interesting, and in this way I found myself studying online the photographic art of a Frenchman, Henri Macaroni. Macaroni had put together an exhibition of three thousand images, all of which, from the publicity material, seemed to have a generic similarity. I couldn’t quite figure out what I was looking at, and thought perhaps they were underwater photos of sea urchins, or strange magnified images of spiders at work. I had a movement of instinctual recoil when I finally realised that they were all images of a woman’s vagina. Once that moment had passed, the images still looked like nothing particularly interesting. The thought of three thousand of them represented tedium on a scale I could barely imagine.

If the erotic is at all dangerous to presence of mind, it must, then, be tied to a quality of elusiveness or secrecy, not placed on open display.

This seemed to be par for the course with a lot of sexualised art over the turn of the millennium, which sought not to make its audience think, but to give it a powerful experience, and rarely a pleasant one. A harbinger of this trend was the French performance artist, Orlan, who, for one installation, set herself up as her own exhibit. She would lie naked on a table, her pubic hair painted blue, and a magnifying glass aimed over her vulva. Visitors would view her through a gap in curtains, and a television screen nearby replayed their own expressions when they realised she was menstruating.

It is an ordinary human response to peer and to scrutinise, when faced with something we do not initially understand, but it is equally human to watch with covert fascination when something we are not supposed to see is finally put on view. Both artworks play with this duality, turning spectators into the peeping Toms they never intended to be caught out as being. But they also raise the question of what it is that we are really looking for when we desire to see images of a sexual nature. My own experience, and that of the audience at Orlan’s performance, was that it was all too easy to see far too much. The erotic must reside in a promise of revelation, in the hint or suggestion of sexual activity, in a cheeky surprise rather than a nasty shock. It is all too easy to move past that point and be greeted with embarrassing, groaning fornication or the equivalent of someone’s medical records. If the erotic is at all dangerous to presence of mind, it must, then, be tied to a quality of elusiveness or secrecy, not placed on open display.