Questions of moral choice and regulation have arisen as older, more traditional patterns of moral conduct have been eroded, and as new technologies have led to conflicts about ‘taste and decency’. Arguments used in these debates draw on a variety of moral philosophies (e.g. liberalism, religious fundamentalism, feminism, libertarianism, Marxism and environmentalism).

We shall examine the recent emergence of moral regulation of new technologies, and then discuss the substantive regulatory issues of pornography and homosexuality.

In the West, the 1960s came to represent a decade of sexual freedom and liberal values. Permissive values dominated much of the social and political landscape. However, for moral conservatives the ‘decade of permissiveness’ was a period of moral decline, and a backlash against sexual liberalism led to a revival of Christian moral values. In the 1980s and 90s, moral crusades were mounted against media, and Western governments sought to control sexual activities and to re-affirm traditional patriarchal family as the moral bedrock of society.

The paradox of the New Right is that whilst neo-liberalism fosters free-market forces, freedom, choice and de-regulation in economic activities, in the area of the family and marriage, morality and sexuality firm controls and state regulation are reinforced.

New technological means of representation and communication have thrown up debates about the potential for corruption, or for enlightenment. Three positions can be identified:

• advocates claim that new technologies can be used for educational purposes, to widen democratic values and to empower people in day-to-day politics;
• critics of new technologies reject television as trivialising serious news and current affairs and serious aesthetic music and literature, and point out its corrupting influence on innocent viewers who have little knowledge of sexual matters;
• free-marketeers regard new technologies not only as a source of wealth-creation, but it is also a means of empowering the choices of ‘ordinary people’ as against traditional cultural elites.

Some feminists argue that pornography epitomises the oppression and abuse of women. Definitions of ‘pornography’ vary: what appears to some as erotica appears to others as exploitation. For some feminists, the use of women in advertisements in newspapers, magazines and on television is regarded as ‘pornographic’ because women’s bodies are designed to incite, arouse or titillate men. The women in such images become objects, subjected to the powerful gaze of the male ‘voyeur’. In other words, men symbolically expropriate women’s bodies for their own pleasure (in a similar way, men exploit the domestic labour of women and use prostitutes to serve their sexual needs). By setting women symbolically within the power of men, pornographic images licence the male degradation of, and ultimately violence against, women.

Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon note that;

• pornography is central to the way in which men subordinate women;
• pornography both depicts and causes violence against women as the latter are treated as ‘objects’;
• pornography is a form of sexual discrimination because it is a specific harm which has an impact on all areas of women’s lives;
• the list of direct harms includes dehumanisation, sexual exploitation, forced sex, forced prostitution, physical injury, and social and sexual terrorism and inferiority presented as entertainment.

In 1983, Dworkin and MacKinnon drafted an anti-pornography bill for an American city council. Drafted as a civil rights law, the bill empowers individual or groups of women to take a case against the producers and distributors of pornography.

Some feminists are critical of the need for legislation. Feminists’ Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT) claims that pornography is not central to women’s oppression and feminists should not campaign for legislation that may restrict women’s freedom. Six points are targeted against Dworkin and MacKinnon’s draft bill.

• Pornography is not central in maintaining gender inequality. Regulation should not be directed at images, but acts of coercion in pornography, rape and domestic abuse and battery.
• In the draft bill, legal terms such as ‘subordination’, ‘degrading’ and ‘sexual objects’ are not adequately defined, so that in some cases, feminist art, self-help health guides and women’s fashion may be prosecuted.
• The draft bill is sexist, suggesting that women are weak, in need of protection, unable to make their own decisions. Women appear as helpless victims who do not seek or enjoy sex, and who cannot enter into legally binding agreements.
• The bill assumes a simple link between words/images and behaviour. Men learn gender roles in many places; the family and school are probably more important than pornography.
• Women’s experiences with pornography are mixed; some women get erotic pleasure from it. Lesbian pornography complicates the debate as both men and women purchase and view pornographic materials.
• There are serious dangerous in restricting sexually explicit speech, so attacking freedom of speech, a cornerstone of Western societies.

Not all feminists share FACT’s concern about restriction of freedom and censorship. Some writers argue that censorship on ideas and thoughts is qualitatively different to censorship on pornography. Pornography is violence, de-humanising and de-grading. Ideas and thoughts, and freedom to express them, are crucial in an open and democratic society, pornography is not.

The feminist campaign against pornography has become confused by the development of a right-wing, Christian campaign against it. Religious pressure groups have been in a tactical alliance with liberal and Marxist feminists.

Two philosophical positions can be identified over what should or should not be broadcast on television, cinemas and theatres:

• Moral conservatives’ hold that the church, the law and the state have a duty to maintain as far as possible the Christian or Islamic moral standards on the family, marriage, monogamy, and heterosexuality.
• Liberalism holds that the laws of the state should not be based upon, or uphold, one dominant moral belief system. Furthermore, the state has no right to interfere in the private lives of adults.

Overall, in the West, liberalism has underpinned much of work of broadcasters on lesbian and gay issues. However, in the 1990s the moral conservatives attacked the media for its permissive moral values. Moral conservatives suggested that there were two groups: a ‘media elite’ and the ‘moral majority’. The television media elite was attacked for being too liberal, and not representing the interests of the moral majority. Yet, who is to articulate the moral voice of the majority? Does such an entity of moral majority exist in a plural society? Those who hail ‘the people’, ‘the majority’, etc create that which they seek to address, by words, representations or images.

In short, television has been a means whereby the horizons of audiences have been expanded and sometimes changed. Some have welcomed this effect, and gays and lesbians have seen gay and lesbian television programmes as affirming and recognising their identities. Others have found the experience of seeing other ways of living offensive cultural change.

Thus, the questions remain, what are the limits of the tolerance of differences, and who sets them? Who defines the boundaries of ‘taste and decency’? Do regulatory bodies establish them? Or are they decided by distinct, differentiated groups of viewers who communicate with television editors, controllers and programme-makers?