Mary Whitehouse - a reappraisal

[KimikosNightmare]

I've thought for some time now that much of what she said was , indeed, right.

Her views on homosexuality are obviously problematic but she was spot on about pornography.

BBC News - Was moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse ahead of her time?
www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-60556060

I wholeheartedly agree with you, @KimikosNightmare. Everything she feared would come to pass has. I feel ashamed that I laughed at her in the 1980s along with all the other alternative comedy loving lefty teens.

By the 1990s, she was just a joke. And the 1990s was a bloody nightmare for women and the gains made since the women's liberation movement. Lad mags, lad culture, cool girls/lad girls, semi-pornographic (and actually just plain pornographic) music videos on mainstream TV that were supposedly empowering for female singers and body positivity, and of course the internet and social media age. Couple that with X Files based paranoia/conspiracy culture that empowered Incel types, and the Buffy/Scully based culture that girls are both as physically strong as males but also responsible for solving the world's ills and propping up broken men and their delusions.

I too was very critical in the 90’s and joined in with the bullying/ taunting/ ridicule. However, I was ridiculous enough to think the ladette culture was ‘ freedom’ and lad mags were ‘empowering’ eughhhh….. shudder…

Am I correct in thinking that she was influential around the watershed ( is that still a thing? Live abroad now and don’t watch terrestrial UK tv in the usual way) .. and totally agree that her concerns around pornography and it’s effects on people were spot on.

The tv portrayal of her by Julie Walters was interesting particularly as it was made by the BBC.

The taunting and baying at those who express concern around sexualisation, pornography etc has increased and I do wonder of the permissiveness around the abuse Mary Whitehouse and her group endured set the scene for what people who voice concerns now face. I believe she would get lots of poisonous letters ( Twitter of her time) and I would guess that no one was brought to justice over the threats etc… not a lot changes, it seems

Her views, as pp said, around homosexuality were just plain wrong and I believe towards the end of her life she made some fairly strong objections to innocuous items which were picked up by the press leading to further vicious parody. But yes, I think she was ahead of her time with her concerns.

My ridiculing of her started in the 70s. I was wrong.

I wonder what the MW experience comedians think now?

Am I correct in thinking that she was influential around the watershed

Yes, that was largely her influence. Before then some pretty inappropriate stuff was on at times kids would see it.

I've never really understood the ridicule (she's before my time) because her basic premise (that kids should not be exposed to adult material during 'family' viewing) seems pretty reasonable.

*In 1974 she wrote: "The young today are more pressurised and exploited than ever before. I'm fighting for their right not to be exploited."

Mary also warned against technology becoming out of control, while addressing a computer industry technology conference in Rome in November 1975.

"May I first share my fear that technology is overstepping itself," she said in her speech. "It does seem, to the lay mind, that the power of computer technology can reach a point where man is incapable of arresting the forces which he has released."*

She wasn't right about everything but it's hard to disagree with this!

documentary by Samira Ahmed about her on R4 now

That was a good listen. My takeaways are that she got some things right (and was very wrong in others) and it's taken decades for the mainstream to start re-adopting some of her "dinosaur views" and that she believed that certain boundaries should be fixed rather than being forever shifted onwards as society became more progressive.

I don't think her critics in the programme came off particularly well. Dismissive, smug, and not above being creative with the facts.

Her successes include the 1978 Protection of Children Act, which criminalised for the first time the making of indecent images of children, the 1981 Indecent Displays (Control) Act which controlled sex shops and the displays of pornographic material in newsagents, and the 1984 Video Recordings Act, to regulate the explosion in the sale of extreme content (so-called "video nasties") in the new Wild West of home VCRs.

That's quite an impressive record.

I think she was just enough before my time - I was only vaguely aware of her as being a figure of fun.

Interesting to consider - thanks for the link, OP.

Here's a link to the radio programme: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0015411

In November 1974, she wrote to the attorney general suggesting the law be amended to ensure that juries were 50% female.

Ofcom has its origins in the Broadcasting Standards Council set up in 1988 - the outcome of her decades long push for ordinary citizens to have an ongoing role in the monitoring of broadcasting standards.

She braved death threats, verbal abuse, actual assaults and, in one case, students lowering an effigy of her on a rope as she spoke, often showing a remarkable sense of humour.

Wow.

That abuse of a woman does look rather familiar in the 2020s, doesn't it DomesticatedZombie?

I was born in 1976 so only knew what other said
I mostly heard she was homophobic

In 2008, I saw a drama about her. So I read up on her and I realised that barring the homophobia, she made a lot of good points.

Thanks for the link to the radio 4 doc, will listen tomorrow. She was clearly a remarkable woman with a great raft of achievements and ovaries of steel. Again, teen me was only aware of her being laughed at by the alternative comedy scene, including Spitting Image. And of course, there was "The Mary Whitehouse Experience" pisstake comedy moniker, 4 privileged, Cambridge graduate males and a good dollop of misogyny that us cool girls laughed along with. God, the benefit of hindsight, eh?

I'm not up for rewriting history about Whitehouse. I remember her not just as a hyper-religious vilely homophobic forced birther but also as a woman who believed that women should keep their legs closed until marriage, thus perpetuating 'loose women' myths. She was not on the side of feminism.

MW was from the conservative side of feminism - which has tended to be unrecognized as such by liberal and left wing feminists. Frankly I think it was convenient to do so because it allowed their views on women's issues to be discredited without really addressing them as the considered views of women. Her views on abortion are good example, women are actually more likely than men to think abortion should be restricted to some degree, but if you frame that as an anti-woman view you can dismiss it out of hand.

But yes, she had a good sense of the way in which the things people think about and what they do form their attitudes toward sex more generally. If sex becomes a commodity or a no-strings hobby activity (in person or through a screen) inevitably that will affect how people think about it's use and misuse.

It wasn't a popular view at the time among liberals and not only with regard to sex related subjects. There was an idea that society could function just fine with the removal of all kinds of normative behaviours and structures and institutions that might seem old fashioned. Both serious ones and less serious, but there are a lot of cases where, once they are gone, people realize they did actually serve a function.

I struggle to get past her views on homosexuality.

She was right about some things and wrong about others. It’s really not a difficult concept to grasp; it’s just like the rest of us.

It was the racism that I had issues with.

Whilst people might look back and read about her or see a film about her and think she was a force for good. Nothing will change my opinion that she was everything that was wrong with the U.K. in the 60s and 70s

Stuffy, puritanical and religious with a large helping of homophobia and racism thrown.
If a programme was about domestic violence or racism then the message of the programme would be lost as she was too busy concentrating on counting words than to take notice of what context those words were used in.

Ultimately people don’t need someone like MW to coddle them. They have an off button on their tv. Comparing audience numbers from the 60s and 70s to today we can see people aren’t bothered with game shows, reality tv and soap operas and have pressed the off button.
Anything we want is at our fingertips it is up to us what we watch.

Ultimately people don’t need someone like MW to coddle them. They have an off button on their tv.

I think ofcom and the watershed are fairly positive things which allow choice while still encouraging responsibility.

Lots of terrible people also achieve positive things.

Nothing will change my opinion that she was everything that was wrong with the U.K. in the 60s and 70s

I wonder who personifies everything that is wrong in the 2020s?

For some reason a particular face has come into my mind.

If I could have apound for every time my DH says, 'bring back Mary Whitehouse', I would be rich.

She was right about a lot of things. We are more prudish in a lot of ways but far more liberal in a lot of damaging ways.

@NotBadConsidering

She was right about some things and wrong about others. It’s really not a difficult concept to grasp; it’s just like the rest of us.

I would agree. Will listen to the documentary later. I was born in the early 60s and looking back now I would say a lot of rather naive and idealistic people thought we should essentially start again with none of the social taboos and conventions we'd had before they came under attack in the 1960s and in some cases then disappeared.

We only need to look at the National Council for Civil Liberties (now known as Liberty) and the Liberal Party (now subsumed into the LibDems) to see what can happen when ill-informed and over-optimistic people take others at face value and suspend all critical thinking.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26352378

PIE [Paedophile Information Exchange] was formed in 1974. It campaigned for "children's sexuality". It wanted the government to axe or lower the age of consent. It offered support to adults "in legal difficulties concerning sexual acts with consenting 'under age' partners". The real aim was to normalise sex with children.

Journalist Christian Wolmar remembers their tactics. "They didn't emphasise that this was 50-year-old men wanting to have sex with five-year-olds. They presented it as the sexual liberation of children, that children should have the right to sex," he says.

It's an ideology that seems chilling now. But PIE managed to gain support from some professional bodies and progressive groups. It received invitations from student unions, won sympathetic media coverage and found academics willing to push its message.

... One of PIE's key tactics was to try to conflate its cause with gay rights. On at least two occasions the Campaign for Homosexual Equality conference passed motions in PIE's favour.

There was a lot of pushback, but the NCCL allowed PIE to affiliate to it and itself campaigned to lower the age of consent to 14. I expect they'd rather forget all this now.

Some of the tactics mentioned in this article may seem familiar from a current controversial campaign. Forced teaming is the term, I believe.

I wonder who personifies everything that is wrong in the 2020s?
For some reason a particular face has come into my mind.

LMAO. Nailed it in one.