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The British like to ban things, but we don't like to change things. This week, there's been yet another conflict between Silicon Valley permissiveness and British censoriousness, as our politicians attacked Facebook for hosting graphic videos. Elsewhere, the latest flagship campaign in mainstream UK feminism focuses on pressuring Tesco to remove lads' mags from its shelves, as if by some sympathetic magic sexism might thereby be solved. In a country with no constitutional protection for freedom of speech, calling for censorship lets the moderate left politely ask for progress without really asking.
The question of lads' mags has been irritatingly divisive, at a time when there are a great many pressing issues of structural sexism to consider and only a limited number of hours to argue on Twitter. Many of the feminists I've spoken to agree that getting supermarkets to pull already ailing softcore porn magazines from circulation might not be the Equal Pay Act of our generation – but it was felt that the issue could be a "gateway" to a greater understanding of sexism and sexual objectification, particularly among the young.
If only it worked that way. If only radical ends could be achieved by safe, conservative means. If only we could get the kids on board with banning naughty magazines today and trust that by tomorrow they'd be hanging out in squats after school, snorting lines of lesbian separatist theory from copies of the Scum Manifesto. What is perturbing about this line of thinking is that the debate is assumed to start with censorship, when censorship should always be a last resort.
What does it say about the state of progressive thought when the only language we have to discuss problematic content is to ask whether or not it should be banned? Facebook came under fire for allowing a video apparently showing a woman being beheaded to be shared on the site. The footage was so shocking that David Cameron himself was obliged to publicly reveal how little he understands the internet, saying that it was "irresponsible of Facebook to post beheading videos, especially without a warning", and that "worried parents" deserve an explanation.
I am not a worried parent, but even a still from the video, in which a woman in a pink top is held up by her hair as a man brandishes a weapon, made me want to throw up my own pancreas. Most of the many subsequent news reports, however, focused on the length of time it took for Facebook to pull the clip, the effect such disturbing images might have on young minds, and the ethics of censoring violent content. None of them led with the surely important question of whether the woman in the video is actually OK and, if she isn't, how her killer might be brought to justice.
The trouble with starting these discussions with censorship is that they so often end there. The debate quickly becomes about whether a given product or publication should be banned, rather than about its implications. If, on the left, censorship is our first response to awful things of which we disapprove, we divest ourselves of moral responsibility for confronting that awfulness. We hand judgment over what is problematic in our culture to the state, or to intermediaries such as the Advertising Standards Authority. We allow ourselves an easy dichotomy: either Publication X should be banned, in which case everything it represents disappears and we never have to think about it again, or it shouldn't, in which case it's totally fine and there's nothing more to talk about, because freedom of speech means never speaking back to bigotry.
Those who start shouting about freedom of speech at the first intimation of outrage are worse still than the kneejerk censors. Over several decades of conservative windbaggery, the concept of freedom of speech has been bastardised and recycled to the extent that many now seem to believe freedom of expression to be synonymous with freedom from criticism. We are living through an unprecedented period of global state surveillance.The fight for the principle of free of speech has never been more urgent. That is why we must not allow that fight to be confused with the right of bigots to defend their own racism, sexism, homophobia or transphobia .
Scads of otherwise intelligent humans are invested in a species of weaponised stupidity, casting their defence of prejudice as a fight for liberty in which they alone are standing on the barricades, waving the flag for the status quo. In fact, freedom of speech includes the freedom to shout back as loudly and angrily as you can.
That's what those who are invested in social justice should be doing more of, rather than simply calling for a ban on whatever we don't like this week. Among the vanishingly few lessons we can learn about tolerance from the United States, which clings to its fickle First Amendment like a priest clings to a relic, is that censorship is no long-term strategy for cultural change. Facebook may have removed the beheading video, satisfying "worried parents" everywhere, but somewhere out there a woman in a pink top may be lying dead. That her corpse can no longer frighten children on the internet will not comfort her family – and it should not comfort us.
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