Porn again in sex-mad York

NORTH Yorkshire has embraced the Internet. Every school, Scout group, shop and social club seems to have their own web page these days.

But we are also hooked on the seedier side of the web. A few years ago, the Evening Press revealed that local prostitutes were promoting their wares on the Net. On another site, toilets in Ryedale and Tadcaster were advertised as good places for gay sex.

In 2002, we revealed how St George's Fields car park was named on a website as a top venue for "dogging": where people watch strangers have sex in cars, notoriously a pastime of ex-football star Stan Collymore.

And this week, the Evening Press revealed how respectable York parish councillor Christine Cranfield was in the pornography trade.

As Angelique, she runs a website from her Clifton home where you can buy videos of her engaging in sex acts.

Surfing on the wave of national publicity, Ms Cranfield has resigned from Clifton Without parish council, announcing her intention to become an MP.

But isn't this tide of pornography damaging to those involved - and society in general? Ex councillor Cranfield doesn't think so.

"There's two varieties of research on that.

"There's a lot of people who think if you watch a lot of porn you become a rapist. Others say it vents it and relieves you so you don't become a rapist.

"I think it's a good thing."

And she is pleased, not ashamed, by what she does. "I am well paid for what I do, so I don't think I am exploited.

"You get exploited if you don't get paid very well, or you are being abused."

What would she say to those people who argue what she is doing is degrading to women? "It's taste," she said. "Some people think it's degrading. Some people don't like it, some people do.

"I can't make anyone like anything they don't like."

She is something of a sex industry expert. Soon after leaving Queen Anne School in York, she met a photographer and started to pose for "glamour" shots.

"It was good money. That's why I went into photography."

Spotted by an agent she was signed up to do striptease, a skill she has practised in big cities such as Liverpool and Birmingham, and abroad in Greece and Spain.

By setting up her Angelique website Ms Cranfield is simply taking control by being her own boss, she says.

By all accounts, she is far from the only York woman making money from web pornography.

Andrew Clark runs the Xes adult shop in Goodramgate with his wife Carole. Asked if women in York were involved in the Internet sex industry, he answered: "Lots. The students will do it. They're in York for a while and then they're off back home again.

"I know of three film companies that make films in York. Each one is different, in a different context, and they're all on the Internet.

"They sell films, and very successfully, some of them. That's just in York, and that's just the people I know.

"The people that are making the films are certainly local. The people who are in the films are local as well, in the majority of cases."

The girls do not believe they are exploited, rather "that they're exploiting the men".

Mr Clark and his wife sell sex toys, magazines and videos both from the first floor of the shop and over the Internet at xesyork.com. He says the sexual content on the Net has been liberating for many adults.

"People have always done all these perverted things. Now it's just out in the open.

"People aren't as frightened to say, 'I go and watch other people having sex in car parks'. Like your parish councillor. She's doing what she wants to do and probably enjoying it."

But aren't many of the women involved pressured into posing for these pictures and videos?

"To be honest, I don't know where these women are who are forced into it.

"I know that if you say to girls, and I am talking about the majority of young women, would you like to be paid some money for doing a glamour shoot, you will have to show everything, you would see that a very large percentage would say yes.

"You would ask them if they want to do it. You would say how much it could be, £35 to £40 for an hour - you would get as many as you want and they will do the business."

Mr Clark does not advocate a complete free-for-all. Paedophilia and bestiality are rightly illegal.

And he is concerned about the long-term effect of exposure to this material. "People become desensitised by watching what's readily available now.

"It becomes the norm and it becomes less exciting. That's why they want to go to more deviant and harder things."

However, he is more worried by the premature sexualising of young girls by our society.

"If you see the way some of them dress their daughters, girls of ten or 11 with high heels on," he said. "It's too much.

"Parents dress their children in a blatantly sexual way. Little girls want to be like Britney or Christina Aguilera who go around touching their crotch all the time.

"If you go on to some of the music channels, what they're showing just falls short of soft core porn. Some of it is soft core porn. I think it's gone too far."

Alan Clarke, senior lecturer in comparative media at York St John College, has similar fears. He is concerned by the mainstream media's portrayal of women as much as Internet pornography. "We should be concerned about all of it.

"Leaving aside the stuff which is completely illegal for very good reasons, for example anything that involves children, I am much more concerned about what you could call legitimate images in a plethora of magazines such as Loaded and Nuts.

"It's to do with the way that the models look into the camera. There's the science of the way models are posed, the way they are captured, which is presenting women as available, docile."

Although some people have an absolute moral objection to depictions of sex and nudity, Mr Clarke is not offended by images of consensual sex. He believes pornography covers too wide a variety of material to be hailed as good or condemned as bad. Even the research is contradictory.

"The Dutch experience with liberalisation of pornography has led to less sex crime.

"But most serial rapists are found to have a huge stash of pornography, and quite violent pornography."

Whatever the rights and wrongs, pornography is here in York and it is not going to go away.

And Andrew Clark, of adult shop Xes, says more local women than you might expect are involved.

"There's a huge trend towards amateur-type porn as opposed to your glamorous French film women. Because the amateur thing could be the girl next door.

"And a lot of them are."

Updated: 10:51 Friday, March 12, 2004