The irony-free life of the internet paedophile

Entertain, if you will, as an exercise in thinking diagonally, the possibility that logging on to paedophiliac sites on the internet is a comparable moral offence to tuning into hip-hop. And now, entertain as a corollary the prospect of Special Branch coming knocking on our doors to investigate our record collections and take away our radios.

Preposterous, of course. Hip-hop, as our much maligned Culture minister Kim Howells was reminded the other week, when he was caught laying some of the blame for gun-toting on those "boasting macho idiot rappers", is the symptom not the problem. The ghetto is already violent and undernourished, aficionados of the genre told him, hip-hop merely reports upon it. End of problem. End of similarity with other representational forms deemed to corrupt our minds.

Here is not the place to rehearse my own suspicions that excessive listening to music, of whatever sort – Wagner if you're a Nazi, Beethoven and the Bee Gees if you're a depressive, hip-hop if you're a gunman – is at the bottom of all our ills. "If music be the food of love, play on,/Give me excess of it," says the Duke in Twelfth Night, leaving us in no doubt that we are never going to get a sensible syllable out of him. But I am aware that music is the great touch-me-not of our times, and whoever would say a word against it risks obloquy. So my lips are sealed.

It obviously won't do, though, as anyone who knows about art in any of its manifestations will tell you, to call a work a symptom only, and to suppose you've closed the matter of its connivance with its subject by calling it an innocent representation. Art might hold the mirror up to nature, but it only becomes art when someone tilts the mirror. Wordsworth new created what he saw, said Shelley, testifying to the truth that seeing is not passive. The greater the artist, the more new-created the seeing, but the principle remains the same even if you are without a semblance of talent: there is no innocent representation.

Let's go back, then, to our exercise in diagonal thinking. Wherein lies the difference, morally, between interesting oneself in images of offences against children, and humming along to the celebration of offences against women, homosexuals and persons of whatever other sexual or ethnic persuasion the hip-hopper in question happens currently to be displeased with?

Irony? The argument being that the rapper simultaneously entertains and sends up the violence he expresses? Fair point, always provided that the irony isn't lost on the audience (which it is likely to be, given that the audience is primarily American) and always remembering the Joker, violence and irony having immemorially made comfortable bedfellows. "Happy boithday, Louis," as the hoodlum says, spraying festive anniversary bullets. For irony, too, can be a species of inhumanity.

Or is it the pictorial nature of the paedophile's researches that disturbs us? Photographs, not words. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will never harm us. A mistaken attribution of harmlessness to words, in that case, as any schoolboy scrabbling to find what he wants in Ulysses or Tropic of Cancer will tell you. What's Men Only as a stimulant, when all is said and done, compared to The Story of O? As for those photographs, I am in no position to make an informed judgement, never having seen any, never having wanted to see any and – now that looking is to be counted a crime – never intending to see any. Other commentators appear to take it as a given – I do not know on what authority – that the images for which the paedophile scours the web are invariably brutal and abusive. Violence for violence, I am not sure how you adjudicate between sexual abuse and ironic shootings, but I do accept that if the paedophile is paying to look at photographs of barbarisms actually enacted, his connivance with them, his encouragement, so to speak, of their perpetuation, is of another order than the rapper's, however close to reality the latter's fantasies.

But what if the photographs that turn the paedophile to jelly are lyrical in nature, a little more, say, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll's tender studies of little girls? Paedophiles were once understood to be arrested individuals, for whom the vulnerability of childhood was more seductive than it should be, but not necessarily men who posed a physical threat. Is physical abuse an inevitable concomitant of their desires? Or again, what if their poison isn't photography at all, but prose? An important component of adult-to- adult pornography has always been the fictional account. Once upon a time, when the world was literate, you would get whole stories written on the walls of lavatory cubicles. "Last night I got home to find my landlady waiting for me in her see-through nightie..." A form that has perished, not least, I suppose, because of the demise of the landlady. But who is to say that some trembling paedophile equivalent isn't alive and unwell on the internet?

And if it were, and if this were all the lonely unironic paedophile were seeking, where would our diagonal comparison with the language of hip-hop violence be then?

The truth is, the evidence mounts daily that we are not, in any corner of our lives, as deserving of unfettered freedom as we were once flattered to believe we were. Like it or not, we need watching, still, every second of the day. As for who should do the watching, now we don't believe in men of God and take the law to be a ass, there's the insoluble problem. In the meantime, the paedophile remains our softest target. At least no one is going to say of him that one's man paedophile is another man's freedom fighter. Or that he is merely making ironic reference to things as they already are.

God help us, though, when paedophilia starts to spawn its own music industry. Who will dare lay a finger on it then?