Streicher wrote that Jewish men believed they could do with German women and children as they liked, and defended his actions with the usual palaver about truth. The means he used to sway the vulnerable Germans have had him hailed, along with Goebbels, as modern advertising's grand old man.

One of the most effective means he used to arouse anti-Semitic fervour was to depict Jews as pornographers - bereft of tenderness; as unclean, meretricious and depraved. Today, such sociopathic lividity would guarantee the same celebrity enjoyed by Larry Flynt, Bob Guccione, Al Goldstein, Canberra's Eros Foundation, and the new crack elite - no pun intended - of international coffee-table pornographers.

Unlike today's sexually inept liberals, Streicher deeply understood the mechanics of porn. He knew the axis of pornography was shame and that this shame called for a target. It is no accident that pornographic scenarios pivot on objectification, humiliation, and exposure; in the pornographic universe, that which shames us is our strength.

During the Nazi era, Jews paraded naked whilst Nazi superiors debated whether to utilize them or put them to death. Naked, they were subjected to the cruelest ridicule, just as women in pornographic images casually emailed by men to other men are cruelly ridiculed by them each day. Nudity has always been synonymous with powerlessness.

For those unable to reconcile themselves with the philosophical slop that passes for, say, Al Goldstein's understanding of the First Amendment, there is the Pornographic New Wave. Here is a hi-gloss universe of nice nude newness, in which intellectual subtext and ligneous penises jostle for our attention ("My God! That's the biggest - well, how about that for a postmodern tableau? Who would have thought of empowering the transhistorically subservient figure of the maid by turning her back to the vacuum cleaner so she can pleasure herself?")

Roy Stuart and Nobuyoshi Araki are specialists in this field, and for those whose urges are further refracted, there is, of course, the teahouse sheen of "vintage erotica" (known to the rest of us as "old porn").

Such offerings are not targeted at the descendants of Streicher's audience, but at the readers of Salon.com. To this end and inaccurately, the word "pornography" is replaced by "erotica". The latter word has come to mean little more than a nude or nudes shot by a photographer of passable technical aptitude (more attention is paid to the gastropod's angle as it slides into the whelk and if there are goats, they are well lit).

Greenwich Village types must then introduce said photographer as the savior of beauty through truth. And pervert pedigree is also relevant. It doesn't hurt to understand the market value of detachment, that filter through which all the world is no more than a Prada ad.

A copy of Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole or one of Roy Stuart's interminable wankbooks casually heaved onto a sofa says many things of its owner, few of them flattering.

Araki is particularly despicable. A toady voyeur whose thin moustache frames the most annoying of Little Lord Fauntleroy pouts, Nobuyoshi Araki produces black and white portraits of strippers and young prostitutes at work. "Without obscenity," he announces on the back cover, "our cities are dreary places and life is bleak."

The real obscenity is his arrogance. That which rapists and the clients of prostitutes have in common is an indifference to their partner's pleasure; one takes by force and the other through economic superiority that which is not freely given or heartfelt. And pornography is the finest educational tool available for producing in male viewers this sense of right.

British troops destined for the Falklands were shown pornographic videos, as were American soldiers prior to bombing raids during the Gulf War. Pornography was endorsed as a "tool of genocide" during the Balkan Crisis, during which women were not only raped, but filmed as they were being raped. A survivor of the pornography-saturated rape/death camps reported her experience:

"[O]ne beats you and the other - excuse me - fucks you, he puts his truncheon in you, and he films all that . ... We even had to sing Serbian songs ... in front of the camera."

This, then, is the real subtext of porn.

Araki's images are forensic in their medical blandness; they are better suited to the yearbook of a morgue. My idea of an erotic kick is not a photograph of the diminutive Araki and his equally diminutive pebbledash-complexioned chum plucking sushi from what appears to be a half-naked female corpse. Nor is it page after page of defeated and compliantly smiling naked Japanese girls, their eyes annulled.

"Young women," reads the introduction, "were now able to earn … upwards of [$20] per hour for simply shedding their panties." Got that, girls? A whole twenty bucks! To Araki, money justifies pretty much every demeaning sexual act. In one spectacularly awful shot, he photographs himself digitally penetrating a girl before a group of (deeply unappetizing) men, his left hand firmly on his thigh as he looks up with the faintly prudish and long-suffering expression my aunt adopts when stuffing a chicken.

Like his fellow "erotic" photographers - and I do not include Helmut Newton in this group - Araki is a man whose bitterness about his blindness really qualifies him for porn. An angry man, he sees only a set of breasts and genitals where another sees a human being. Blind to beauty, blind to eroticism, dignity and joy, his depiction of women is defamatory: he works in Streicher's spirit of hate.

The Jews, it seems, have been replaced by girls.

Roy Stuart belongs to the same autistic universe in which there is a preoccupation with parts (and not the lucky whole). There are, however, divergences. No static In the Realm of the Senses dissociation for the American Stuart - brrrrrrrrring on the Ritalin! He uses color the way toddlers boggle over and consume fluorescent candy: too much too fast, and for too long. His hyperactive hues throb in the outer reaches of the color spectrum: vibrating violet, pulsating pink, and lucite lime. Where Araki's victims slump, small heaps of congealed Soba noodles, Stuart's move.

His models writhe like flatworms fornicating in an aquarium.

Stuart creates this sense of immediacy by losing focus and when blended with true beetroot hues, this immediacy is transformed into heat. His glossy girls and women are captured squatting, rolling, moaning, flinging flowing acres of hair back into space. Creatures of pantyhose commercials, they cross long legs and readily flash gussets. Their sexuality belongs to the era of Amanda Lear, of the young Jerry Hall, to Roxy Music at their shiniest: no authenticity at all, only an engrossing engrossment with the self.

The introductions to each of Stuart's three volumes are the worst kind of pap. Witness: "Using sexual imagery to encourage more evolved attitudes towards relations between men and women became Stuart's cause." Call me obtuse, but I don't really understand how gusset shots encourage "more evolved attitudes" between the sexes, nor do I understand how women dressed as maids encourage anything other than the sexualization of an underclass. A fan of Über-nut Bataille, Stuart joins Streicher and Araki in rationalizing his porny endeavors with waffle about truth.

This "true artist" who sees "through magical eyes" strikes me as little more than a case of arrested development (Roy Stuart, aged six, hiding under the table to stare up his mother's skirt). A "cultural guerilla" and "sexual subversive", Stuart is said to depict a world of "freedom". This "free" world of his is populated by French maids, schoolgirls, enthusiastic whores, squatting women. Even the weekend lesbians serve the sexual needs of men. The only freedom in these books is that enjoyed by Stuart, whose snowdropper's fetish for white panties is extreme.

Volume I features 57 glimpses of white panties; Volume II features 84; and there are 76 flashes - count 'em, ladies and gentlemen! - in Volume III. Was he low on props, perhaps? (Roy Stuart, wringing out his only pair of white panties in the darkroom, to a model: "Wear these, honey - they're a bit damp, but they'll do.")

And with the exception of a few token fatties and oldsters, Stuart's female models are predictably attractive. His male models, on the other hand, look like convicted frotteurs. Why threaten the male viewer with male beauty when you can instead soothe him with large, beaked noses, matted chest hair and circumcised ultraviolet members?

We are told that if traditional pornography is "a vacation from reality," Stuart's work "provides a huge dose of it." A vacation from reality? Roy Stuart's images are real - that is to say, those are real penises and real hands and real girls in real alleyways. There is no fantasy involved. And therein lies the real obscenity with pornography: everything you see is real. No acting other than the simulation of desire or pleasure is involved.

Pornography is hawked as "fantasy" because the word removes the sting from our conscience. After all, how can a fantasy be wrong? Which is why in rendering pornography chic, Stuart, Araki and their ilk are, in effect, endorsing humiliation.

In this respect, they could not differ more from Helmut Newton, whose passion for women is evident in every shot. Us and Them, Newton's superb collaboration with Alice Springs (his Australian photographer wife), is a tribute not only to their love for each other, but to the intelligence of portraiture. On page 77, one of Newton's most memorably erotic images: his middle-aged wife at their Rue Aubriot kitchen table lighting an after-dinner cigarette. A half-empty glass of wine to her left, she intently focuses on the flame, her dress opened to reveal her thickly erect nipples.

To model for Newton is to amplify the self. Even Nurse Wolf, the dominatrix he photographed for Paul Theroux's New Yorker article, entered through him an iconic realm: Newton's lens positioned the ceiling's lit single bare bulb between the black impala-like horns tied to her head and with this, she was elevated to the pedestal of Isis, all-powerful goddess of the dead.

Forbidden Erotica, a collection of "vintage pornography", is unfamiliar with such grace. The historical quirks of the gelatin silver prints, albumen prints, lithographs and sepia photographs ranging from the 1870's to the 1940's only serve to distract the viewer from any misgivings ("My, look at that hat! How very quaint!") We are assured that in light of the "suffering, privation and pointless drudgery" faced by the prostitutes used, "posing for pornographic photographs must have seemed like a lucky break." (The gastric gurgle of this logic is not dissimilar to Araki's.)

And then, the information that upended my head: "[A] small number of the models were mental patients with little or no knowledge of what they were doing."

Mental patients? Mark Rotenberg is considered arty, intellectual even, because he finds his thrills not in today's "boring" and "pumped up … silicone" blue-screen queens, but in pornographic depictions of deceased mental patients. Are these abuses acceptable because the victims in question are dead? And what philosophy are we endorsing when we consider such things "curious" or in any way associate them with our pleasures?

The book is deformed by heartrending images. On page 28, a prostitute dressed as a maid straddles a man, her expression transparently broken. On page 115, a girl whose face is that of Echo in John William Waterhouse's Echo and Narcissus, stares nowhere as she is sodomized by one man and suckled by another, disengaged. On page 374, scarred old women mechanically perform acts of indignity so powerful it is impossible not to react. These were daughters, sisters, mothers. They had names, feelings, experiences.

Pornography ensures that such women will always be effaced.

All defamation specialists know that the worst thing that can be done to a woman in social terms is to cast a slur upon her sexual character. The Australian politicians Peter Costello and Tony Abbott are familiar with this truth. But what does this say about our perspective of women in pornographic material?

Pornography depicts women as little more than docile ruminants, as any one of a group of mindless, four-footed cud-chewing mammals. The relationship between pornography and contempt is more than intimate; it is interdependent.

Unlike sex, pornography trades in death. Organized crime and the most brutal of drug cartels are subsidized by pornography and prostitution, as are coercion, degradation, exploitation, and murder. Each time we yoke sexual pleasure to porn, we must accept responsibility, however indirectly, for those acts. And "artists" such as Araki and Stuart contribute to this lessening of our character by blurring distinctions.

It is said that Julius Streicher's crime was greater than those of his peers because he poisoned the minds of the young. Today's pornographers have perverted the sexual impulses of three generations. Streicher exploited the humiliation of Germans by providing them with scapegoats they could comfortably humiliate in turn; our men find equal satisfaction in demeaning women, if in the easy guise of "fantasy": few men acknowledge the anger at the heart of every pornographic exchange.

Sentenced to death at Nuremberg on October 16, 1946, Julius Streicher walked up to the scaffolding, spat at his executioner, and then was hanged.

© Antonella Gambotto 2004

AUTOGRAPHED COPIES AVAILABLE THROUGH THIS SITE
(for more info, click authors/books links below)

· ORDER ANTONELLA'S BOOKS
- The Eclipse
- The Pure Weight of the Heart