Work is no place for porn – it creates a hostile environment for women

That’s true whether it’s a tabloid splayed on a break room table, or a boss furtively gathering video clips behind his desk: This is not the behaviour of anyone who sees women as co-workers, equals and humans

The definition of harassment is behaviour that creates 'an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment' (Getty)

Before the internet, it was Page 3. Walking into the break room at my supermarket job came with the risk that, while I ate my sandwich, male colleagues across the table from me would be lingering over that day’s offering and appraising her in the impersonal tones they might have used for a stock take. It was worse when I worked in a pub, where the men who drank there would sometimes slap out a nude calendar on the bar and huddle around it, eagerly arbitrating the merits of different nipples and different pouts while I restocked the crisps so I didn’t have to look at them.

Women working the same jobs now might well counter that a few pictures of boobs are nothing compared to what flashes past them on smartphones or computer screens now, in a world where one quick Google can deliver dozens of pages of fisting gifs before breakfast. Or indeed women in any job where there’s an internet connection – which means all jobs, including those in the Palace of Westminster. Including, apparently, those women who were working in the vicinity of Damian Green’s computer, which (according to former Scotland Yard detective Neil Lewis) contained “thousands” of pornographic thumbnails.

How did they get there? As Lewis concedes, there’s no way to definitively say who downloaded all this material, but given the massive volume of it, whoever was responsible must have had extensive access to a computer that was in Green’s office, on Green’s desk, and logged into Green’s account. In fact, there was so much porn that it sounds like this was, in practice, more a porn machine being used for occasional bits of work than a work machine being used for the occasional dip into porn: Sending emails and reading documents happened “in between browsing pornography”, says Lewis.

That’s the first answer to the “so what” brigade – the inevitable apologists who insist that porn is a private matter and, even if it was Green, it’s nobody else’s business what he looks at. But if you’re spending more time thinking about cracking one out than you are just cracking on with work, that’s a problem whatever your job is. At the time the computer was impounded, Green was the opposition immigration spokesperson. If it turns out that one of the politicians responsible for perhaps the most fraught issue in UK politics was filling the wankbank when he should have been thinking about policy, then everyone in Britain has the right to be furious.

The workplace isn’t private. And that’s the other reason why the porn on Green’s computer matters. This issue has resurfaced because the MP is currently subject to a conduct inquiry, following journalist Kate Maltby’s allegation that he made inappropriate advances to her. Porn is not a sidebar when it comes to the culture of sexual harassment: Porn is the culture. It’s the propaganda of male sexual entitlement. If you want to learn to treat women as things to be manhandled, exploited and disposed of when they don’t comply with your desires, porn is where you get that education.

The definition of harassment is behaviour that creates “an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”; and porn is the definition of hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive in its treatment of women. That’s true whether it’s a tabloid splayed on a break room table, or a boss furtively gathering video clips behind his desk: This is not the behaviour of anyone who sees women as co-workers, equals and humans. The tolerance of porn – an industry that not only has its share of alleged abusers, but also eroticises abuse in the product it makes – is troubling enough in private lives. In the workplace, it’s inexcusable.