As of yesterday, U.K.-produced pornography will be subject to significant censorship, thanks to the enactment of the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014. It's an amendment to the 2003 Communications Act that bans a new and lengthy list of sex acts from Video on Demand (VoD) porn — purportedly to protect innocent children who might stumble across inappropriate material.
This inappropriate material now includes: spanking, caning, "aggressive whipping," penetration by any object "associated with violence," physical or verbal abuse (it doesn't matter if it's consensual), urolagnia ("water sports"), female ejaculation, strangulation, facesitting, and fisting. (Because, we all know there is no greater danger to society than inserting one's fist into another person's bodily orifice.)
Will someone please explain to us why female ejaculation is now banned but male ejaculation is not? The message: Women's enjoyment of sex is obscene, but men's enjoyment of sex is natural, par for the course. The ban on BDSM-related sex acts, meanwhile, implies that those who enjoy watching or doing them — whether or not they are safely and consensually performed — are perverse. The thing is, ban or no ban, BDSM imagery will continue to be accessible to minors online, through channels other than British VoD streaming porn. There have got to be better ways to ensure that children become adults who value consent than by preventing consenting adults from expressing certain modes of sexuality.
This new legislation is more than sex-negative: It opens the door to future, more expansive content bans — what British journalist Laurie Penny has referred to in the past as "the mission creep of Internet censorship." "In the name of protecting children from a rotten tide of raunchy videos," she wrote about prior attempts by the U.K. to limit online access to porn, "a terrifying precedent is being set for state control of the digital commons." What's creepy here, then, is not the sex acts the British government seeks to censor, but that censorship itself.