New legislation means UK-produced porn is now banned from showing certain acts. The new rules place online paid-for porn under the censorship of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) alongside other DVDs. The full list of banned acts includes spanking, caning, aggressive whipping, penetration by any object “associated with violence”, female ejaculation, strangulation, face-sitting and fisting. 

AYE – Rowena Bermingham

I have to applaud the UK government for dealing with the biggest current threat to Britain; not the Ebola epidemic or the rise of ISIS, but the risk that an adult might pay for pornography and witness female ejaculation. It is wonderful to live in a nation where the nanny state can tell us what is sexually acceptable, and Nanny has decided that expressions of female pleasure and BDSM are wrong. To some people, this legislation may seem like the first step in stopping the objectification of women, but it is actually the first step in restricting sexual freedom and repressing any sexuality that is not heteronormative and cis-male. When authorities legislate sexual freedom, they start by prohibiting acts that they do not understand. White heterosexual middle-aged men dominate government; this new legislation seems to prohibit anything outside of their personal sexuality. This means that these kinds of laws are always to the benefit of normative sexuality and to the detriment of all others.

In a time when women have purchased more than 60 million copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, the government has decided that certain BDSM acts (spanking, caning, physical restraint) are no longer appropriate. Is this a coincidence, or is it a reactionary move by horrified conservatives to the sexual liberation of British women? Firstly, women being restrained or spanked may appear to play into wider issues regarding male-female power relations, but the sales figures for Fifty Shades alone show that many women enjoy the idea of such role-play, and to label it as unpalatable demonises this aspect of female sexuality, effectively shaming women for having desires outside ‘normative’ sexuality. Moreover, although Fifty Shades deals with female submission, pornography can show any combination of gender and power. One of the most troubling facets of pornography for feminist theorists like Andrea Dworkin is that men traditionally hold all the physical and sexual power. However, there are forms of pornography that fight back against this imbalance by putting women in control of both their own and their partner’s bodies, including scenes with face-sitting and certain types of BDSM pornography. Limiting BDSM acts prevents the production of films with female dominants and pushes women back into a classically sexually passive role in pornography. It seems absurd that a woman can no longer be depicted caning a man, but she can shown being ejaculated on by numerous males or being simultaneously penetrated by multiple partners.

Amongst the diverse list of banned acts in the new legislation is female ejaculation. This probably made the list because it has been misidentified as urination during sex, which is now also banned (the only British water sports you will be seeing from now on are at regattas). This is because female ejaculation is still not entirely understood, despite decades of research (Alfred Kinsey described female “genital secretions” that “eject […] with some force” in 1953). So instead of attempting to understand female ejaculation, the government has ‘othered’ it. Now ejaculation is a solely male act. If the aim of this legislation was to assist gender equality, then this rather seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. This new legislation tries to draw a line in the sand for sexual liberation based on what are perceived as current societal values. But if the government regulates based on what it considers sexually normative, then we are no more advanced as a society than when homosexuality was illegal or when the gender on your birth certificate was unalterable. Some of the acts banned also appear to unfairly target same-sex pornography, with fisting (more frequent in gay porn) and face-sitting (more common in lesbian porn) no longer permissible.

Porn should not be entirely unregulated, but the 2008 legislation on its extreme forms successfully prevented porn from showing harmful or illegal acts (like necrophilia and zoophilia). These new rules do not improve previous legislation and are impossible to enforce. Could David Cameron clarify exactly what constitutes “gentle spanking” or “non-aggressive whipping”? It is also not prohibited to access the newly banned material, it is just illegal for British filmmakers to create it, meaning the only real impact will be on the profitability of the British porn industry. People will turn to international videos or, more troublingly, will be driven underground so that certain material many end up on websites alongside content that is genuinely worrisome (like snuff porn, revenge porn or child abuse).

These new rules have been put forward as a means to protect children who might discover internet pornography. But there are better ways to achieve this. We need to encourage frank discussions about the importance of consent, perhaps insisting that porn starts with explicit consent and a discussion of the sexual boundaries of the participants. Porn is, unfortunately, how many young people first learn about sex, and it could be a force for good if regulations were sensible and non-judgemental. Although some assert that pornography promotes the objectification and commodification of women, it merely reflects what is ubiquitous in general media where women are frequently used as mere decoration. Censoring pornography does not reduce female objectification, and nor is it a step towards gender equality. Instead, this new legislation promotes a proscriptive normative sexuality that serves to oppress all others, including many aspects of female sexuality.

NAY – Emma Jane Harris

Pornography is not about people, not even acts or practises, but about ideas. Women – or indeed all pornographic participants – voice a script in their sexual acts and that script has an ideological basis. The ideals underpinning pornography are two-fold, the first of which is self-evident – profit. As distinct from erotica, it is not what it conveys but why it is conveyed. Porn symbolises the oppression of women. The experience of the viewer of pornography is not simulation but reality – the viewer is as equally participant as the conspicuous performers. And so they participate in the often degrading sex acts which this amendment treats of.

This amendment is not the regulation of expression or the curtailment of any person’s desire. It does not prevent anyone from doing or wanting to do these acts, but it prevents these acts from being assimilated into a medium which homogenises human sexual desire. This is ironic, if pornography isn’t supposed to be about sex. Why does it do this, then? Because sexual desire can be and has been commodified. It is in the market’s best interests that we consume these images – of a woman’s subjugation through ‘fisting', for instance – because these images feed into a pre-existing, misogynistic societal framework. Pornography strives to maintain this framework of inequality in its pursuit of profit.

Porn identifies practises predicated on various axes of power and subservience. It does gender. It doesn’t matter if we speak of porn that is heterosexual, homosexual or otherwise, and the participants of porn do not need to be women in order to be harmed by it. This also counts when we speak of ‘the male gaze’ and ‘the female object’: the gazer does not have to be male and the object does not have to be female; it is about imbalances in power.

An anti-pornographic view does not underestimate individual agency, but a pro-pornographic feminist view does grossly underestimate the power of the state and the often violent political structures that confine women's choices in sex, especially in polarised settings such as in pornographic contexts, and unquestionably shapes the meaning of sex acts. To reiterate, pornography is not about individuals but individuals are harmed through being (unwittingly) drawn into its performance. Almost everyone is unwitting if society – at the behest of the pornography itself – misrepresents the ontology of porn.

It is discursive to focus on the specificity of the acts banned. It is considered (from a feminist perspective) that they were selected based on the pleasure they offer women. This misses the point of the amendment. The legislation doesn’t prevent us from desiring or doing these acts, but prevent the acts from entering a medium which is based on hierarchies of power in sexuality. They may seem to be subverted. Take ‘face-sitting’, the banning of which has irked some feminists most. 'This is about a woman taking control!' they vent. 'This is about them being on top!' they say. But the feminist framework ought to abolish such a hierarchy, rather than divert it.

Christopher Hooton of The Independent wrote, "[...] worryingly, the amendment seems to take issue with acts from which women traditionally derive pleasure." Which of the acts does he refer to, strangulation, caning or fisting? I have never traditionally taken pleasure from being strangled. Not that my sexual tastes should define others’. Are they referring to what women 'in the porn industry' have traditionally taken pleasure from? If so, then why should these tastes be allowed to potentially define others’? Dworkin is convincing when she argues that the acts do not represent tastes but drive and embed them. We cannot take any specific pornographic sex act as normative and/or representative when driven by a medium which is in constant pursuit of the newest, most shocking images. “The fact that as more and more pornographic images become readily available, it takes much more to scratch one's sexual itch,” says Mike South (pornographic actor and director). “And sometimes, that leads to the necessity for extremism.” This can be seen quite clearly in the increasingly popular trend of ‘Rosebudding’- causing anal prolapse through the loosening of the rectal walls (pre-empted by the violent and prolonged insertion of objects into the anus), and then the touching, kissing and fondling of the bloody entrails on camera. This seems to be a desperate and macabre form of attention grabbing in a market already saturated with violent sexual images, and willing to go as far as it can to break an ennui gained through the repetitive viewing of certain sexual acts.

Furthermore, consent, in this space, becomes distorted; if it is in the interests of the market that an individual consents to a certain act, then no ethical and objective evaluation and presentation of the act is made. In any case, is consent  (assuming it could be meaningfully given) enough to grant this medium the right to process arguably violent images and convert them into the mainstream - with ramifications on societal behaviour and perceived norms?

It is naive to argue that we can objectively gauge a participant’s consent and it is impossible to calculate how many people are affected by pornography and in what ways. The least we can do, at present, is to take stock of the material affects of pornography and to protect those embroiled in the market, often those most vulnerable, coerced or otherwise, from participation in sex acts which, most potently when marketed, propound androcentric dogma. As a sad and thoughtful addendum to this debate, consider the element of harm reduction in this amendment’s passing. Whose right is greater – the male gazer’s freedom to view a woman being strangled or the vulnerable female object’s freedom to be protected from a violent sexual act?