Film Censors Don’t Mind Real Sex. How About Spanking?
Scenology — By Adele on 20 September, 2006 11:32 pmTheLondonPaper reported yesterday that British Board of Film Classification has given the movie Shortbus an 18 certificate. Why is that newsworthy? Because the film has scenes of real (that is, unsimulated) sex between two or more people at a time, including gay and lesbian sex, plus scenes of self-fellatio – and an 18 certificate means it’s now legal to show it in the cinema. (In case you don’t know: normal porn, if rated at all, gets rated R18, which means it can get sold in sex shops, and that’s it.)
The movie is, apparently, about the “why modern city folk have such difficulty opening up emotionally”. Obviously, you have to shag a lot to find an answer to that.
So, what does a spanking film have to do to get an 18 certificate, do we think? It has to have a moral conundrum at the centre, I suppose, such as, oh, “why modern city folk have such difficulty opening up emotionally”, except instead of Olympic shagging sessions the main characters (investment bankers or interior designers, all of them) get to dress up as schoolkids and French maids, and bend over for the cane. If people keep their pants on, there’ll be no visible marks, so the censors won’t get too upset.
Seriously, it’s hard to remain emotionally closed up when you’ve just had a good hard walloping.
The best part? (Or rather, the part that the censors will love?) There needn’t be any real sex. Just the caning, and maybe some spanking, and maybe a few rounds with a belt for variety. A few whacks with the tawse, maybe, and some paddling to finish. But no sex. It ought to be easier to rate a movie without any sex than a movie with ten different types of it?
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8 Comments
Well, “Preaching to the Perverted” did have some unsimulated paddling and whipping in it, but nothing severe and there were certainly no marks. I’m pretty shocked by the “Shortbus” rating too, but I think they’ve set a nice precedent that can only help our cause. An interesting bookend to the ongoing debate about extreme porn.
Perhaps what’s really needed is a brigade of charitable sex workers to seduce every one of those uptight censors and MPs and remind them that they do still have blood in their veins. Assuming they do.
Reading here is a real educational experience. self-fellatio? Thanks to Adele and Google, I now know someting I didn’t know 5 mins ago. There really is such a thing. And as I suspected, it takes flexibilty and endowment. As opposed to auto-fellatio, which just takes a car.
Uh-huh. Sex guru, that’s me ;)
I was going to mention Preaching to the Perverted, but its already been done. Youngsters ah?
There is an extended flogging scene towards the end of Shortbus with a guy being hit first over his pants then on his bare bottom – the results being clearly seen. After every couple of blows from the Domme, shots from other scenes are interspersed. This was the version screened in Germany last week. Another film which should already have reached UK screens is Destricted, some of whose segments are much more artistically explicit than Shortbus. Frankly, although I liked the idea of a club ‘somewhere in Brooklyn’ where freedom of sexual expression was encouraged, I felt it fell into that trap that many several sex-film makers do sense of notoriety
R
Something happened…my post submitted before I told it to do.
Frankly, although I liked the idea of a club ’somewhere in Brooklyn’ where freedom of sexual expression was encouraged, I felt the Shortbus fell into that trap that many several sex-film makers do – letting their overblown sense of notoriety overwhelm them to the point where they need to tell us how radical and edgy they think they are, when in fact repeating what you’ve seen a dozen times from different camera angles, becomes pretty boring.
R
Interesting fact – When Preaching to the Perverted was made (by the super duper Stuart Urban!) it was 1997. Almost 10 years ago. The BBFC licensing rules were actually far less stringent than they are today and the then head of the BBFC was far more ameniable to fetish based material (providing a reasonable argument was put forward for it) than the current guy. That being said, they did have to cut some risque scenes from the film to get the certificate. Stuart Urban himself has absolutely no doubt in his mind that if he tried to get certification from the BBFC for P2TP today as it was released in 1997 he would almost certainly be denied. So it seems in classification terms we are moving backwards, not forwards. It will be most interesting to see if I can get classification for my first feature – I’ll keep you posted!
Redhead – Temptation by Notoriety is one of the reasons I’m not terribly keen on seeing all these cinematic revelations. They still end up on my renting list somehow.
Lucy – Definitely keep us posted. I’m dead curious what the BBFC will have to say about your film. I have a hard time imagining you shooting something more risque than the shag-fest that is Shortbus…