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Chill: Nobody Has Banned Spanking Porn
I suppose, people won’t stop sending me panicky email with the BBC’s news story about the supposed ban on extreme porn in the UK until I express my sheer terror at having to close this site down and remove myself to a convent.
OK. Take a deep breath, and let’s have a talk about this.
Reader: OMG! There’s a new law banning kinky porn!
Adele: No, there is no new law. Don’t listen to the BBC, they are idiots. The only thing that changed is that the Home Office published the government’s official summary of responses to its consultation paper on the subject, and agreed to legislate further. The Home Office doesn’t issue laws, you know. That thing called Parliament? That’s who issues laws.
Reader: OMG! But there’ll be a new law eventually!
Adele: Possibly. Personally, I doubt that this legislation has half a leg to stand on, but let’s assume the worst. Let’s assume it’ll materialise at some point.
Reader: OMG! I’d better get rid of all my spanking movies!!!! They’re about to become illegal!
Adele: I doubt it. Don’t trust the reports on this, read the actual source. (That’s right, don’t trust my word – check the damn paper. Its URL moves about, but it’s readily linked to from the Home Office site.) According to that, the three things you won’t be allowed to have pictures of are:
- Fucking animals
- Fucking corpses
- Acts that appear to be life threatening, or are likely to result in a serious disabling injury.
Unless you tried to administer a spanking with the sharp edge of an axe, I doubt any spanko’s collection contains anything that comes close to that threshold.
Reader: Oh, that’s OK then. If spanking’s not in danger, I don’t mind the future law so much.
Adele: You and I may be OK, but the ban is still a stupid idea. What about our neighbours in the BDSM community? Some of what they might like to film – with full consent of the actors, with safety precautions in place – may still look like a realistic threat of an injury. Ever heard of breath play? How about mock crucifictions? Needle play? Trampling? All of these can end in a serious injury if you don’t know how to go about it.
Reader: Ewww. No way any of that stuff should be allowed to be filmed. Spanking is so innocent, but that? That’s extreme porn! Ban it!
Adele: Oh, yes? Well, let’s put it like this. Bear in mind it will be up for a jury to decide whether any materials found on your computer answer the definition of extreme pornography. Do you think you’ll keep your job if you get prosecuted for possession of it – even if the jury has a think about it and acquits you in the end? You’ll still be known as a filthy pervert, if not perverted enough to be locked up.
Reader: So you think it’ll be better to delete my spanking porn anyway, just in case?
Adele: No. Instead, try to make sure you don’t have to worry about arbitrary prosecutions and badly defined laws. Haul your butt to the Backlash Campaign site; it’s as good a place to start as any.
Now stop panicking and repeat after me: “I will not trust journalists on legal issues. I will read original sources. I will not run around and cry that the sky is falling without checking it’s actually cracked.”
Here’s an idea for a groovy porn flick: a steamy affair between an undead vampire and a werewolf in his animal form, wherein the have a lot of sex while being repeatedly shot at by an anti-vamp-wolf squad.
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23 Responses to “Chill: Nobody Has Banned Spanking Porn”
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Amen, sistah! The voice of reason. Yes, I’ve been having a hard time too with the alternating mob scare and “Oh, THAT stuff – yes, it’s sick – ban it!” The typical intolerance of people who ought to know more than any how icky intolerance is. *sigh* If you don’t mind I’d like to copy this post on my Yahoo group. I think the wisdom needs spreading.
Oh, and that vamp-werewolf flick? Can I be in that? ;-)
Thanks for the common sense Adele, every one of use should be supporting the Backlash Campaign, and read reliable sources not newspapers.
Thanks again Adele,
Paul.
Niki – sure, copy away. :) And what role would you like to be cast for – the walking corpse, the beast or the chick with a gun? :-P
Paul – cheers, happy to oblige!
I wish I could share your optimism, Adele – but I can’t.
You weren’t in this country in the late eighties, during the “Spanner” trials, when SM first came to the public eye and sixteen men were pilloried in the media even before being persecuted in court… You weren’t here in the mid-nineties, either, when the London fetish clubs were being raided every week or two and the organisers done for various trumped up “disorderly house” charges… And you may not realise how far certain segments of the police forces (urged on by the ever-vocal religious right wing) will go to make life miserable for anyone with sexual tastes a little out of the ordinary.
You might like to look at this blog entry (link courtesy of The Melon Farmers) to gain an idea of the general sense of smug satisfaction exhibited by the police after the media circus that was “Operation Ore” – and how little they care that innocent people were harmed. Of course, the comments that follow, from some of those people, are even more telling:
http://www.anotherconstable.co.uk/blog/2006/04/operation-ore/
One final thought – the laws that resulted in the “Spanner” men receiving prison sentences of up to four and a half years are still very much on the books, and there has never been any indication that the mood of the police or the judiciary has changed since then. The pictures you post of your beautiful bottom, so beautifully marked, are more than suficient to have Abel arrested for ABH should Mr Plod wish to do so, and your claims of consent would be deemed completely irrelevant.
http://www.spannertrust.org/documents/spannerhistory.asp
My friend Avedon Carol from Feminists Against Censorship (experts in the field if any are!), is very concerned about these proposals, and I’m inclined to trust her judgement, too…
I think you missed a point here.
Any investigations under this proposed law will be carried out in a similar manner to Operation Ore. This will mean the credit card details will be obtained and computer records will be examined. The police will then ( based on that suspiscion) have the right to enter your home, remove and take apart and examine your computer.
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller
Dominic and MsDemmie, have you read the last part of my post? The part that says that the proposed legislation is obnoxios and must be opposed?
Oh, I read it, yes, but that was only a couple of lines in a long post, and I was reacting to the overal tone – which felt very much like someone sticking their hand in the sand. That’s your choice, of course, but the general impresion you’re giving is that everyone else can safely stick their heads in the sand as well, and that’s a dangerous message.
As well as all the other things I accused you of underestimating, I don’t think you realise exactly how much influence the Home Office actually has when it comes to drafting and enacting laws. As someone who has spent the last year campaigining against the ban on replica guns included in the so-called “Violent Crime Reduction Bill” it is clear that to all intents and purposes what the HO says, goes. The VCRB is passing pretty much unchanged, in spite of concerted efforts against it and a clear lack of support from expert consultants, and I predict that exactly the same thing will happen with the extreme porn law.
The police are also extremely liberal in their interpretation of laws like these once they are on the statute books – it won’t matter that your pictures of being spanked, for example, are not really violent porn under the terms of the act – as MsDemmie says, they will feel quite justified in seizing your computers for a good poke around, and from that point on it doesn’t really matter if you are ever formally charged or not – the effects on the people processed by Operation Ore were chilling enough that 34 of them comitted suicide before ever getting to trial…
Take a look here, if you’re not convinced – this policeman has already taken it upon himself to extend the terms of the proposed law to cover simulated rape, thus arbitrarily criminalising another fantasy element:
http://www.melonfarmers.co.uk/gch.htm#Be_Afraid…Be_Very_Afraid
Why are you spending so many words trying to convince me in a point I’m supporting in the first place? *After* I pointed out I was supporting it?
Yes I did read your post ……..
The overall emphasis in content is *dont panic* – nothing to worry about here – let me reassure you ( approx 90% of your post) including the lines “Unless you tried to administer a spanking with the sharp edge of an axe, I doubt any spanko’s collection contains anything that comes close to that threshold.”
Followed by a 5% on do something about it and 5% FLuff .
Nowhere in your original post do you mention that “the proposed legislation is obnoxios and must be opposed”
Ahem… where I tell people that just because the proposed legislation isn’t aimed at spankos, it doesn’t mean they should relax? And to support Backlash campaign, instead of sitting on their arses and worrying about badly drafted legislation?
The overall post is addressed at people who kept writing to tell me that spanking content was banned henceforth (as the first BBC report was implying). Which really isn’t the right thing to worry about.
Forget it, MsDemmie. You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it pay attention if it doesn’t choose to. As Adele suggests, I suspect our time is better spent elsewhere.
Quite. Trying to convince me I disagree with you, so that you can set me straight, is really counterproductive.
You’re absolutely right to mistrust press reports that confuse “proposed ban” with “ban”.
Unfortunately, I do suspect that Dominic is right and that, for all our efforts, that difference is already getting razor-thin. We don’t plan to stop campaigning against it, and we hope everyone will join us in writing to newspapers and MPs to protest this nonsense, but it doesn’t seem that anyone is prepared to pay attention to the multiple objections that have already been lodged.
Sure, Avedon. I’m sure Dominic is right. (Though for some reason he doesn’t believe me.)
The campaign has made *some* difference, though, if you compare the initial proposal and its ridiculous GBH test with the climbdown that’s the current list of offences. Now we only have to convince the government to scrap the whole thing altogether.
Given that I’m not a citizen of the UK nor do I live there, forgive me for stepping into this discussion. It is something I have an opinion on. Besides, I’d *like* to live in the UK someday.
My reading of Adele’s original entry was basically “don’t panic,” but I think that’s a good thing. IMO, not panicing is itself a positive reaction in this climate. The reason I think that is that legislation like that passed in the UK and some interpritations of US laws on pornography can cause what I think of as a panic and purge reaction in some people, a self censorship that’s (for me anyway) far worse because of being so insidious than anything that the government might actually be doing.
I’ve got a rather lengthy example of that relative to child spanking stories / discussion which came up when my husband decided to take on the hosting of the usenet group soc.sexuality.spanking at the same time a number of people expressed concerns about group content being read as kiddie porn by the UK and US authorities. In reaction to that, there was originally a plan to ban a genre of child spanking stories from the group’s annual writing contest. This is not because of anything that had happened in the US, just the potential that it could.
In the end, it didn’t happen, the story contest continued without any content limits (as it has for the last 12 years). But what I realized was that choosing to censor ourselves not because we thing we’re doing anything wrong but because of how the government *might* react is a frightening example of self-imposed fascism.
Mija, it’s not “self-imposed fascism”, it’s legitimate concern that you could have your life ruined – and you could – by cops who go overboard in interpreting the law.
I look at legislation like this and I remember that the child porn laws have been misused to silence political critics of certain powerful corporations. People have had their homes raided and perfectly legal material seized because some cop managed to reinterpret the content as “child porn”. And they’ve been prosecuted for it.
Just imagine how many R-rated videos could suddenly be seen as “pornography” under laws like this. And even if a jury disagrees in the end, that’ll be after the victims’ lives have been destroyed.
I don’t think it’s foolish to worry about the effect of laws like this. What I do think is foolish is to treat it all like it’s a done deal now when there is still a possibility of preventing this legislation from being passed.
whoa fuck. i disappere for the weekend to watch the fireworks and this is what happens. god i cant leave you lot alone for a second :P
i think thats my whole collection under threat pretty much. fuck. why cant they bloody well stop these conflicts in the middle east instead of fucking with our home/personal lives.
right!
*in important voice that means action*
“To the anti law site!!!!!”
ok unfortunately, the only ways i could help are by lobbying my mp. Whos not going to do anything that i tell him. or by giving them money…! :| *sighs*
oh well. i’ll just inform people of the situation. and they’ll helpwork something out.
im not even sure if this will occur in scotland too? anyone have any idea?
You write well, Adele.
Informed, well considered and compassionate reactions to the proposed legislation are hard to come by.
Thinker first, writer second and spanking model third?
LondonDave
Mija – That’s a great example of “the sky is falling” reaction, and exactly the reason people should go directly to sources of legal information, instead of cooking in pot of guesses that is the forum circuit.
Avedon – there’s a fine line between “worry” and “run around in a blind panic”. Informed worrying is, IMO, a good and useful thing, inasmuch as it can be channeled into changing things.
Nick – the law is intended to cover Scotland too, yes. And if the only thing you do is to link people to Backlash, that’s a fine way to show your support, too.
LondonDave – Cheers. :) Glad to entertain.
Finally, someone to poo on the uproar! I guess you won’t be removing yourself to the convent afterall. Why don’t we start a spanking commune instead…on a deserted island. We’ll set up a government that only allows spanking and then we won’t have to worry about anymore uproar?
I wouldn’t count on that, Ruby Redd. Just check out the squabbles that occur on British Spanking Forum. There are some spankos who follow the One True Way view of kink and are down on anyone whose kink is slightly different. “A pervert is anyone kinkier than I am.” They can be every bit as Fascist as the anti-porn brigade. Whatever happened to YKINMKBYKIOK (Your kink is not my kink, but your kink is OK.)?
Material featuring people shagging corpses is banned? Shit on a stick! How on earth will I ever achieve orgasm again?