UK BANS INTERESTING THINGS THAT CLEARLY DISCRIMINATE AGAINST PEOPLE WITH VAGINAS
AMBER LOVE 02-DEC-2014 First, I will clearly state that I am not a lawyer nor British. I’m not going to interpret this news but rather share what came to my attention last night. I was startled by things I was seeing in the @whorephobia Twitter timeline. I urge all sex-positive people to follow that feed. It’s a team of people in the sex work industries that manage the account. The British Board of Film Classification redefined what falls under the R18 rating.
Basically, the agency that makes these laws are saying it’s for the safety for everyone and protection of children with complete disregard for consent and sexual preferences/needs. You might see rules like how you can’t have all limbs bound and shown on film or bound with also mouth gagged to prevent a safe word/consent withdrawl and think this new R18 list only applies to those in the BDSM community. You’d be wrong. Seriously wrong.
Also worth a little note that this does not apply to video games. This agency can consider games but is not the same as the games rating board.
SOURCES/MISINFORMATION
I’ve seen a lot of popular news sites like The Guardian, Bustle and The Independent report a specific list of what’s banned (facesitting, strangulation, caning, female ejaculation) that I think they are copying and pasting from one source.
The article I read on a blog last night gave a different picture about things like female ejaculation. The post on ObscenityLawyer indicates that female ejaculation is “allowed” but can’t be seen going onto another person and can’t be seen being licked/ingested or on another person. They have it as part of urinating which pretty much shows that the people who wrote this law don’t know how the female orgasm works. No surprise there. Legislators in the United States aren’t any smarter.
You can’t put female ejaculate into or onto another body but male semen — A-OKAY!
The Fisting rule is another interesting ban since the law allows a certain amount of urethral “sounding (wiki)” – which I only knew of because of the Sex Nerd Sandra Podcast. Sounding is defined as specifically inserting things into the urethra of a penis. That’s allowed. But how far a human hand goes into a vagina needs to have enforceable rules even though an entire baby can come out of one. Fisting is applicable to the vagina or rectum.
Watersports and Squirting
Peeing and squirting are acceptable if not performed onto another person and/or then consumed. Squirting during sex or masturbation is acceptable if fairly brie, isolated and not deliberately consumed or put onto a body. It would be acceptable to imply that it was licked up if could be deemed as to be simulated.Fisting
Fisting is not acceptable. Penetration with all five digits beyond last knuckle is not acceptable; but all five digits of two or more hands would be acceptable as long as not past last knuckle. Ofcom have sought medical guidance on fisting and don’t believe it to be a dangerous act to perform. However, as the CPS’ Guidelines specifically cite fisting as obscene the BBFC can’t pass fisting for classification. The BBFC acknowledge that they are well aware of the decision in R v Peacock but are obliged to have regard to CPS’ OPA Guidelines.http://obscenitylawyer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-following-content-is-not-acceptable.html
These new rules of the UK porn industry are specific to WHAT IS SEEN ON CAMERA not what you can or cannot do in your own home. I’m NOT certain if that includes people you exchange photos/vines on things like Skype and SnapChat if you are bartering or charging for that. You can go to the BBFC website and see the .PDF file spelling out their guidelines.
The new Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 requires that video-on-demand online porn (porn you pay for) complies with the same British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) guidelines for DVDs you can buy in sex shops.
This means only R18 content that won’t incite hatred or “impair†children is allowed. (news.com.au)
BBFC CLAIMS SEXUAL ORIENTATION IS NOT A FACTOR – YEAH, RIGHT.
What is particularly of interest is how discriminatory these bans are. They take acts that are natural for women, like squirting, and come close to criminalizing them – you can squirt on camera but no one can be seen ingesting the fluid; of course oral sex on a penis is totally fine including getting it all over the partner, in the mouth and swallowing! It’s so male-centric, most especially heterosexual male centric despite what they claim in their paragraph about the rules being applied across the board. Fisting is something not foreign to the gay community nor those into kink. It’s not “bad” there like it is to the heteronormative world.
CONSENT
Here’s the part about CONSENT which is causing me to question nearly every Hollywood “damsel in distress” trope. Okay, Hollywood is American so I have no idea what it would mean to American films shown over there. However, how many times do female characters (and on occasion male ones) go through threats of rape and actual rape? It’s a lot. It’s a real world threat so it is often used in fiction. The way this reads, it’s like you would only be able to see those films in specified theatres and only purchase the DVDs from sex shops.
Below is a bunch of the tweets that only begin to tap the surface of things that have changed. It’s the reactionary tweets of sex workers.
What you see here is that the female-dominated world of webcamming is being hit hard by this. Women have taken such ownership of the porn industry since the late 1990’s when porn stars immediately recognized the potential of the internet as a money making platform. When I was teaching myself HTML from a book, I saw a documentary about Dani’s Harddrive. A bleached blonde porn star with giant fingernails that taught herself how to build a website because she took control of her business, her body, her source of income and made it a huge success. This kind of legislation is specifically going to hurt women who choose porn as income.