Legal Victory! For Dreams Of Spanking

This is excellent news: Pandora Blake’s Dreams Of Spanking website, which got shuttered by British censors in 2015, is to reopen soon after Pandora won a solid legal victory.

dreams of spanking photos

Here is Pandora’s press release:

FEMINIST PORN MAKER THRASHES CENSOR

Pandora Blake, award-winning activist and feminist pornographer, has won her appeal to Ofcom against ATVOD and can reinstate her site Dreams of Spanking, which was banned under the AVMS guidelines in August 2015, triggering widespread anger among free speech advocates as well as porn fans.

The controversial Audiovisual Media Services Regulations came into effect in December 2014, banning consensual sex acts from online porn including facesitting, female ejaculation, and spanking that leaves marks. Pandora Blake took part in the ‘facesitting protest’ outside Westminster, and also spoke on Newsnight and Women’s Hour challenging the sexist and regressive nature of the regulations. She believes that speaking out made her a target for censorship.

ATVOD – the Association for TV on Demand – were tasked with regulating online porn in 2010. While porn critics often focus on the ‘mainstream’ industry, ATVOD made a point of targeting independent niche and fetish porn producers, including a disproportionate number of female filmmakers. In January 2016, Ofcom shut down the quango amid rumours that it was acting beyond its remit.

Pandora Blake said, “The point of Dreams of Spanking was to make ethical porn based on my own fantasies. I’m not ashamed of being kinky and there’s no harm in adults sharing consensual BDSM films. The AVMS regulations effectively criminalised my sexuality. I was singled out because I criticised the new laws. ATVOD tried to shut me up, but they failed.”

“Now I’ve won my appeal I feel vindicated. It proves that it’s worth standing up to bullies. The war against intrusive and oppressive state censorship isn’t over, but this decision is a landmark victory for feminist porn, diversity and freedom of expression.”

Pandora said on Twitter that Dreams Of Spanking will reopen for business as soon as she gets things sorted out with her credit card processor: “Hopefully CCBill will reactivate my credit card processing soon & I can re-open the full site again!”

6/10/2016 update: It’s open!

Legal nerds among you will find the official bureaucratic bulletin here containing the details of Pandora’s victory, starting on page 20. It’s dry reading and not particularly recommended. There is a huge amount of celebratory press that’s come out today; Pandora’s twitter feed is probably the easiest place to find all of that.

It took a lot of courage (and, I do not doubt, economic sacrifice) for Pandora to fight this censorship and win. I look forward to the return of the site and especially to fresh production when that starts to happen again.

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June 6th, 2016 | No Comments »

Dreams Of Spanking: Enjoy It While You Can

Pandora Blake has made no secret of the fact that her Dreams Of Spanking website (which we have greatly enjoyed here at Spanking Blog) has been under serious regulatory threat since that ridiculous-but-terrifying censorious regulatory regime went into effect last year in Great Britain. (From this great distance, my murky impression is that a fading agency primarily responsible for regulating the adult content of DVDs — which have long been heavily censored in Britain — has made a successful grab for power, relevance, and funding, by the expedient of saying “adult websites are like old-fashioned video-on-demand services, which we also regulate because they used to just play DVDs over the cable TV network, so we ought to be able to regulate websites too!”)

Regulatory officialdom in Great Britain turns out to be impossibly hostile to BDSM and kinky stuff, the more so if it involves women in any role other than the traditionally-submissive. Thus it has been clear from the start that this is an existential threat to sites like Dreams Of Spanking. Pandora has legal representation and the courage to speak out, be activist, and keep doing what she’s doing, but there’s a lot of legal and financial peril involved. As an outspoken activist, it was probably inevitable that she would clash with regulatory authorities sooner rather than later, and indeed that day has come:

If you like Dreams Of Spanking, go read her post. Many people are rooting for her, and we can wish for a triumphant outcome, but that’s by no means a sure thing. As Pandora says (and I do not think she’s being either melodramatic or self-serving here):

If you haven’t yet joined the site, do it now, while you still can – time is running out, and legal fees are expensive.

Verbum sapienti satis.

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April 16th, 2015 | 3 Comments »