There’s a ton of excellent spanking porn coming out of the United Kingdom. And it is now in jeopardy from the latest round of bat-shit crazy UK censorship laws. Pandora from Dreams Of Spanking writes:
Today in the UK, the law changed regarding the sort of content that can be sold online.
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Under the new legislation, UK distributors are no longer allowed to sell content depicting bondage and gags, fisting, public sex, age play, facesitting, urination, female ejaculation, and spanking and caning beyond that deemed “transient and trifling”.
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In one fell swoop, I and most other independent fetish porn producers in the UK have been criminalised. Many spanking producers are already making changes to their sites – including taking free trailers down, moving their base of operations outside the UK, or even taking their site offline entirely.
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As for spanking – well, any image that shows bruising, welts, or marks beyond a slight redness are now restricted. So that’s Dreams of Spanking, my fairtrade, feminist spanking site, well and truly implicated.
Pandora’s post has a lot more detail and links and commentary about the law and some of its ludicrous sexist implications. But what’s going to be the effect on her site and her business? What is she actually going to do? She says:
I’ve had people sending me this information for the last few weeks, asking what I intend to do, and my answer has been the same every time. If you think that this legislation is going to send me running and hiding, you are mistaken. I have no intention of helping the bigots by self-censoring, and I’m certainly not going to pre-emptively shut up shop.
That’s brave, and it’s good news for those of us who like her work. But it’s also risky. Somebody like her will inevitably be charged and become a test case, with life’s work and liberty on the line. Her final paragraph is aimed at those who want to help. If you’re a UK citizen, the best thing is to get politically active on this issue! And if you are not, you can still donate to UK free speech organizations and support fetish pornographers by subscribing to their work. As Pandora puts it:
So what can you do? Well, you can tell your journalist friends about it and get them to write articles about how stupid and harmful this is. You can talk to your mates about it, post about it on social media, and raise the chances that the next time this comes to trial, the jury will think this legislation is a load of rubbish. You can donate to Backlash UK and join the Open Rights Group (of which I am a member), both of whom are campaigning on this issue. You can write to your MP. And you can support your local independent queer and fetish porn producers by buying their porn while you still can.
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