Not that we don’t have our own problems looming here in the United States when it comes to worrying about official hostility to online pornography, but this blog post by Pandora Blake explains in the bleakest imaginable terms how all but the most uncontroversial and bland corporate porn is in the process of being legislated off the internet in the United Kingdom. Pandora recently fought a protracted and successful legal battle for the right to sell her progressive and ethical spanking porn online in the UK, but her site was offline during that battle and so her victory was necessarily something of a Pyrrhic one. And now her site is once again under threat (along with pretty much every other porn site in the UK from the sound of things) from a proposed new law that imposes economically-ridiculous age verification requirements on porn websites while simultaneously just flatly banning from the internet a great deal of kinkier porn:
The Digital Economy Bill is currently going through Parliament, and has just come to the end of its committee stage. The section of the Bill introducing compulsory age verification for all adult sites accessible from the UK will have a serious impact on Dreams of Spanking, and on many other adult websites.
Complying with this legislation will be difficult, if not impossible. First of all, I’ll have to overhaul the whole site structure of Dreams of Spanking. Any content that would be classified as “18” or higher will be illegal to publish publicly, on the open internet. So video, images and audio that contain any nudity, bums or spanking will need to go behind intrusive, privacy-violating age checks.
To prove you’re over 18, you’ll have to type in sensitive personal details such as your legal name, credit card details, date of birth, address or phone number. That data will be visible not to me, but to whatever age verification system I install – private companies that are free to operate unregulated, and without having to safeguard the security and privacy of your personal data.
Not only is this terrible for you, it’s terrible for me. Every age check will cost me money – estimates range from £0.05 to £1.50 per check. Dreams of Spanking currently receives over two thousand visitors a day (under half the traffic we had before ATVOD forced us offline), so the cost of checking the age of every site visitor would add up to significantly more than the site’s total revenue – and that’s before we take into account existing costs such as production, paying my team members, and bandwidth. In other words, complying with the age verification law will immediately put the site out of business.
Even if I can somehow persuade enough of those two thousand visitors to buy memberships that I can afford to verify all their ages, the site will never be the same. This law will mean no more public previews. No free trailers, no preview images, no free hosted galleries, no birthday spanking giveaways, no Creative Commons projects and no charity caning films. No more getting around CCBill’s content restrictions by giving material away.
No more transparency, and no more free porn.
As bad as that sounds, we haven’t even gotten to the worst part. The new UK law proposes to outright prohibit whole swathes of BDSM and fetish porn:
Even if I somehow manage to fully comply with the legislation: hide everything spanking-themed on the site behind age checks; find the money to check the ID of every non-paying visitor who wants to browse my free previews; survive the loss of traffic and Googleability – even if I can stomach the disappearing of this blog, the behind the scenes videos, the performer interviews, and the discourse about ethics and consent – the site still can’t survive, because every scene that was criminalised by the AVMS regulations will be recriminalised by the Digital Economy Bill.
ATVOD found us in breach because they ruled that some of our videos depict corporal punishment that leaves ‘lasting’ marks. We won our appeal on the basis that the principle purpose of the site is not commercial, and it is not in competition with mainstream broadcast media. That victory won us an exemption to the AVMS Regulations 2014. But the AVMS didn’t invent the rules around what content is banned; it drew them from existing classification guidelines used by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) for films and TV.
The guidelines prohibit any depiction of pain play that leaves marks on the body beyond those deemed “transient and trifling” from classification even as R18, the highest classification category in the UK. Basically, under the current rules you can’t show any act which would constitute assault or actual bodily harm, or any act which would risk injury to the viewer if it were imitated. So no caning, no belting, no welts, no bruises – and that’s before we get into the bans on things like facesitting, breath play, fisting, squirting, watersports and “full” bondage, defined as the restraint of all four limbs plus a gag.
The AVMS regulations were the first instrument of UK law to apply those classification guidelines to material published on the internet. We’ve enjoyed a heady few months of official exemption from them: but now the Digital Economy Bill uses those same guidelines to control what can and can’t be published online. If the Bill is passed it will be illegal to publish any ‘prohibited content’ even behind age checks. Let that sink in: even age-verified, consenting adults who have handed over their real names and addresses to prove their age won’t be allowed to look at spanking videos that show marks.
Pandora is an award-winning community-supported activist as well as a pornographer, and she isn’t giving up. No law is a sure thing before it’s final; things might go differently and better in the UK than Pandora and her lawyers currently expect. We may certainly hope so, but my point, in any case, is a larger one: the relative freedom pornographers have enjoyed to publish internet porn in the 21st century is more fragile than you probably imagined. When British porn goes dark and Great Britain vanishes from the kinky internet, we in the rest of the world may barely notice; it’s not like we don’t have our own fetish porn resources. The lesson, though, is clear. Laws and policies change, not always for the better. If we value the work of independent pornographers here in the United States (as I, for one, do), we’ve got to have their backs.
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