How did you spend your Saturday night? Me first - I was at a film festival and just happened to see a short of a a drag queen being fisted, with margarine used as lube. I also saw a woman being whipped into candy-cane red and white stripes by a hairy-armpitted dominatrix with facial piercings, a little cartoon on what it’s like to date a stripper and an elderly German man who gets his boyfriend to put him in nappies which he then soils.
But all of this porn, and so much more, could be banned under British law. This week, it emerged that the Digital Economy Bill, which mainly concerns restricting under 18s from accessing porn, has a clause banning any porn act that wouldn’t be certified by the British Board of Film Classification [BBFC]. The result? Well, if you’ve seen an 18-rated film and you’ve seen actual porn, you’d know there’s a gaping difference.
‘Spanking, whipping or caning that leaves marks, and sex acts involving urination, female ejaculation or menstruation as well as sex in public’ are all things that could, according to The Guardian, fall foul of the law, as the BBFC won’t allow them. However, all those acts, bar sex in public, are totally legal to do between consenting adults over 16.
Of course MPs might prefer not to yay or nay each detailed sex act one by one - here are people who can’t even say tampon out loud, and remember the humiliation Crispin Blunt got for mentioning bum-widening poppers in Parliament? But by borrowing the BBFC’s classifications, all the Government is facilitating is a ban on the truly subversive stuff that chips away at the monotonous porn that we’ve grown sadly used to.
Because unless you really go out of your way and actually - shock! - pay for porn, the material available online, for free, fits a distinct formula: a buff man, a skinny girl, a blowjob, a bit of doggy, a close up of a huge penis shoving into a shaved vulva, maybe some anal, then a cumshot on the girl’s face, hair, tits. Gay porn isn’t hugely different - it’s two buff men, a blowjob, anal, a cumshot. And ‘lesbian’ porn - well, it’s just straight porn with another woman to hand. Minorities are reduced to their worst stereotypes - horny black people, submissive east Asian women, desperate disabled people. With this routine, by-numbers approach to porn, comes (sorry) a by-numbers approach to wanking, and a by-numbers approach to sex.
A study from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, titled Anal heterosex among young people and implications for health promotion found that anal sex between straight couples ‘often appears to be painful, risky and coercive, particularly for women. Interviewees frequently cited pornography as the “explanation” for anal sex’.
This study was provided to the consultation on the Digital Economy Bill, and so it should have been. A lot of young people - girls and boys - feel pressure to not only have sex, but have certain kinds of sex ahead without discussing why. Sure, some people love anal sex, and some like having gloops of come on their face. But just as there’s so much more to sex than porn, there should be so much more to porn than this.
A proper reform of porn access rules could see bans on, say, porn which centres on unwilling participants, like necro-porn, revenge porn, voyeurism and depictions of coercion and rape. Some porn enthusiasts would complain, sure, but it’s not as if porn’s the only place you can can learn about these things, is it? What porn can be, though, to people with enough patience to search, is the only place to discover the oodles of kinky ways it’s legal to find pleasure. The proposed rules to remove, say, period sex and female ejaculation only send the message that some stuff is normal, but this other stuff, especially the stuff that comes out of women’s vaginas, sometimes by accident? Not so much.
It’s hard to legislate for pleasure, but maybe the government could give it a try, instead of simply fluffing up the pillows of ‘normal’ porn. Because while I didn’t get turned on by the drag queen being fisted, while zoning out, eyes glazed on a marigold-ed wrist slip in and out of a very accommodating rear end, I got to thinking: he sure likes it.
And that’s what was so drastically weird about this porn: not the specific kinks, but the satisfaction the actors had. Like a gigantic leather-trussed elephant in the room, with an erection longer than its own trunk, pleasure had a starring role. If the government put pleasure - the number one reason most sex happens - at the front of their rules, instead of old-school faffing about what or what isn’t proper, we could begin to have a much smarter debate. Like, why didn’t that drag queen just use coconut oil?
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Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
UPDATED 2nd DECEMBER : The BBFC have been in touch to clarify that they refuse to classify 'pornographic works that: depict and encourage rape, including gang rape; depict non-consensual violent abuse against women, promote an interest in incestuous behaviour, promote an interest in sex with children and bestiality. The Digital Economy Bill defines this type of unclassifiable material as "prohibited"'. They also told us that scenes 'involving urolagnia' would likely be cut as this means an attraction or excitement towards urination.
*No word on period porn, though, or the obstinate routine man-doing-sex-to-woman porn we always see, and it looks as if male ejaculation still makes the cut! *
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.