Watching all the currents within feminism is very interesting. We can't ignore what's happening; and I would say that in the seventies, we actually led it, says James Ferman. The GLC often showed films that we had refused certificates to. But in the eighties Valerie Wise convinced Ken Livingstone (then leader of the GLC) that he'd been wrong and they withdrew all the certificates they'd ever given. That was two years before the GLC was abolished!

We noticed the number of films, particularly in porn, in which women were forcibly stripped at gunpoint or knifepoint and raped. They were eventually, as they say, screwed into submission, threw their arms around their attacker and thanked him for this glorious liberating experience. Plainly, the message in these films was that when a woman says no she really means yes.

The BBFC decided that the material was depraving and corrupting. It was not a message about rape that ought to be propagated. these films were all for men - so we laid down a policy that we would not accept that message in porn. Serious films make their own rules. I don't think you can have rules about serious films, but you can have rules about a genre like pornography. Ferman pioneered the cinematic release of Ai No Corrida a few years ago and stresses the distinction between quality films and those which are apprehended rather than comprehended. Pornography is a generalising medium, it doesn't exactly promote intellectual messages.

Anyone who has taken a media studies course during the eighties will probably know about the male gaze. For feminist film theorists, it was fundamental to the way Hollywood misrepresented women. Whilst male characters were shot head-and-torso entire frame, the camera would linger on parts of women's bodies for no obvious narrative reason. Pornography was seen as the most extreme example of the way cinema privileged the male gaze at the expense of women.

For feminist theorists like Professor Linda Williams, demonising male voyeuristic pleasure in this way created its own problems. Its moral distinction between 'normal' and 'perverse' subjectivities, she says, is what led some feminists to line up with the anti pornography crusades of the moral right.

She is one of a growing number of 'pro-porn feminists' who claim that the way to challenge the anti women messages in porn is not to 'just say no' to everything sexual. Williams wants to create alternative material which shows women as active sexual agents, given the licence to define 'a desire of one's own'. This not only brings her into confrontation with the vociferous pro-censorship lobby in the US, but also challenges the conventional distinction between soft and hard core pornography.

Linda Williams, in her book Hard Core, contends that pornography is a genre which has changed since the seventies. It often contains a perverse dynamic that undermines notions of phallic supremacy. She concludes that it is in the profusion rather than the censorship of pornographies that resistance can be found to the dominance of the heterosexual, masculine, pornographic imagination.'

Ferman has shared many a pro/anti-censorship debating platform with Williams. A last- minute phone call from him once rescued material from the hands of British customs. He remains unconvinced by her arguments. Linda comes out of an American perspective, he counters, where no matter what you feel, you have to be anti-censorship because censorship has been used by the likes of Senator McCarthy in such intolerable ways. The last thing any American can be is pro censorship...but I'm afraid that men who are potential rapists are turned on by films that reinforce that propensity. Has he seen any of the change which Williams describes? We see an awful lot of porn, we don't see many films with complex characterisation.

In the United States, 40% of mail-order video porn is said to be bought by women and it has a growing popularity amongst middle-class couples. Candida Royalle is an ex-porn star who set up her own film company, Femme Productions, to make pornography which addresses this new market, including the work of 'post-porn, post-feminist performance artist', Annie Sprinkle. For these Ferman has unqualified enthusiasm. The people she's assembled around her are all talented. It looks nice, it's about people, they look at each other, their eyes talk to each other. In most porn you don't get that - in fact you hardly get any faces.

The reason Femme videos, which have won awards from the American Association of Sex Therapists, were not released here turns out to be a uniquely British combination of prudishness and politics. Explicit sex cannot be passed in the '18' category for sale in ordinary video shops. The 'R18' category, which means restricted supply through licensed sex shops was proposed in 1984 by Tory MP Graham Bright. We argued very hard for it as a liberal safety valve, but in the end, the Home Office sided with those who were against it, recalls Ferman. In the Standing Committee, the motion won by a landslide but the Home Office persuaded Bright to accept minor changes in the wording. Instead of simply saying, 'To be supplied only through sex shops', they wanted the legend to read, 'To be supplied only in licensed sex shops', which meant no mail order sales.

There were only about 80 licensed sex shops in England, one in Wales and none in Scotland or Northern Ireland. Although more liberal local authorities do not require sex shops to be licensed, this means they are unable to sell 'R18' material. 'So effectively, what we ended up with was a category which was open only to the chain of shops which had enough clout financially to corner the market and get the few licences that were going. It turned out not to be politically advantageous for councils to grant too many licences because there were no votes in pornography. Most of the pressure on local politicians is part of the NIMBY syndrome.

Pride Video has succeeded in breaking out of this legal triangle and has four explicit safer sex videos on sale in WH Smith. These are health education videos. We have to distinguish between them because the law does so...if something is in the interests of art, science, literature or learning, it has an advantage over something which is just entertainment. Yet Ferman would not be drawn into advocating change. It's not a question of being happy with it, we have to live within the law and that's what the law is.

He claims that almost all videos submitted by gay and lesbian production companies like Pride, Pout, and Dangerous to Know are passed uncut, adding, I think it's a great pity that we haven't got a viable sex shop category. I wish that some gay companies would open some gay sex shops and I wish some women would get together and open a chain of women's sex shops because there is room or sex entertainment for women and gays of a kind which I believe would be legal in a licensed sex shop if we classified them as such, but at the moment they are just not commercially viable.

But is the marketplace to blame for all the anomalies within British censorship? What about the fact that erections cannot be shown, for instance? Not true, claims Ferman. It's police custom and practice that's led us to believe that there's a law against it. The police have a checklist approach where, if there's an erection, they assume it's getting towards being obscene and if there's a penetration shot, it's obscene. If you ask them why penetration is obscene, they have no answer, it's just that in their book, it always has been.

Sado-masochistic porn, according to Williams, rarely shows genital sex but tends to be more concerned with rituals of sexual power. While she draws on psychoanalytic theory to argue for the progressive importance of the feminist lesbian sadomasochist, for Ferman, SM brings to mind a spate of mid-eighties concentration camp videos, SS Experiment Camp, The Gestapo's Last Orgy and Nazi Love Camp 27 from Italy and Germany. When you see as much of that as we do, you have hard and fast rules that don't allow eroticised sadistic treatment of women. Certainly the worst sadistic stuff is coming from Germany. I don't understand why, but clearly there must be women who do this for a living. Their bodies must be so distended after they've done a couple of years of it. They get hauled up on chains, weights are hung from their labia and nipples and they are pulled down so far that they must surely lose all elasticity...' He recalls one video like this called Extreme Torture, which he banned, only to discover it in a very middle-class, very respectable, pedestrian precinct in the centre of the Hague. His German counterpart told him that They may be made in Germany, but they can't be sold here because of our constitution. This states that any media product which glorifies violence is illegal. If it makes violence seem sexy, that qualifies, concludes Ferman, so they make it and export it.

As for films portraying dominant women, Ferman says, If it were an exploitation film, we would still be very careful about it. We have quite a lot of sub/dom films. The first one we got was called Thigh and Squatting Power, simply about a big strapping woman who sat on little men and squeezed their heads between her massive thighs. It's easier to pass when the woman is on the dominant end because it doesn't reinforce the power relationships in society, but we don't like the idea of young women being seduced into allowing themselves to be tied up or put in a position where they can no longer withdraw their consent. We've always said that if someone could teach us a way to be liberal on masochism without being liberal on sadism, we would do it.

While there is clearly a huge gulf between the sensibilities of people who buy the atrocities that Ferman describes and those who opt for the 'bisexual pornutopias' described by Williams, concepts like 'soft-core' versus 'hard-core' do little to clarify it. They shed even less light on the issue of power relations in sexual imagery. If images of inequality are so powerful once made sexually explicit, then isn't this precisely the area that women should seek to subvert? And if governments wish to intervene in favour of fairer power relations, why only in representations of sexual activity and not, say, in economics?

Asked if he thinks Britain is a repressive society, Ferman replied, I think it's trying not to be, and I think the public are prepared to go further than the regime within which we have to work and I think that the police are way behind public taste. But I have to say that when people occasionally try to break out of the straitjacket like the satellite channel, Red Hot Dutch, you suddenly discover that there is a residual conservatism which comes out.