Protest against internet porn censorship law
12th December 2014, at noon
Old Palace Yard, Parliament, London
To meet outside parliament and protest against the new sexist laws - This is not supporting sexual equality and something needs to be done! Pornography produced in the UK was quietly censored today through an amendment to the 2003 Communications Act, and
the measures appear to take aim at female pleasure.
The Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 requires that video-on-demand (VoD) online porn now adhere to the same guidelines laid out for DVD sex shop-type porn by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC).
Seemingly arbitrarily deciding what is nice sex and what is not nice sex, the board's ruling on content that is not acceptable (p.23) effectively bans legal and consensual acts from being depicted by British pornography producers.
The theme of the protest is the Monty Python classic song, Sit On My Face. And couples will be doing as the song suggests, one the ludicrous prohibitions contained in the government censorship decree.
Protest Against The Audiovisual Media Services Regulations
See article
from caan.org.uk
The Consenting Adult Action Network (CAAN) fully support the protest organised outside parliament this Friday against the government's latest ludicrous and hypocritical attempts to clamp down on porn that falls outside a narrow cultural definition of
normal sexuality.
According to Jane Fae, co-convenor of CAAN England and Wales:
far from protecting anyone, this is the usual badly thought-out mishmash of irrelevant measures and middle-aged male prejudice. What they mostly dislike are women and individuals from outside the charmed circle of sexuality(*) having any place to explore
what turns them on.
Dennis Queen, also co-convenor, seconded this view. She said:
Yet again, the official censors are reinforcing regulations that prevent people from expressing themselves safely while politicians such as David Cameron reward their friends in big porn by making it ever more difficult for anyone else to be involved in
creating erotic film.
Equally this prevents a very large constituency of people, both straight and otherwise from accessing material that is fundamentally harmless.
Fae added:
If politicians had even a smidgeon of concern for individuals involved in porn, they would be talking to those already working in the industry and identifying what THEY want to make their workplace safer. As it is, Cameron's enforced introduction of
filters has made it far harder for young people -- especially LGBTQ youth -- to obtain vital information and to explore their personal sexuality.
The principal beneficiaries of the government's initiatives in this area have been large US and China based filtering businesses. The government have made no-one safer: they have almost certainly done harm to vulnerable people.
(*) The charmed circle is the idea, proposed by Professor Gayle Rubin, that sexuality can be divided into that which is privileged by society, and is located inside the circle, while all other non-privileged sexually was located outside, and in
opposition to it. Within the circle, broadly, are to be found straight, monogamous, vanilla, sex without the use of any aids.
A blog post from a UK fetish website provides an interesting but unverified snippet warning of future oppressive control freakery:
