Anti-porn feminists love a top-down directive. (Juno Baisla/EyeEm)
How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: about a hundred or so, working together to chuck people who ignore faulty lightbulbs in jail. So ran my thoughts as I heard about the new anti-porn laws.
A quiet addition to the Crime and Policing Act has made pornographic images that depict realistic-looking acts of strangulation and suffocation illegal, along with images of adults pretending to be minors, or pretending to be engaged in incest (otherwise known as the immensely popular category of “fauxcest”). Several feminist organizations back the change as a good one for women generally. Controversy has erupted about the clauses pertaining to suffocation in particular; for it turns out that there are many creative ways to block the airways while on a porn shoot, and nobody really knows what is now allowed. But while definitions of criminality remain vague, the penalties cited are chillingly specific: up to five years imprisonment for producers and distributors, and two years for possession, including the retention of previously legal downloads.
As you might expect, these events have produced some sober and dignified online exchanges. Professional femdoms are complaining about the sudden censoring of their monetized content, and the Government’s failure yet again to back the small business owner. Incensed libertarians are speculating that the authorities might come for murder mysteries next, since these too depict dangerous activities not to be tried at home. Labour MP Jess Asato has unwisely weighed in on whether face-sitting counts as suffocation or not, while justice minister Alex Davies-Jones denies being a “modern day Mary Whitehouse”, urging all those engaged in “legal, safe, and consensual” sexual activity to “crack on”. Meanwhile the real Mary Whitehouses — namely, radical feminists — have been hurling the newly minted insult “stranglewanker” at anyone online who dares complain.
But I’m afraid there are several good reasons to feel concern about this law, without signaling undying commitment to the stranglewanking cause. You might dislike unclear, confusing criminal legislation; exactly the same goes for the draft Conversion Bill, attracting the righteous ire of many feminists at the moment. You might object to the practice of foisting late stage amendments onto existing bills, meaning they bypass the committee and/or report stages of scrutiny — the same tactic that recently brought us the decriminalization of late abortion without much discussion at all.
Alternatively, you might be worried about censorship on spurious “protective” grounds becoming a lazy Government habit: Spotify, YouTube Kids, eBay and Vinted are just some of the sites being mooted as off-limits for minors this week. Or perhaps you just don’t like the hypocrisy of clamping down on an erotic medium mostly used by men, while allowing women to keep enjoying books with titles like Taken By My Alpha Triplet Stepbrothers.
My own concern is partly about the infuriatingly high-handed strategy, and why some campaigners seem so happy to use coercion to get the changes in public morality they want. (One might even say that anti-porn feminists love a top-down directive, if it were not very dangerous to make such jokes.) Personally, I think porn is a spiritual blight on the soul. But it is also a mistake to have turned a set of common, easily committed, and widely tolerated private behaviors into imprisonable crimes from one day to the next — and even more so when the collapsing court system can barely accommodate graver offenses. Indeed, it seems deeply perverse for the Government to be making relatively new electronic offenses imprisonable, while including those with GBH and firearm convictions in early release schemes. Do they just want a less scary kind of prison inmate, or what?
Polling suggests there is broad support for some kind of ban of the images in question. Still, I am skeptical there will be much enthusiasm for punishing individual users once the details are properly grasped. The reception on Mumsnet has been distinctly mixed, and is likely to become more so when sentences on blindsided family members start being handed down. For it is hard to defend a law that means someone can be banged up for possession of an image, yet where no actual offense occurred in front of the camera; and especially where the viewer is also fully aware he is looking at pretense. Or to put it another way: if you enjoy role-playing of the kinds in question, and it is consensual and safe for all participants, Davies-Jones will tell you to crack on. If you film it for later use, she thinks you should be in jail.
That this is the case is clear from the drafting. To count as an offense, the depiction must be “realistic”: a similar sounding word to “real” but which usually implies the opposite. When you say that a piece of acting is realistic, you are signaling awareness of an element of pretense. Meanwhile the clause on fauxcest requires that a reasonable person, inspecting the image, would judge that the participants “were related or pretending to be related”; and similar wording is applied to depictions of sex involving adults pretending to be minors. In other words: the image is the crime, but not necessarily what it records. And the viewer can know perfectly well that no crime has been recorded, but only a feigned one; yet still be committing a crime by possessing the image at all.
At the core of this proscription, then, is a fear about representation, and not reality directly; about the supposedly harmful effects of pretending or fantasizing, using staged images as props. Campaigners tend to obscure this point by mixing up concern about the direct dangers of sexual role-playing behaviors for participants with suppositions about their indirect effects on viewers. It is true, for instance, that there are physical risks in what is referred to, horribly coyly, as “breath play”; and that the normalization of such practices provides a convenient criminal defense for violent males. But these points have no bearing on a separate argument, also emphasized: that performing make-believe versions of transgressive activities on camera encourages viewers to do them for real. That this is the complaint is underlined by the fact the new rules censor AI-generated images, involving no real people at all.
To this argument about causation of harm, critics reply that the evidence presented has been underwhelming so far; that most people can keep track of the distinction between fantasy and reality, even when props are realistic; and that feeling excitement while vividly imagining doing something does not mean you are actually tempted to do it. The question is complicated, and I’m not sure what I ultimately think. But — as the actress probably said to the bishop — wading in with a judicial cudgel and a Mommy-knows-best face is only likely to make the law look like an ass.
There is a growing trend here. This week, we also heard of politicians’ plans to get rid of webcamming for its links to sexual exploitation; and to install spyware into every phone in the name of combating child sexual abuse. Meanwhile, in the wake of Bralliams — the biggest double feature since Barbenheimer — there have been plenty of calls to change the legal age of consent. The general, basic-as-hell formula for action seems to be: allege some sort of eye-catching harm to a vulnerable group; then intimate you can magically reduce that harm, simply by banning or criminalizing something. (Alternatively, if the allegedly vulnerable group is the one being criminalized — as in late-term abortion — then use a simple sob story to get the howwible, mean penalty taken away.)
If your aim is criminalization, don’t worry about unintended consequences for civil liberties, or any other abstract matter. As no heart-rending story can be told about a favored set of victims here, nobody is going to care about those. And if you get objections or protests, smear the objectors as filthy perverts, or else construe the criticism as intolerable abuse. Repeat as necessary, then proceed smoothly to the King’s speech.
Arguably, the tendency to stitch up the law like this stands in inverse proportion to campaigners’ ability to persuade people to stop doing things by other means. This is not necessarily their fault. It is difficult to make a persuasive moral case against anything these days, thanks to decades of be-cool liberalism telling us that pretty much anything goes. Indeed, it is telling that even when campaigners are blatantly moralizing on behalf of a better deal for women — and nothing wrong with that — they like to pretend they are doing something science-y and objective. Ludicrous psychological studies involving word-association tasks are cited as revealing something about misogyny generally. Actively defining the limits of immoral sexual behavior is presented as countering “rape myths”, as if some historian were debunking medieval beliefs about the weather.
Thanks to said liberalism, there is also deep squeamishness about translating any knowledge of the sexual dangers women face into practical parenting measures; and particularly when it means laying down rules that the kids might not like. Enlightened mothers can no longer comfortably decree “you aren’t going out like that!” to a teenager venturing forth dressed only in knickers and a coat, for fear that some sort of autonomy-suppression or victim-blaming is going on. When your gormless 16-year-old says she is in love with a creepy comedian, it seems easier to lobby your MP about the age of consent than to take away her phone. In the wake of the gentle parenting revolution, we appear to need Big Brother more than ever.
If online discourse from this week is anything to go by, some anti-porn campaigners are likely to respond to my points here by suggesting I need my hard drive checked. They act like there are only two possible categories for behavior, illegal or positively good; and only one possible motive for arguing against illegality, secret approval. Probably in vain, my hope for these law fetishists is that they have their own lightbulb moment. The rumors are true — you really can hate something without immediately wanting to see it banned.
