With colourful language.
Starting tomorrow (November 6th) possessing pornography in England and Wales which shows strangulation/suffocation or where the participants are pretending to be related will be a criminal offence. ‘Suffocation’ has been left deliberately open-ended (‘Whether an image depicts strangulation will be a question of fact for the court in each case’), and one of MPs who has supported the legislation has claimed this could extend to depictions of oral sex. The maximum penalty for possession of this material is now five years in prison.
This particularly gift, unlike the National Health Service, has not been bestowed upon us by the Windrush generation (Winston: “Nuh bowcat”) but because the few non-imbeciles left in the national conversation are too cowed to defend liberty on its own terms.
The genesis of these restrictions will be familiar to anyone who has studied the Online Safety Act. The families of women who had been killed during rough sex, and seen the offending men get off with manslaughter convictions, (on the grounds that they were being choked consensually) started campaigning for legislation to close this loophole (which they say has killed sixty women.
This sympathetic campaign was then fused with general distaste against pornography, arguing that watching videos of this was causing men to pressure women into degrading sex. To seal the deal, the ‘choking ban’ in pornography was combined with a ban on pornography whereby actors were pretending to be under the age of sixteen, meaning that anybody who publicly stood up for liberal attitudes towards rough sex would also be forced to defend paedophiles (this was the same wheeze that the government used to force through the Online Safety Act, accusing Farage of being on the side of ‘people like Jimmy Savile’ when he said he would repeal it).
The ultimate aim of this is to ban pornography, in Britain as no hosting website will be able to comply with removing all content which depicts suffocation in its widest interpretation. ‘Ban porn’ would never, ever work as a manifesto pledge but ‘treat normal pornography like it is child sexual abuse’ does (never mind the fact that Britain rarely imprisons people for CSE).
Meanwhile millions of men and women in Britain are now potentially in breach of this insane law which criminalises anyone who has downloaded any mainstream pornography and has inadvertently stored it on a device and forgotten about it.
But the absurdity of this law does not mean that the British courts will not enforce it. This is, after all, the country which has gone further than any Western democracy in demanding people use passports to unlock phones and which sends people to prison for being mean online. If the State has a problem with you they will check your devices for this content and weaponise what they find, just as British teenagers who downloaded the Anarchist Cookbook from 4chan find out they are being charged for owning terrorist materials.
If you have robust views on this Trans Business and are stuck in UK it is probably time for a bit of digital hygiene. You are not D.H Lawrence and you will not enjoy a liberal media circus where the British establishment is made to look ridiculous and out of touch; you will instead find yourself with a permanent criminal record with most proper careers and travel to the United States made impossible.
Nigel. Rupert. Have ye the bravery to stand against this?
As one door closes
In 2013 Miley Cyrus wore a flesh coloured two-pieced outfit and ‘twerked’ on Robin Thicke at the VMAs. At the time this was so controversial that CNN ran it as the main story despite this taking place just four days after Assad doused Ghouta in sarin gas. The item continued to run as lead even when John Kerry confirmed chemical weapons had been used, meaning that Syria had crossed Obama’s red line and military action was set to follow (an editorial decision satirised at the time by The Onion).
As late as 2013 a PR team could simply instruct a female popstar to act like a slattern in public, or release a music video pushing the scantily clad boundary and this would drive headlines for weeks as the left-leaning media would line up to congratulate your empowerment (“She’s a wild woman, she’s a shaman’: Nicki Minaj becomes a feminist art muse”) (“Nicki Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’ Video is not pandering to the male gaze”) (“Nicki Minaj, Feminism, and the message behind ‘Anaconda’”). Ten years on, Sydney Sweeney’s people would turn this strategy in its head (being sexual shows ‘right wing values’) to great effect.
A decade on ‘twerking’ is barely a verb (this is just how female popstars dance). Every mainstream female pop artist in America has adopted the sexual mores and even musical styles of LatAM. Zara Larsson, a Swedish popstar who has made a serious attempt of flavouring her public image with an intellectual feminist twist dresses like a video vixen from the 2000s. Sabrina Carpenter sadly tries and sadly fails to be sexually provocative for attention. To paraphrase Patrick Marber the most fun that a girl can have without taking her clothes off has already been had.
