Following another wonderful festival weekend (Truck, this time around) it’s pretty much guaranteed that the Monday morning headlines will make me want to run away and live in a field for the rest of my days. This morning was no exception, with the news that David Cameron is planning to crack down on the “corroding influence” of online pornography and outlaw the possession of “extreme pornography”, which includes scenes of simulated rape.
As a woman, I imagine I’m expected to be pleased about this. After all, pornography is exclusively a male domain, right? And simulated rape has got to be as bad as the real thing, of course. I’m sure there are hundreds of studies and irrevocable figures showing that all pornography is created under duress, that every single person who’s ever sought out images purporting to show non-consensual sexual acts has immediately gone out and raped someone to experience it for themselves.
Well, here’s the thing. Sometimes I enjoy being held down during sex. Sometimes I like to be tied up. Occasionally, I ask my partner to hit me. Once these new measures come into force, if I filmed myself having that “type” of sex, I could be breaking the law. Now I, personally, find no gratification or artistic merit in filming or photographing myself naked or in erotic situations – largely because I’m far too self-conscious about my body (which is a whole other debate for a whole other day). However, many people do partake in this type of activity, whether for their own personal collection or for public consumption. Many of those have turned it into an art form; there are some wonderful blogs and websites out there that teach people to revel in their bodies, in their sexual predilections; to not be ashamed of how they look or what they like.
Because that’s what this is about, at the end of the day. These laws, this moralising from our government – it’s about shame. It’s about saying “no, I’m sorry, you can’t feel comfortable about liking that sort of thing, it’s just not cricket“. It’s about restricting the type of sex we’re allowed to have and telling us it’s for our own good.
In a surprisingly shrewd move, Cameron has said that these laws have to be in place to protect our children. He’s not doing this as leader of our country, he’s doing this as a father. How nice for him. But he was elected to lead our country (I realise that’s a debateable point) and to represent the entire cross-section of views this country holds, not just those held by white, upper-middle-class fathers for whom the internet is modern and scary and therefore everything contained within it is somehow immoral, whereas Page 3 is traditional and worthy of protection because it’s every man’s God-given right to see nipples on paper whenever they so choose. Worse, by portraying this as necessary to ensure the protection of our children, he’s set the bar for every voice of dissent to be vilified as a closet racist or paedophile, simply for having “non-standard” sexual preferences – or even just for standing up for those that do.
As a law student, I studied R v Brown; an extraordinary case in which the House of Lords ruled that consensual, homosexual, sadomasochistic behaviour was illegal. None of the participants had complained about the acts in which they had participated; video footage of these acts had been uncovered during a completely separate police investigation. However, the Lords upheld that the prosecution did not have to prove absence of consent in order to establish guilt. It has been 20 years since R v Brown was brought to the House of Lords. Gay marriage will soon be legal, and that’s a huge step forward. It saddens me greatly that our government can’t apply the same forward-thinking, non-prescriptive approach to sexual conduct.
Written by Hannah Morgan
You can follow Hannah on Twitter @fionchadd
