Niche porn films face censorship fight in Britain

Feminist pornographer Petra Joy has been making X-rated films for a decade, but new online porn regulations in the United Kingdom, which went into effect on Dec. 1, are already hurting her business. She’s shelved the launch of her streaming service in light of the new regs, which ban online hosting of everything from caning, spanking and bondage to fisting and face-sitting. Verbal abuse is also a no-go, even if it’s consensual.

What’s most galling to Joy? Giving female ejaculation the same status as urine, which, as Joy explains it, can be shown but it cannot touch another person or be consumed. Male ejaculation is treated differently, and Joy says these rules offer a disturbing double standard.

 “Why can we have bukkake parties where 20 men jizz into the mouth of a woman and she has to swallow it all, but if a guy wanted to drink a drop of female ejaculate he can’t? Basically what they’re saying with this law is that female ejaculation doesn’t exist.”

Joy calls it all a “double whammy” because, as a feminist filmmaker, she’s already battled the mainstream porn industry. She cites a scene she created in the film Female Fantasies, in which a woman wearing a strap-on enters a men’s bathroom and gets a blowjob from a man. “It won a Feminist Porn Award, but one of the biggest porn-distribution companies in Europe, [which will show] women receiving triple anal, [refused to] distribute the film with this scene because it’s ‘dirty.’ (Joy cut the scene, but released a director’s cut that includes it.)

“It was because it was a dominant woman doing it. That’s why the web is so important for feminist pornographers; you don’t rely on the distribution that is largely in male hands.”

 U.K. porn fans can still access porn with the acts cited above from non-U.K.-based sites, and it’s doubtful they’ll let these new regs dictate the material they watch. In fact, porn-sharing site PornHub reports “caning” is “200 percent more popular as a search term in the United Kingdom than in the rest of the world.”

Joy’s adamant that protecting “children” from explicit images, the purported reason for these rules, will never happen via wholesale censorship. “The answer is education, to talk with kids about porn, sex, boundaries and consent. These films won’t go away and whoever wants to find them will find them,” she says. Furthermore, this kind of censorship assumes a misguided, out-of-sight, out-of-mind outcome, when the opposite is likely the case. “I bet a lot of U.K. youngsters have never heard of fisting or squirting before, but now that it’s outlawed, they’ll [enter it in] search engines and find it from producers abroad. Now that it’s forbidden, it’s going to be so much more desirable,” Joy predicts.

A protest is scheduled for Friday outside the House of Parliament, which Joy plans to document, and an online petition  has been started, with 2,803 signatures as of Monday. Joy likens what’s happening to a “witch hunt,” saying the laws will particularly affect creators of feminist, BDSM and gay and lesbian porn.

“You can’t think … that the current British government has the interests of women in mind,” she says. “They clearly don’t.”

American readers who think that what happens in the U.K. doesn’t affect them need to think again: This is part of a larger problem of government judging what’s sexually acceptable for others. After all, our obscenity law is predicated on “contemporary community standards,” which leaves plenty of wiggle room.

There’s an inherent judgment call in these new rules, such as one against “aggressive” whipping. Who gets to decide? By saying these acts aren’t acceptable to show on film, the British government is attempting to impose its views about sex on its citizens. That should be disturbing wherever you live, and whether or not  you like to watch porn.