Liz Longhurst, whose daughter was strangled to death by Graham Coutts a musician with a fetish for images of violent porn, has convinced the UK government to announce a plan to ban violent porn.
Unusually for a porn story the media has got the facts entirely wrong. There is no ban, and not even a bill. Just a decision to move forward after a period of consultation. When a bill is written it will be brought before parliament and voted on, but until then nothing changes. Supporters of the move are suggesting a line will be drawn between ‘art’ and ‘porn’ which allows ‘legitimate’ films which involve violent sexual images to be distributed. How this will be done remains a mystery.
It’s another example of bad laws being written to fill holes in the porn business which could be filled with performer protection. Murder is already illegal - we don’t need any new laws to put creeps like Coutts in prison. Grevious Boddily Harm (GBH) is likewise outlawed (in the US you’d call it assault) and if performers had better protection we could stop it from happening on camera in the name of ‘entertainment’. The idea Coutts might not have killed had he not seen violent porn is post hoc in the extreme. The Marquis de Sade managed to crank out dark fantasies without TV, film, or the internet.
In a magical world (where I run things, tights are outlawed and Anita Dark says yes when I invite her to my room for a whopper with cheese) there would be more reason in this debate. Of course a segment of the BDSM crowd are pretty sick individuals acting out their fantasies as far as other people are prepared to let them go; but we can only make sane laws, which do a job of protecting people, if we recognize the difference between simulated and real events, the rights of performers to work safely which assures viewers what they’re watching isn’t actually dangerous, and the insanity of saying some things are fine to do in private but illegal to watch in public.
Whenever I hear a story about something like this, I flash back to a Skye Blue/Summer Cummings production entitled Clinic of Torment, which is basically 60 minutes of Cummings being tortured in various ways. The film both begins and ends with both performers stressing that while what you see is real, it is not to be depicted - that Cummings enjoys the things Blue is doing to her, but it’s not for everyone, and if you don’t know what you’re doing people can get hurt, arrested, or deported, so DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS.
Which is not to suggest that such a disclaimer, at each end, is likely enough. But it’d be a start, and something that would be incredibly easy to implement NOW, without any major cultural or production changes to the porn industry. (the family of bondage sites owned by Hogtied.com do this already, opening and closing each segment with an interview with the model - the opener to determine her interest and limits, the closer to determine what parts of the shoot she did and didn’t enjoy.)
aargh - not to be IMITATED, that should say.
Sam, as I read the “guidelines” you posted a while back, violent porn was already illegal, Why is this even being proposed?
Is this nutwad claiming that the girl “enjoyed” what he was doing, and that it just went too far? That was vaguely alluded to in the bit I caught about the case on BBC.