Bound and gagged: the women urging a repeal of the porn laws

“The conformity that it’s imposing is to the worst model of porn. It specifically targets and bans acts that are associated with feminist and fetish porn.” Pandora Blake, over welsh rarebit and eggs, was explaining to me the new porn laws. They aren’t new, exactly – it’s just a new way of regulating online pornographers, via ATVOD (the Authority for Television and Video on Demand) so that they have to comply with the rules for pornography on DVD.

The only reason independent porn studios never made DVDs is that regulations governing that kind of broadcast are so stringent, devised by an unaccountable board, who can cope with untold degradations so long as they happen to women. If it’s something you would recognise from the hardcore mainstream, it is acceptable; if it’s something you didn’t know anybody did, it is probably verboten.

I first interviewed Blake a year ago, researching ethical porn, which she makes: you may meet people who have thought as hard, but I do not think you will meet anyone who has thought harder about sexuality and its expression than she has. Then, her filmed work was almost exclusively for her website Dreams of Spanking; recently, she has diversified into hardcore feminist porn with colleague and “kinkster”, Nimue Allen. “When we were booking the shoot, it wasn’t illegal, when we were shooting it, it wasn’t illegal and then when we got back, it was illegal.”

“The thing that shocks me most,” said Itziko Urrutia, a dominatrix, “is that this is legislation at all. The list of sexual activities banned make no sense at all, unless, as it’s the current consensus, you read them as a misogynistic vision of female sexuality, written by school boys who are still scared of the girls. The chaotic, demonic female sexual energy must be suppressed at all costs!”

On the banned list, now: oral sex upon a woman that is seen to block the airways; acts of oral sex upon a man that block the airways are fine; female ejaculate is banned lest anyone mistake it for urine, which is also banned; male ejaculate is fine. “Where you’ve got female sexual desire or agency, that’s disallowed,” Pandora said. “So I think it’s actually in contravention of EU equalities legislation.” I can think of few legal challenges I would enjoy more than a female-domination pornographer taking the British Board of Film Classification to court in Strasbourg. Even the hypothetical look on Nigel Farage’s face delights me.

Bondage in specific amounts – both arms, both legs and a gag – is banned because that apparently makes it impossible to consent. Don’t get me wrong, I do not know a huge amount about BDSM, but I know enough to know that there are ways to signal consent that don’t involve both arms, both legs and an unimpeded mouth.

A blogger and writer of erotica, going by the name of Girl on the Net, met me in a cafe in Shoreditch, east London, and spoke rather patiently of ATVOD. “Whenever you take this principle of ‘some things are safe to do but disgusting to see’ you’re always going to get this disconnect … one of the weird things in there is that you can’t have a particular type of spanking unless it is moderate and consensual. Well, who decides what’s moderate? As a kinky person, I’ve always been taught, the person who decides these things is me. A third party can’t tell me what I consent to.”

I have never read a set of rules, not even the changes to legal aid, that so flagrantly omitted to discuss principles with the people to whom they would apply. Functionally, the regulations kick in only when you are contacted by ATVOD, asking you to apply to be registered with them. If you refuse, they shut you down, and if you accede, you then have to abide by their rules.

Their powers are justified mainly in their notorious Article 11, which refers to material that harms children. It lacks internal consistency; niche porn is the hardest thing for children to access, because you have to pay for it.

“They’ll grab 30 or 40 sites of the same genres, so it’s very interesting that so far the ones that have been targeted have been gay sites and fem-dom. No BDSM sites with female subs have been targeted because that’s apparently fine,” Pandora remarks; her own site has so far gone unnoticed.

But one person got the letter and did refuse – Urrutia appealed to Ofcom and won. “Smaller studios who didn’t challenge it were shut down. I am single, I don’t have children, I don’t care if my name is attached to this. My family is in another country. But women like me, we have families. Many decided to pay the fee, and they find themselves under this law. It’s going to be known as the female ejaculation law from now on.”