A year after the ban on face-sitting and female ejaculation, I've just filmed my first BDSM scene as a porn producer
There's nothing inherently harmful about kink - but there is about sweeping it under the rug. The truth is that the government has a problem with female pleasure
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Your support makes all the difference.So, it’s the anniversary of the face-sitting protest outside Parliament where people took a stand (OK, a seat) against the The British Board of Film Classification's legislations on certain acts in UK-produced porn. One year on, the ban still stands.
As an erotic film-maker who works very hard to print my own personal values in my films, I’ve worked hard to prove that BDSM and kinky sex doesn’t harm us. In fact, I waited many years to shoot my first BDSM scene so that I could get it just right - it only happened this year, in Appointment with My Master. I wanted to do it correctly and make sure the consent was real between the performers. That had to come through in the narrative, and that was my first and foremost goal.
The respect between the two - both of them experienced BDSM practioners - was really special. The communication was open and honest, and if you talk to any serious BDSM practioner you'll learn that this respectful way of communicating is standard.
Of course, bad eggs are found everywhere, but that includes the realms of morally "correct" sexual practices too – there are no more deviants within the BDSM community.
It drives me nuts to see how BDSM is misinterpreted by so many people, since its fundamentals are built on consent. And it's frustrating to see institutions obsessing with giving it a bad reputation. Why do they quite literally obsess about how hard we should spank each other?
Two of the most baffling banned acts from last year were of course face-sitting and female ejaculation. This is where the legislation went from just confusing and mis-informed to politically questionable. These two banned acts most clearly revealed the blatant sexism in the ban: two acts that both explicitly depict female pleasure, and that women derive pleasure from.
If your problem truly was with ejaculation, then why not ban all the male ejaculation in porn? It's because ejaculation isn't their problem. Female pleasure is.
And it's the same with face-sitting – a way for women to get pleasure, both within and outside the BDSM community. But, The British Board of Film Classification classified face-sitting as potentially life-threatening, as there is a potential risk of suffocating. Well, dying from choking on a Digestive biscuit is also a potential hazard, but that doesn't mean that we should, you know, ban Digestive biscuits.
These two acts often show the woman as active, rather than just a passive object for a man's desire. And there's nothing more dangerous than a woman who enjoys her sexuality.
Female ejaculation and face-sitting offer an alternative to the one-sided and often misogynistic pictures widely seen in porn – and alternatives slightly level the playing field. The ban, in that sense, takes away diversity from a genre that's been ruled by a small, homogenous group of men for so long. All hidden behind an ill-advised "Will someone please think about the children!" shield.
As the Independent reported last year, the new censorship laws had no intention to make any distinction between consensual and non-consensual practices between adults. Let's read that again, shall we: no distinction, at all, between consensual and non-consensual practices between adults. With that logic, under the law, BDSM and sexual abuse are pretty much the same thing. Oh dear. Taking consent out of the equation when talking about sex is just the wrong way to go.
To go from rape culture to consent culture, we need to keep clear lines between consensual and non-consensual events. And that means not contributing to further stigmatisation of the BDSM community. The message sent out by the legislation is that people who like BDSM are sexual deviants. And when you stigmatise a group further, you only make it harder for people within that group to get help if problems do arise. Prejudice can be a powerful force for silencing victims of abuse.
If the government really want to help people who fare poorly in pornography - and want to protect children who might be exposed to it - they should help build a culture of consent within the adult industry. This includes making consent a crucial part of the sexual education curriculum in schools, and openly declaring that there’s nothing wrong with consensual sexual kinks.
Meanwhile, if there’s any truth to that "piggate" incident I've heard about in the news, all I can say is: Britain, should you really let someone who might have had a "private part of his anatomy" inside a dead pig’s head lecture you on obscenity?
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