Brits Can Now Make BDSM Porn Legally—Squirting And Fisting Too

LONDON, U.K.—Producers and fans of fetish porn, showing such practices as bondage, female ejaculation, fisting, and spanking, got good news from Britain’s top law enforcement authorities on Thursday, when the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it was changing the definition of “obscenity” under a 60-year-old law designed to shield the Queen’s subjects from material that might “deprave and corrupt” their minds, according to  report by The Guardian newspaper.  The United Kingdom’s 1959 Obscene Publications Act was used to prosecute sellers of the D.H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover,  now considered a literary classic, which describes an erotic affair between a married but unsatisfied upper class woman and a working class gamekeeper on her estate. But in recent years, the law has mainly been invoked against porn—though juries have become increasingly less impressed with the law’s definition of what counts as “obscene.” In a landmark 2012 case, a jury found a man not guilty of obscenity for selling DVDs depicting male fisting, “watersports,” and and consensual sadomasochism.  Under this week’s ruling from the Crown Prosecution Service, porn depicting those activities will no longer be prosecuted as “obscene” in Great Britain, as long as the acts shown in the films are consensual and do not involve serious harm. The porn films must also be aimed specifically at audiences over 18 years of age, and cannot be connected to other criminal acts, according to The Evening Standard newspaper.  Acts that remain “obscene,” however, include “dismemberment and graphic mutilation... asphyxiation causing unconsciousness, which is more than transient and trifling, and given its danger is serious,” The Standard reported. Essentially, any act that would be legal if performed between consenting adults will now also be considered legal under the Obscene Publications Act, according to a Daily Record report on the law.  “This is a happy day for queer, feminist and fetish porn,” said feminist porn filmmaker Pandora Blake, who in 2015 directed a segment of the film Ban This Sick Filth! which was intended depict acts that would have been prohibited by the 1959 law.  Image By Eric Stanton/Wikimedia Commons Public Domain