from Pandora Blake in The Guardian
Last month I persuaded a few dozen people to have a “squirting water fight” outside parliament to highlight the absurdity of UK sex laws. The digital economy bill – currently at committee stage – is an outrageous attack on the sexual liberty and personal privacy of adults in the UK. It will destroy the livelihoods of many adult industry workers, particularly webcam performers and DIY porn producers such as me. Making and selling our own content online gives us autonomy over our work – but the mandatory age verification and censorship this legislation will impose on online porn will take that away.
‘Our fetish isn’t harmful to society.’ Photograph: Pandora Blake
I own and operate Dreams of Spanking; a niche BDSM (bondage, domination, submission and masochism) site with films expressing my personal sexual fantasies. Running my own website gives me total freedom to do what I want on camera, with the people I choose. Authentic and performer-centric sites such as mine are exactly what the porn industry needs – but small-scale independent websites will be devastated if the digital economy bill is passed into law.
I’m no stranger to censorship. Last year, Dreams of Spanking was unsuccessfully targeted under the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014, because my consensual BDSM videos depict spankings that leave marks. After a traumatic, invasive investigation, I was forced to take my site offline – and I was left in no doubt that the law considers kinky sexualities such as mine to be obscene.
