Beware the female orgasm, for if you produce porn in the UK, it could get you into a whole lot of trouble. UK locals, on the other hand, will have to search it out overseas, since online content containing the female ejaculation is now prohibited.
In a move to consolidate regulations for DVDs and online porn, new rules about what is and isn’t appropriate have been issued across the pond. And some of those regulations seemingly target women within porn—not just porn in general.
“Female ejaculation being banned is not only a slap in the face to women across the UK, but proof that men making these rules do not see women as equals,” says UK porn star and producer Tanya Tate. “The lads can enjoy a good pop shot, but should a woman come, all hell breaks loose.”
Right. And how is female ejaculation going to be determined anyway? Some women squirt and the gushing fluid makes the orgasm hard to ignore, others however just get very, very wet down there. So my question is: Will being too wet with a slight trickle of fluid count as female ejaculation, too? So ladies, when the camera is rolling, if you think you’re on the verge of orgasm please stop and refrain. If your body responds to pleasure by uncontrollably gushing fluid, you’ve gone against the new legislation.
For men, well, they can grab a woman by the hair, tilt her face towards them, and blow a load in her eyes, or up her nose, as long as they don’t call her any names while doing it. That’s still considered acceptable. But female ejaculation is not?
Besides the blatant silliness of it all, it does raise some questions—and not about sex. Why is something, like ejaculating, okay for a man and not for a woman?
“It is a step backwards for western cultures,” wrote porn star Chanel Preston on her blog. “To me it seems that rather than moving forward we seem to tiptoe, and sometimes leap, back and forth between a more progressive and oppressive attitude towards sexuality.”
This legislation comes on the heels of last year’s proposal by Prime Minister David Cameron that online porn should be blocked by default.
So this startling move towards Internet censorship should come as no surprise. Yet when the new regulations for the UK Audiovisual Media Services 2014 were announced, jaws dropped. Shock at what the government considers dangerous and high risk could be read across social media. This anti-porn legislation hit a nerve. Among what is now considered banned content includes:
Spanking
Caning
Aggressive whipping
Penetration by any object "associated with violence"
Physical or verbal abuse (regardless of consent)
Urolagnia (known as "water sports")
Role-playing as non-adults
Physical restraint
Humiliation
Female ejaculation
Strangulation
Facesitting
Fisting
So basically a female empowerment website featuring verbally degraded consenting paid performers with fully clothed women sitting on their faces is not okay. Even though it’s a seemingly harmless fantasy to most, the government has essentially deemed it dangerous. This ban clearly hurts the niche markets most, including the BDSM and fetish communities (even though Fifty Shades of Grey has outsold the entire Harry Potter series in the UK combined). And a lot of those are the mom and pop producers.
Big companies that are already tapped into the more vanilla types of what some consider “mainstream porn” won’t be bothered much by this—though they’ll have to watch the spanking and perhaps even the verbal abuse, since whether it’s consensual or not doesn’t seem to matter. What counts anyway? Is it the specific words or tone that matters? Dirty talk can be a huge part of foreplay and even heighten the experience of sex for some. Directors will now have to guess the difference between dirty talk and abuse, or leave the UK to film elsewhere.
Then there is the role-playing issue and the murky lines porn producers are worried about crossing. UK porn star Tanya Tate feels the most important part in all of this should be adult consent, and that’s something the new regulations seem indifferent towards. “Can you say, ‘Oh you’re a naughty boy?’ Or can you not say that because you cannot role-play as non-adults? Can you call someone a ‘naughty boy’ or do you have to say ‘naughty man?’ Who is going to monitor this?”
With such broadly defined legislation, playing by the rules may not be worth the risk for some companies. This might be the UK’s passive aggressive way to push content producers out of the country. According to The Telegraph, “the Department for Culture, Media and Sport recognized that the new system might lead to some loss of British business.” Banning these acts in the UK doesn’t really stop anyone from accessing them; it merely succeeds in pushing the business of porn a little further away.
