Online pornography showing strangulation or suffocation is to be made illegal, as part of government plans to tackle violence against women and girls.
It follows a review which found depictions of choking were “rife” on mainstream porn sites and had helped normalise the act among young people.
Both the possession and publication of such material will be a criminal offence, under amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill currently going through Parliament.
Oh okay, I get that. I would agree with you, but the problem here is the coercive nature of paid acting. We have to have safeguards in place to protect actors.
Choking, as I mentioned, causes permanent brain cell death every single time it is done. Not to mention issues like PTSD as well. In this scenario the government has the overwhelming burden to protect actors from being paid to harm themselves.
I think there is another argument about protecting the welfare of the public as well. This is where you could argue it becomes about a questionable moral decision. I tend to agree with people who have concerns about the state exceeding it’s authority and the possible slippery slop of censorship.
This is why it is important to weigh these things carefully. You may disagree, but I fall back to the the concept of specific and narrowly defined speech that poses the direct risk of harm. I think filming actual or even simulated choking can meet this definition.
The burden of proof must be on the government and it must prove its case empirically . With the large amount of non-consensual choking, along with the reality that a lot of men abuse women it can be seen as an extremely negative societal trend. Statistics point to the reality that only a small fraction of these instances could be considered truly consensual.
Monkey see and monkey do is a very real phenomenon. Our brains literally work by mirroring actions. I know this harkens back to a lot of truly negative censorship though. We can see all kinds of censorship that could be justified with this logic.
I suppose depicting sexual violence in normal sexual encounters is where I draw the line. When it is no longer fantasy and people see what they think is normal behavior without any pushback.
This is why so many young men that watch pornography with male dominated choking go on to repeat these actions as if they are normal, safe, or acceptable.
You talk like actors are actually choked. I’m pretty sure there are already regulations against that.
You talk about protecting actors; sure. That’s not what’s discussed though.
You think people that are actually willing to choke someone, sometimes even against their will, need a porn flick to think about it? Or that they would not do it without someone having filmed it somewhere? Some people are lower than beasts, and they’ll do what they want. Trying to chase after every possible outside justification will not change them, and will not protect anyone. If a couple is getting it on and the man won’t listen to a “no, don’t do that”, there’s no amount of censorship, regulation, and ban, that will make them abide. The only thing it will do is increase censorship, regulation, and bans.
The sane approach for that is, surprise surprise, education, and maybe properly labeling stuff. It’s not putting in place another framework to ban things on a whim, which will subsequently be abused for much more than the arguably “fair” initial point.
This discussion is repeated ad nauseam everytime there’s plan for banning something. The argument that choking is bad is true, there’s no point repeating it. The argument that “monkey do what monkey see”? Sure, go for that. Let’s ban every media then, because boy oh boy I have a bad news about the movie industry of the past 50 years.
Actors do actually get choked so that takes care of the first part of your premise. Here is a story of it happening. There is no safe way to restrict breathing period.
https://laist.com/news/holly-deen-accusations
To the last part. It should be illegal to actually harm people on camera which is what is happening. If you think this is a over reaction you are wrong. We should not be allowing this to happen.
There is direct correlation between people watching people get choked out in porn and doing it in real life. This is not violent video games.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/sep/02/i-think-its-natural-why-has-sexual-choking-become-so-prevalent-among-young-people
Please save your moral panic nonsense for cases were it is applicable. It is not here. This is simply a public health issue and the UK is doing the right thing.
Then, campaign and propose laws to prevent actors from getting choked or mistreated for real. Not a free ban on content. Put in place a framework for safe recourse for these actors, especially in an industry that’s usually shut off, instead of turning them down for being in the “adult movie business”. Provide protection for people coming out denouncing unlawful activites instead of putting them on the spot. Have strong incentive for directors to not do it that way, where even a single report gets seriously looked at and would cost them more money than it brings back.
In summary, actually protect people instead of just setting up yet another strawman.
Fiction is fiction. If your call is protecting actor, then I wholeheartedly agree. But your position in this discussion is not that; it’s ban this or that content from existing. That’s a very different, very slippery slopey topic.
Censoring media is never the right thing. You’ll never make me change my mind on that. I’m dead set on not having censorship while protecting people; you’re dead set on encouraging censorship blindly.