• LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    12 hours ago

    I’m just dropping in here after 10 hours after reading literally 3 comments to say lol this seems like a weird ass struggle session where “reactionaries are against kink” but like uhhhh youse guys, the porn industry is profit driven and capitalist controlled and what it chooses to depict and the frequency of it isn’t “kink” and it seems like people are weirdly defending what’s widely seen, in any other context, to be a predatory industry that needs extreme reform if not outright abolition (as it exists under capitalism), as I’ve frequently seen it spoken of due to its inherent, abhorrent exploitative nature, because they see it as like some kind of attack on “kink” (spoken of as some sort of amorphous concept)

    what the fuck’s wrong with y’all, dick cheney died today go fucking celebrate or something, christ

  • CrookedSerpent [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    12 hours ago

    Guys, an evil Bougieoise state having a moral panic about a sex kink to appease it’s rabidly reactionary honkey population is actually good thing!! :D

  • mistermodal@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    11 hours ago

    Unfortunately this is vaguely defensible even if the overall british policy on the internet & prostitution etc is awful

    1. Sex work is coercive sex i.e. rape

    2. Advertising everyone & their grandma to choke someone out for quick thrills and lightheadedness is VERY DANGEROUS does not even distinguish between air and blood choke etc. People are way too cavalier about regularly air choking even if it is “safer” than blood choking, you need training on how to do that stuff or you can crush or bruise somebody’s windpipe

    Not replying to any pro-rape comments, thx

  • XiaCobolt [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    15 hours ago

    My general stance is that pornography and sex work contains a whole bunch of contradictions. There are harmful behaviors, practices and coercions that should be policed. But an overzealous bourgeois state having a moral panic will rarely fix these issues and often overcorrect into punishing innocent people and even victims, while absolving perpetrators. Ideally any change should be driven or with input by the workers and community.

  • sodium_nitride [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    59
    ·
    19 hours ago

    None of this censorship effort is being directed against medical misinformation or reactionaries BTW. Compare this bourgeois moralism with Chinese censorship efforts. Even though their state censors go too far at times, at least they attack online misinformation and harmful shit.

    • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      33
      ·
      18 hours ago

      The West (most of it at least) doesn’t care about misinformation or harmful content/hate speech, they even help promote it with shit like Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Cuba, and the millions of christian fascist missionaries they finance to travel around to world that spreads their hateful ideology and views to the Global South.

      They just want to use the excuse of “banning pornography” to crackdown on LGBTQ+ media.

      • XiaCobolt [she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        18
        ·
        edit-2
        14 hours ago

        There’s actually a really funny loophole/phenomena where China bans all outright sexual pornography, but it doesn’t ban the adjacent non sexual bondage erotica type videos and photos. So you can find videos of a “relationship drama where a woman is kidnapped by another woman and menaced” type thing that is super horny but never sexual. Then a funny subset is there are people who dress up as the police or PLA etc and do horny trials of spies/corrupt official etc. They pretend it’s a morality type play, but it’s just entirely horny. Then photos of these hit the Western internent and they get presented as proof of China’s secret purges. When it’s just a bunch of horny larpers and BDSM nerds.

      • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        20
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        18 hours ago

        China banning porn is like the single issue thing I don’t agree with the CPC on, but from what I gather it’s super easy to use a vpn in country and sidestep the firewall so it’s really whatever.

      • sodium_nitride [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        17 hours ago

        That’s my point exactly. They have a blanket ban which makes much more sense than kink policing.

        Although to be honest, I’m no expert on the Chinese legal code so I don’t want to make too many comments on their approach. I’ve seen much conflicting information.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      18 hours ago

      It wouldn’t even take much either, most of the tech platforms can reasonably detect hateful and shitty content. They could block it before anyone sees it, they just choose not to until it’s reported. Government could easily place a burden upon the operator to pre-emptively remove content just the same as they’re doing here with kink porn and they would enforce it.

  • V112347 [she/her, it/its]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    14 hours ago

    Damn, talking about kink really brings the reactionaries out of the woodwork. What consenting adults do in their spare time is their own business.

    Obviously the UK is just doing this out of puritanism. If they wanted to help folks be safer, they’d run PSAs or other educational material.

    Edit: I suppose this is good if applied to the porn industry, but as per usual I imagine this mostly gets weaponized against vulnerable people.

    • حمید پیام عباسی@crazypeople.online
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      14 hours ago

      Lets say one was an industrial worker making textiles at a spinning loom. Every once in a while the fibers get caught in the loom and require manual intervention to untwist the fibers. The boss doesn’t want to stop production so they ask the worker to reach into the loom, next to the fast spinning parts, and unhook the fibers. 99% of the time the worker can do this, 1% of the time they lose their arm and it gets crushed. Should they be allowed to do this? Is it consensual when an industrial worker does something unsafe at the risk of losing their job and not making money?

      From the article:

      Research shows strangulation is never a safe practice, despite a widespread belief it can be performed safely. Though it often leaves no visible injury, oxygen deprivation, even for very short moments, causes changes to the fragile structures of the brain.

      Multiple studies have specifically shown brain changes in women who have been repeatedly “choked” during sex, including markers for brain damage and disruptions in brain hemispheres linked to depression and anxiety.

      In most cases these aren’t consenting adults in their spare time. Producing pornography is a job. These people are workers. Workers need protection and regulation from exploitative capitalists who would risk the workers bodies for profit. Is that reactionary?

      • RandallThymes [undecided, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        10 hours ago

        Good perspective on this, thank you. I think we can be skeptical that the British state has sex workers best interests in mind with this but the consent argument does not hold up when workers are coerced into putting their health at risk to perform wage labour in the first place.

      • LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        12 hours ago

        99% of the time the worker can do this, 1% of the time they lose their arm and it gets crushed. Should they be allowed to do this?

        hot take but if a worker wants to do something dumb they should be allowed but if their boss makes them they should be crushed to death in a wine press

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    26
    ·
    18 hours ago

    They’re banning the pornography but are they banning searching for the pornography?

    Like, whatever man if they wanna try and stop it from existing by blocking it fine, they’ll fail. Are they gonna arrest me if I look up and find asphyxiation porn though? Am I going on a sex offenders register for viewing consensual adults doing consensual kink?

    More important question than the poor hard done by pornography producers tbh. I don’t give a fuck about them particularly.

  • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    69
    ·
    22 hours ago

    I never found strangling to be particularly up my alley, and I get that it is introducing a lot of people to a potentially very harmful sexual practise without giving them the tools to actually do it. However fuck off Kid Harmer. Why is literally the only bit of state capacity you endorse getting into people’s bedrooms, looking at their junk or monitoring their porn? Fuck off.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      47
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      21 hours ago

      Yeah. Even the “safe” way to do it is one of the most dangerous and “even done completely right, this can still just randomly kill someone[1]” kinks someone can engage in and it being mainstreamed into vanilla porn as just like a thing people spontaneously do is bad, but the solution would be like mandating warning labels with sex-positive education on how fucked this is on videos featuring real or simulated choking, not the UK’s usual “oh heavens a kink, I must send in the constables and retire to my fainting couch and pray to the depraved sex pest royals for salvation” shit.


      1. Due to the risk of blood clots and stroke from stopping the movement of blood through the artery that’s entering the brain. It also probably causes minor brain damage every single time, even without a loss in consciousness, and as a result can cause neurological problems if that randomly happens to hit something important. ↩︎

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          19 hours ago

          I just wanted to elaborate with a footnote without breaking the flow of what I was saying. Checking, the only thing I had saved that might have mentioned it 404ed, although I think that may have just been a resource on doing a blood choke without threatening the wind pipe. This is just general kink community knowledge though, like the risk of nerve/joint damage from poorly placed restraints or how blunt force impacts to the abdomen and particularly around the spine or kidneys are very dangerous.

          But like, stopping blood from moving is bad and has a risk of making blood clots (this is why sitting for excessively long periods of time causes a risk of DVT, as blood pools in one’s legs more than it should), and cutting off oxygen to the brain is also extremely bad. The only bit that contradicts conventional knowledge is the more recent research that even brief reductions in blood flow to the brain cause brain damage that builds up over time in the same way that minor head impacts add up (another recent discovery, since before the assumption was just that serious concussions were bad but lighter impacts didn’t cause injuries).

          The article in OP does mention and link studies about the brain damage risk though, I think.

        • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          37
          ·
          17 hours ago

          We do that all the time. A lot of kink is about recreating situations that would otherwise be unsafe or abusive but within a safe consensual “pretend” context.

          Tying someone up and whipping them? A fucked up immoral thing to do.

          Tying someone up and whipping them but it’s sexy and everyone involved consents? Fucking awesome.

        • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          24
          ·
          edit-2
          16 hours ago

          The point is that it’s contextual. Normally it would be flagrantly immoral to tie up another human being against their will and force them to eat from a dog bowl.

          But if two people engage in that activity, with informed consent, have a safe word, etc. The normal rules of social niceties are suspended.

          It’s playing pretend. It’s not real.

          While there are obvious concerns about the set of a porn film, that make it distinct from a regular film set, just as with regular film, such environments need to be regulated for safety and related concerns.

          Anyone who’s had sex can tell you that porn isn’t Exactly realistic. It’s actors, filming a scene that woman being strangled is, on a properly regulated film set, is not actually being strangled. Just as two dudes shooting guns in an action movie aren’t actually killing people.

          By passing all of these laws, they’re pushing pornography production into a legal grey area where film set safety regulations increasingly don’t apply, which actively puts people at risk.


          Edit: I also want to make sure that I don’t come off as somehow whitewashing the porn industry. Others in this thread have rightfully pointed out that porn stars are often abused on set.

          Many Marxist Feminists, especially in the global south, have advocated for the immediate abolition of sex work. This makes sense in a context where the sex work industry is serving a largely white, bourgeois, clientele. A manifestation of larger Imperialist value extraction.

          In the global north, however, I think sex workers are largely under-theorized as a peripheral part of the proletariat (or often lumpen-proletariat) that ought to be organized by Socialists.

          While we ought to strive to live in a world where no one must sell their body to survive, sexually or otherwise, I think the short term response to these contradictions is to advocate for, and organize sex workers, and that includes pushing back against these laws, which further ostracize an already uniquely exploited part of the working class

          • fannin [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            14 hours ago

            Just going to reply to you because I don’t want to retype this a hundred times in the thread. I get exactly what you’re saying and I find it very hard to disagree with any of it. But if this kind of fantasy play acting ever crossed into someone pretending to be underage I don’t think I’d say it’s okay and maybe I’m badly misreading the room but I’m not sure anyone else here would either. So there has to be some line somewhere and I can’t find it

            • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              13
              ·
              edit-2
              14 hours ago

              into someone pretending to be underage I don’t think I’d say it’s okay and maybe I’m badly misreading the room but I’m not sure anyone else here would either

              Again, it’s pretending. it’s not real. It might personally give you the ick, and that’s fine. That’s the point of consent, none one should be made to engage in a sexual act that they don’t want to. But when you start drawing arbitrary lines about what consenting adults can and can’t do, based on your own personal icks, that’s an issue.

              For example, Age play is something that a lot of trans women engage in, and that fact is often weaponized against them by people who want to demonize trans people as inherently dangerous to children.

              I am transfem and while ageplay isn’t my thing, my first exposure to the very concept of transness, as a young kid, was an episode of a reality show. In this episode the brilliant minds over at TLC took this otherwise very sweet seeming trans woman, who was into ageplay kink because it allowed her to reclaim a childhood she never got to have, and demonized her for it.

              The other half of the episode was, if I recall correctly, about a person who drank bleach. The show went to great lengths to demonize this trans woman for her otherwise harmless quirk, and treated her behavior as equivalently dangerous to that of the bleach drinker. That kind of framing did a lot of damage to my self conception. Told me that my desire for transition was not only inherently a perversion, but actively dangerous.

              So, while you might not like it, demonizing behavior done between consenting adults just ain’t it. Personally, I trust the person engaging in consensual play between grown adults more than I trust someone who conflates fiction and reality, because they think it’s yucky. The content of that play is irrelevant.

                • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  12 hours ago

                  Personally, I don’t necessarily care. I’ve see real children be incinerated by US made bombs in Palestine enough times that I struggle to care about some fictional drawings. Plus, I’ve never seen a firm causal link made between 4000 year old loli hentai, and actual abuse of children. It just doesn’t sound like any of my business. Not when the West is undeniably killing real children as we speak.

                  Weebs and GamersTM famously have less of a grasp on sex than your average porn watcher anyway. But I could always be wrong about all this, I suppose.

                  The point I’m making though, is that scurrying around, looking for some moral, ethical, line for what kinds of consensual acts between adults are “good” vs “bad” is a fruitless exercise. Was consent enthusiastically given? Is everyone involved adequately informed, and taking safety precautions? Then who cares? Not my monkeys, not my circus. People should be empowered by the systems around them to make their own decisions about their gender and sexuality, not arbitrarily restricted.

                  You expressed concern earlier about “badly misreading the room”. Just for some perspective, I have concerns about expressing my, I think very tepid, opinions about this because I know how trans women’s sexuality is twisted and warped to attack us, and I know that Hexbear is a place that can be a little trigger happy with discourse and dunking. I wouldn’t be surprised if I caught a ban for my opinions in this thread, because transmisogyny runs deep, and it doesn’t take a lot for a trans woman’s word to be twisted against her. The stakes for us are different here.

            • V112347 [she/her, it/its]@hexbear.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              12
              ·
              14 hours ago

              Ageplay is a relatively common kink, certainly in many trans kink spaces I’ve been in. If adults are risk-aware and engaging in consensual kink, there’s nothing wrong with it at all.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          20
          ·
          16 hours ago

          In general yes? There are lots of “when real, this is extremely bad and not fun at all” things that when remade into safely ritualized and/or sufficiently fantastical forms become exciting and safe ways of coping with real anxieties and fears, whether this is through some sort of ritualized roleplay or more explicit fiction and art.

        • Kuori [she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          22
          ·
          17 hours ago

          i mean, yes? is it really flagrantly immoral if (actually) consenting adults agree to participate in an activity together? like sure if someone on the street stabbed me out of nowhere I’d be pretty put out but i would consider that categorically different than asking my partner to carve her name into my thigh with a razor blade bc it gets me going even though their actions (cutting my skin) and the outcome (me being wounded) are functionally identical

          not all violence is created equal. we can understand this outside the purview of kink (violence against the workers bad, violence against the ownership class good) so I don’t really see why we should struggle with it here

        • XiaCobolt [she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          edit-2
          16 hours ago

          I saw a flagrantly immoral video the other day, where a man was visiting his parole officer who was a woman, when he got up to use the toilet she found a ring he had, that she thought he had stolen, she tried the ring on and it turns out it was magic, because her whole personality changed and she was very horny. The scoundrel knowing her consent was impaired by the magic ring, still agreed to tie her up (while fondling her!) and at the last minute he took the magic ring off her leaving her stranded and not enjoying the situation as she previously had been.

          It was all fake but those creators should be in jail.

      • fannin [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        17 hours ago

        We all accept that not all kink is ok don’t we? I don’t think anyone here thinks that preteen dragon girls who are actually 6000 is ok

        • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          23
          ·
          16 hours ago

          Anything that consenting adults do and enjoy under safe conditions is okay.

          Anything other than that is obviously not okay. The “pre-teen dragon girl” stuff is problematic because it doesn’t fulfill the “adult” requirement.

          Is it kink? That is a matter of definition, some definitions sets a discrete border between kink and abuse, other definitions allow an overlap.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    20 hours ago

    I wonder if this only extends to “IRL” porn or if it also extends to things like fanfiction and animations? I guess if the argument is to not promote choking then it makes sense to extend it to all types of porn. But if it’s only about actress welfare then it’s not clear how the law would be applied to types of porn with no actors/actresses.