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Last week, in its dogged commitment to a free and open internet, the UK has instituted a criminal prohibition on certain pornography in England and Wales. It is now a criminal offense to view or possess pornography that depicts "strangulation" including choking or "face sitting", incest including depictions of step siblings, and any depictions of underage roleplay. The penalty for viewing or possessing any of these categories is a prison sentence that ranges from 2-3 years. Publication of these materials has a punishment of up to 5 years in prison.
Before a conservative cheered the prohibition of pornographic materials as a buttress against the immorality of modernity I'd remind him it is worth keeping in mind the context. The UK has been on a tear the past couple decades when it comes to regulating the internet. These efforts did not go without results, culminating most recently in the Online Safety Act of 2023 which pushed an age-verification regime. The OSA is not limited to porn sites to ban minors, but also potentially hits app stores, vendors, payment intermediaries, and more that extends the tendrils of the state into the internet.
Feminists and Labour politicians who hate violence against women, think-of-the-children conservatives, Christian organizations, and Ofcom the regulatory agency which, surprisingly, tends to voice support for more regulations-- what do these constituencies all have in common? It's not the weirdest coalition to lock arms in solidarity, but it's strange bedfellows. Public choice theory stays winning. Many are saying.
I can't claim abstinence, but I am not a big fan of porn. I don't think productions involving toasters are a social good and children should not watch porn. However, what I suspect laws like this to be in practice is to function as a carve out for a censorious state with neurotic apparatchiks to punch up criminal charges whenever they feel like. The next time Tommy Robinson gets picked up for violence they can hit him with the lude pornography laws. There will be no reduction of Violence Against Women when so many report sexual choking as consensual and pleasurable.
If you peruse internet commentary on the Crime and Policing Act 2026 you will find a lot of people who agree with me. From reddit to X, everyone has criticisms that this is selective or ineffective. If you stopped there you wouldn't know that some surveys indicate the majority of Brits support the ban, if not the criminalization. To properly do this experiment Brits must go full bore with social taboos, reverse the sexual revolution, and enforce criminal statutes to that effect. Reinstitute sodomy laws. The cowards will never.
I'm not the first to note that it's pretty funny that watching two porn actors pretending to be adult step-siblings (not even blood relatives) is now illegal in the UK; meanwhile an outright majority of Pakistani Brits are married to their first cousins. A relative of mine teaches at a British school with a large Pakistani population, and he's told me that rates of deafness (because of consecutive generations of inbreeding) are through the roof.
From an acquaintance who was a porn director in the 'good old days' before Onlyfans, the step-sibling stuff just became popular since it was maximal taboo for minimal actual requirements of the acting talent. It let you shoot essentially boring vanilla stuff and got the same niche bump that a lot more onerous stuff would do otherwise.
I've heard that before, that they think it's an easy way to just add an extra tag. But doesn't it also detract? Like, a lot of people are going to be sketched out by that, even if it's just thrown in for a few lines. It seems like an extremely weird niche that for some reason they all went for.
Grist for the mill for my conspiracy theory that China is pushing incest porn as part of a broader effort to promote dysgenic behaviour in the West.
I agree! Or at least, I think it's plausable. I wish there was a way we could find more evidence. Maybe someday soon we can use AI to analyze every single porn video to find where the incest stuff was coming from?
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