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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

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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.

In George Orwell's 1984, a key theme is sexuality in opposition to fascism. In real life, every fascist society is puritan regarding sex (exceptions?), because it's in the definition: fascism is nosiness, interfering with the citizen's private lives, even the most intimate. Fascists at best don't care about others' intimacy, at worst they have a control fetish. Why should anyone care about what degenerates do, consensually, apart from them?

In Project 2025, one of the most notable goals is banning pornography, along with other police state measures. Who knew it was actually a blueprint for the UK?

Meanwhile, I'm sure this will be selectively enforced (Andrew would still be a prince if he was merely caught with fake step-sister porn), and waste resources as prison cells get filled with "dangerous" (/s) screen-watchers. The UK could instead work on improving its economy, promoting national pride, or actually protecting women and children*.

* I support preventing children from watching degenerate porn, and only oppose most age-verification laws because of their privacy-violating yet ineffective implementation. UK lawmakers are probably aware that some children will see porn from their adults' screen...but should be aware that some children will see their parents having sex, and the correct course of action is obviously not to ban sex, but threaten such parents with neglect.

This is a common misconception but for German Nazism it is wrong (dont know about Italian/Hispanic fascism). The Nazis rejected Christian morality and also Christian sexual morality like castity/celibacy. After the war the 1950s were very social conservative, but this was a backlash against the Nazis and Religion/Churches had the moral highground after the horrors of the war. It was the next generation and the 1968 movement who conflated both to have their moral high ground and leftist social/sexual revolution.

Here is a text of a Spiegel article you can translate:

https://archive.is/xsz8I

The young American journalist Howard K. Smith, who traveled through Germany in 1937, was quite taken aback by the images he encountered at the Haus der Kunst (House of Art) in Munich. In his memoirs—published in the United States in 1942—Smith wrote that Nazi art "lived solely and exclusively off two themes: pornography and militarism."

Smith’s account contradicts common assumptions regarding sexual morality under National Socialism. For a long time, Hitler’s ideology was considered hostile to pleasure.

The children of the Nazi-perpetrator generation fashioned this image in the 1960s, when they took to the barricades to protest against the uptight attitudes of their parents—and, above all, against an Adenauer-era republic that chose to forget its own history.

According to U.S. historian Dagmar Herzog, there was no overarching "hostility toward sexuality" in Nazi Germany. On the contrary, the majority of Germans at the time were actually "spurred on and encouraged" to "seek out and experience sexual pleasure." This applied, of course, only to those Germans who were heterosexual—and, furthermore, blond and blue-eyed, possessed a "Nordic" appearance, or could at least prove that their ancestors were "Aryan."

Much to the dismay of the churches, the new regime saw no issue with young "Aryans" sleeping together before marriage or having other sexual partners while married. Quite the contrary: the prevailing philosophy was that the sooner they learned how much pleasure could be derived from procreation, the better. The Nazi youth organizations were intended to serve as training grounds and playgrounds. Within the Hitler Youth, it was actively encouraged for young Germans to engage in sexual activity—or, as Hitler put it during his monologues at the Führer’s headquarters, to "try things out." A 1937 report on the Hitler Youth by the social democrats in exile noted that "promiscuity is the effectively accepted norm."

In the course of her research, historian Dagmar Herzog uncovered an internal, "strictly confidential" directive from 1934, addressed to the female leaders of the League of German Girls (BDM). It explicitly instructed them to encourage teenage girls to engage in premarital sexual intercourse.

The Nazis’ response to male homosexuality was more restrictive and infinitely more brutal. Shortly after seizing power, they made gay men fair game for the male-only, thuggish squads of the SA and SS. At the end of 1934—just months after the gay SA leader Ernst Röhm was shot dead on Hitler’s orders—the Gestapo established a dedicated commission to combat homosexuality. Acting on denunciations, this Gestapo unit compiled lists of names and kept suspected meeting places under surveillance. In Berlin alone, they estimated there were 200,000 gay men.

The Italians were not puritanical by the standards of their day; the actual-fascist Spaniards weren't either, but they were in coalition with Catholic theocrats who wound up taking over the state.

'Hostile to pleasure' seems like an odd description of a party that instituted policies like Strength Through Joy.

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