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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6013 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.

On that, I was thinking about making a post discussing the optics, ethics, and logic of police physically violating people over this. Here is how that looks:

Here is a subtitles website for YouTube if you want to quickly read the exchanges. I recommend looking at the first few minutes because that's where most of the violence happens.

There is obviously no way that the behavior of the people being arrested here can be justified. It is, without any doubt, wrong. The best defense one could mount is a type of amoralism or nihilism that asserts the moral value of their behavior is 0. But it definitely is not virtuous. It is directionally harmful to themselves, whoever is depicted in the material, and anybody exposed to it.

The problem is that there are a lot of numbers between 0 and -∞. Is this response from the government proportional?

I don't know for sure, but I'm also not sure that the government knows. I think the steel-man of this behavior is that these people will hurt real children if they aren't swept up in the dragnet. But I haven't seen any scientific evidence of it, it seems quite possible that that narrative is post-hoc.

But anyway, this is what will be happening in England, and probably soon other parts of the world, for « face-sitting » videos. You can bet that they will carry over the same detection and enforcement methods for it.

I think whatever the answer to the question of what the government ought to do when this stuff is detected, there is definitely an issue with how they detect it in practice. Basically it seems like in all of the videos I linked they rely on techniques that are illegal in the EU without ChatControl. There are serious privacy and moral issues with these techniques:

  • Companies advertise private chats but monitor chats with computational methods to detect illegal content. This will now be extended to « face-sitting » content .

  • It would seem that when companies detect illicit content, they report it secretly and keep hosting it. (I may be wrong about this).

  • The government is slow with reports, often waiting months to make arrests, meaning the offender can spread it in the meantime.

It would seem to make more sense to try to stop the spread of the material? Nuke the chats of offenders, notify them they've been reported and quote the text of the law at them, hoping they completely stop? What about minors who stumble across it, maybe looking for girls their age or a little younger than them? What if they then get groomed into going down into worse material? With the current approach, it's basically arrest the minor instead of focusing on complete prevention. And indeed one of the videos features the arrest of a teenage boy.

And indeed one of the videos features the arrest of a teenage boy.

Yes, it's intended to be sexual humiliation for failing to play the market in the way old men approve of. Did you learn nothing from Adolescence (and the public's response thereto)?

It is directionally harmful to themselves, whoever is depicted in the material, and anybody exposed to it.

Point out specifically, on this doll, where the dangerous XXX-rays emanating from the material touched you.

There are serious privacy and moral issues with these techniques

Why's that? Society has investigated its own base instincts and found no evidence of wrongdoing. There's only really one way to hold them to account, and it's coup-complete.

Yes, it's intended to be sexual humiliation for failing to play the market in the way old men approve of. Did you learn nothing from Adolescence (and the public's response thereto)?

No, could you expand on that?

Sure, here you go.

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