UK Proposal To Restrict Internet Pornography Sparks Row

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports on the row over proposals by the UK Government to criminalize possession of 'extreme' porn. The bill, published last week, would include the prohibition of fictional depictions of violence and images of acts between consenting adults. The law would also apply to screenshots taken from a legal film, if the screenshot was made for erotic purposes. The goal is to prevent disturbed individuals from accessing content online that would trigger violent behavior. From the article: 'Labour MP Martin Salter, who has worked closely ... in pushing the legislation, rejected the BDSM community's claims their civil liberties were being undermined. He said: "No-one is stopping people doing weird stuff to each other but they would be strongly advised not to put it on the internet. At the end of the day it is all too easy for this stuff to trigger an unbalanced mind."' The bill follows from plans initially announced last August."

Comments

Prehaps instead..

[Tainek]

Prehaps it would be smarter to spend resources finding and providing care for unbalanced people, rather than banning anything (which means pretty much everything) that sets them off, No?

slippery slope here, very slippery

Re:Prehaps instead..

[JordanL]

It's very easy to pick on the BDSM community... they aren't what you would call the most upstanding citizenry in most people's minds... but isn't that kinda the point?

A real free society cares about the rights of the people they don't like too.

Re:Prehaps instead..

[UncleTogie]

ok thats fine but keep it in YOUR bedroom, not on the internet...

Do you have the Playboy Channel? I sure don't, but it was an option when I signed up for cable. I didn't want to see it, so I didn't GET it added. I'm not sure who's forcing you to browse hard-core XXX sites, but I'd take this issue up with them. If, in fact, you do NOT have someone forcing you to view this material, then why do you keep looking for it? I don't care for racism, so I don't troll racist message boards. I don't believe I'd care for dead-puppy-humping. Go figure, I never visit dead-puppy-humping sites.

Let me ask you this: What qualifications or basis do you have to make the "best" moral judgements for everyone else? I'm rather curious.

no offense if you have to pretend to rape your wife to keep her hot I dunno.

I think the last two words of that quote sum it up wonderfully. You don't understand it, so it MUST be bad for everyone ELSE. I don't understand it either. Doesn't mean I have the right to make that moral call for everyone around me....{side note, if you'd read my post, you'd see that neither my fiance nor I have engaged in this particular play style.}

You may want to think on that one for a little bit. At least one of us will be thinking about it....

btw your analogy on mental health really shows only one thing which is your ignorance on the matter.
This one was rich... While I've not had any partners ask for the "rape" scenario, I've had quite a few girlfriends get quite creative as far as fantasies go. I'm familiar with the material. As I've also had around 10 years experience in the psychiatric field, I'm quite content in keeping the analogy. You believe it's the wrong analogy? Fine. Show you're less "ignorant" than I am on the source material. Give us a more relevant analogy.

At the end of the day...

[Anonymous Coward]

"At the end of the day it is all too easy for this stuff to trigger an unbalanced mind."

Really? Can I see some peer-reviewed research papers showing such a link? (Seriously, I don't know either way - let's see what scientists say, not politicians.)

But the problem is over THERE

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

The problem is not that an imbalanced mind sees extreme porn. The problem is that the mind in question is imbalanced. Denying all minds access to extreme porn will not solve the problem...the mind in question will still be imbalanced.

And the mind in question will still be likely to cause harm.

All this law will do is create another subjective standard by which some people can be arbitrarily criminalized.

Re:But the problem is over THERE

[NMerriam]

People need some form of entertainment. Or, perhaps more accurately, a society benefits if its people are entertained. Whereas no person or society needs pornography except for the aforementioned unbalanced people.

And some people's chosen form of entertainment is pornography. You've somehow convinced yourself that only "unbalanced" people enjoy pornography, but I know of no scientific study that indicates it is anything more than just another form of entertainment that many perfectly healthy adults enjoy watching. Most surveys since the VHS days indicate that the majority of the population in western countries has viewed pornography at one point or another, and a significant fraction of the population views it on a regular basis.

There's no indication that those huge numbers of people have become molesters or otherwise scarred by their exposure. Indeed, sex crimes in the US have declined greatly as the internet became more available, which brought pornography into many homes on a dramatically more frequent and extreme basis. If pornography led to criminal behavior in healthy individuals, we should be in the middle of the most horrific crime spree of sexual assaults in the history of mankind.

The main "damage" that psychologists have found with some pornography viewers is that pornography can set up unrealistic expectations, both for what sex "should" be like and what physical ideals and -- a criticism that is similarly offered for most forms of recorded entertainment, where actors and actresses are unrealistically attractive and their lives generally are much more interesting and exciting than the average viewers'.

You sounds bit like a headmaster circa 1900, when masturbation was considered to be a horrible act children should be beaten for experimenting with. It was widely "known" at the time that masturbation led to criminal behavior, insanity, and sexual deviancy. Of course the same charges were leveled against homosexuality and every other form of sex that is outside "missionary position in marriage for procreation under the covers with the lights out". Of course there's no evidence whatsoever for such claims other than mere belief by those who espouse them.

Re:To drag it back on topic, though

[grahammarsden]

> IIRC what got the brits with their panties in a knot about extreme porn, was a case where one deranged guy watched a bunch of snuff movies, then went and strangled a woman to death.

No, that is what those who propose this law *want* you to believe.

Some facts:

1) SNUFF MOVIES ARE A MYTH!

Excuse me shouting, but in 30 years of searching by police agencies worldwide there has never been a *single* "snuff movie" found (someone being murdered for sexual gratification and then the film being sold or distributed), let alone anyone being prosecuted for it!

2) He looked at sites like "Necrobabes" and "Hanging Bitches" which are *staged* porn sites with actors posing for photos. Nobody is killed in these any more than people are killed in films like Saw or Hostel or Captivity!

3) Martin Salter MP, the guy who is pushing this law, has a clear anti-porn agenda. He has just been quoted as saying "No-one is stopping people doing weird stuff to each other but they would be strongly advised not to put it on the internet" he has also repeated the myth about Snuff Movies and claimed that "it is all too easy for this stuff to trigger an unbalanced mind" even though the original Government Consultation admitted that there was *NO* evidence that images such as this caused harm!

> I fail to see what good it does to provide movies for _that_ deranged minority.

You have this argument backwards. What you fail to see is that *NO* good will come from attempting to block imagery like this *in the hope* that it will somehow stop a "deranged minority" hurting others.

Peter Sutcliffe, the "Yorkshire Ripper" murdered prostitutes and justified it by his reading of the Bible. Should the Bible therefore be banned because it stimulates a "deranged minority" to murder??

> I'll say they're messed up in the head as it is. With or without movies, that's a disturbingly unbalanced person who gets an erection at the thought of taking a life.

Exactly, see above. These people will find justifications by one means or another. Criminalising the rest of us is not going to make a difference.