This week Britain introduced a controversial law restricting types of online pornography. Criticisms of these rules are many, but one complaint is that they make no logical sense. So do these new laws and their supposed rationale stand up to scientific scrutiny? It looks doubtful

The list of things banned by the rules is a bizarre one with various supposed justifications, but three of the banned things (strangulation, facesitting, and fisting) are listed as “life endangering”. The rationale appears to be that, were a naive someone to perform these acts themselves, they could potentially cause fatal injury. Undoubtedly, if you strangle someone too long they’ll die, and fisting has apparently led to fatal injury in some rare cases. I could not find any record of death by facesitting

Anchor Moy wrote:

I could not find any record of death by facesitting

LOL.

Spoiler:

I can hear the laughter now. A mass face-sitting outside Britain’s parliament: are they serious?

The answer, for anyone who dares think otherwise is: absolutely. Yes. For the new anti-porn regulations censor people without consent. Nobody has the right to take away peoples personal liberties or personal choice.

If we don't speak out now, more and more amendments are going to be added to existing laws taking our personal rights away.

In 2008 the Consenting Adult Action Network (CAAN) protested outside parliament on the latest “extreme pornography” law. This criminalised possession of images involving consenting adults, including staged acts, and screenshots from legal films.

The promise that the law would crack down on harmful imagery now rings exceedingly hollow, and revealed just how incompetent the authorities can be. In one case, an individual was prosecuted for possessing a video that featured a woman supposedly having sex with a tiger. The authorities, it turned out, could not distinguish between a man in a tiger suit and a real big cat. Still, they prosecuted, causing immense personal harm to the individual concerned. That case is now at the centre of a judicial review brought forward by Backlash and leading obscenity lawyer, Myles Jackman, on the grounds that the law breaches human rights.

Seemingly arbitrarily deciding what is nice sex and what is not nice sex, the board's ruling on 'content that is not acceptable' (p.24) effectively bans the following acts from being depicted by British pornography producers:

Spanking

Caning

Aggressive whipping

Penetration by any object "associated with violence"

Physical or verbal abuse (regardless of if consensual)

Urolagnia (known as "water sports")

Role-playing as non-adults

Physical restraint

Humiliation

Female ejaculation

Strangulation

Facesitting

Fisting