Some ministers had opposed the amendment and suggested the new ban would have been difficult to implement because, under the law in England and Wales, it is not illegal for adults who are step-related to engage in a sexual relationship.

This is amusing to me. Legal to do, but not legal to film.

For context, the (now accepted) amendment ensures that "anyone found to posses or publish pornography which shows incest between family members, or sex between step- or foster-relations where one person is pretending to be under-18, will be criminalised, with publication carrying a maximum penalty of two to five years’ imprisonment, depending on the severity of the content."

This coming from a secondary legislature with an average age of 70. I do not think this a liberal move, to put it mildly.

“Today we are sending a powerful message: we will stamp out misogynistic and harmful content online and create a safer world.”

I’ve not read the full report, but I have to presume this will ban depictions of women participating in consensual S&M on the ground that someone thinks that’s misogyny? Many times have I eagerly strapped myself on to a St Andrew’s cross and enjoyed a stimulating flogging. It feels good! It releases endorphins! It’s healthy! Sex is about playing with bodies in fun consensual ways.

Maybe it doesn’t ban women’s participation in S&M per se, but the article does mention a ban on choking which is an act which is not without risk but which consensual adults can safely engage in.

What is upsetting is the penalty is prison. For possession of porn made by consenting adults. Awful. Anyway if women can’t see depictions of things they would enjoy, they will be deprived of the opportunity to discover themselves. This is not fighting misogyny this is about enforcing one group’s views on others and criminalizing consensual behavior.

I don't get the point of banning specific pornography niches/fetishes that are otherwise legal.

Are there not much more objectionable fetishes than this one?

I am sure they each personally researched the topic very thoroughly to come to this conclusion

"anyone found to posses or publish pornography which shows incest between family members, or sex between step- or foster-relations where one person is pretending to be under-18"

This reads to me as though sex between foster-relations where one person is pretending to be over 18 is still A-OK. Wasn't it already illegal to depict sex with an under-18 year old though?

Meanwhile is still legal to distribute and claim payment for videos depicting killing, mass killing, torture, crime, drug abuse and dependency and so on. Priorities are where the highest bidder puts them.

It's interesting how restricting the commercialization of recorded sex acts (by consenting actors) has had more success over the last few decades than restricting the commercialization of recorded violence (by consenting actors).

Adding to the curiosity: there seems to be many more possible legal actions in the sex category than the violence category.

Consenting adults should be able to do whatever they'd like with each other and if they want to record it and share it, that's none of my business. How much mainstream entertainment is centered on murder? Is that ok?

Ok I'm just gonna straight up ask: do people actually like "oh no stepbrother" porn? What's with the huge proliferation of it? I only watch it because it seems like 80% of the well shot, quality porn is step family shit, and I'm wondering if I'm participating in some kind of bizarre feedback loop where step family porn happened to be a category that started getting higher quality production value, which got more views, which led to studios erroneously believing people were watching because they have a step family fetish. I just try to ignore that aspect.

The UK gets more absurd by the day.

Unfortunately this is a well established part of their history to criminalize speech they find distasteful.

This comment section will inevitably fill up with comments from people who have exactly the same thing to say, namely, that internet censorship is bad. That opinion has transcended the good-take-bad-take dichotomy: it's entered the pantheon of ideas that are seamlessly dumped into any mildly-related discussion and act as an impediment to any more interesting ideas.

Here's a more interesting idea: because the pornography that's banned by this bill is made mainly in the US and Eastern Europe, and because it's distributed by businesses that are also located outside the UK, the UK has negligible ability to impose regulations that differ from other jurisdictions on the dividing line between legal and illegal pornography. The age verification system was imposable because there are very few websites that span the porn/not-porn divide, but this new bill regulates at too fine a level to enforce.

> Under this amendment, senior tech figures who have been made aware of *none* consensual sexual materials on their websites could face large fines, imprisonment or both if they do not act to remove without good cause.

theguardian couldn't even be bothered to proof read? emphasis mine

If a conservative doesn't want to consume a product, they ban it for everyone.

Looks like the "we are just protecting children" ploy will now expand to protect even more people!

I honestly expected them to wait a bit longer before doing this

[flagged]

"Once the law comes into effect, anyone found to posses or publish pornography which shows incest between family members, or sex between step- or foster-relations where one person is pretending to be under-18, will be criminalised...."

Wouldn't the step/foster bit already be covered by child pornography laws?

What is too bawdy, too immodest, too immoral to depict in a figment of film (assuming for the moment that the state even has legitimate authority in this area)?

One of the greatest films ever made is a comedy depicting the combination of psychosis, greed, incompetence, and bigotry bringing about mass murder and nuclear holocaust, culminating with the characters planning orgies in a mineshaft.

If depicting _that_ is OK (and it is - Dr. Strangelove is one of the finest in the medium, not only in its commentary on war, but its commentary on film), how in tarnation can adult actors pretending to be step-siblings cross the line?

WHAT are you doing, step-peers?!

Anything but exposing the abusers who Epstein and Maxwell trafficked to [1] and investigating (let alone prosecuting) child abuse [2][3].

Britain has many real problems. This isn't one of them.

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/the-epstein-files-rattle-...

[2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/2/26/british-politicians...

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/28/outrag...

Help me step bro I’m stuck in 1984.

> I don't get the point of banning specific pornography niches/fetishes that are otherwise legal.

A typical practice for dictatorships to create a legal system capable of exerting pressure on any opponent.

> Are there not much more objectionable fetishes than this one?

The goal isn't to combat sexual perversions, but to silence anyone the dictatorial regime deems necessary.

You pass a law that's clearly unimplementable, and therefore won't cause much outrage, and then, as expected, the law doesn't work. But when you need to silence someone, a complaint emerges that someone accessed and distributed illegal content (some anonymous on some forum saw their IP-address doing that). In the public consciousness, the violation isn't serious (the law isn't actually implemented), so there's no significant outrage. Meanwhile, you conduct searches of the victim's home, confiscate their computers, laptops, smartphones and other gadgets, and open a criminal case against them.

And then you simply close the case, saying, "Yeah, nothing illegal was found, we are sorry". And the victim (and others) will think twice before going against the dictatorial regime next time. Typical practice, all dictatorships do it

This exactly. I don’t believe the government should be censoring porn, but I have a really hard time arguing that principle against studies that suggest it is normalizing choking and slapping women among the young men exposed to it. Why is this roleplay fetish the beachhead and not something like that?

Not that have reached the top twenty in prevalence at major sites, no. Incest porn has grown (in concert with the typical move-out age increasing due to economic pressures*) from a long-tail niche decades ago to, looking through a certain United States site’s category list today, being approximately 4x as prevalent by quantity than category ‘British’ and 2-10x more prevalent than most other categories. I would imagine that British leaders are particularly hostile to that U.S. cultural export (and we are a, if not the, top exporter in that industry!) for various reasons beyond simple disinterest in it. Monarchies tend to disfavor that which diminishes their ‘above’ness relative to commoners, and export of this now-widespread U.S. fetish into British society certainly could be estimated to have that diminishing effect by British leaders.

* For anyone looking for a controversial Econ/Psy dual-major thesis topic, inflation-adjusted wage and job losses for teens reaching their age of maturity resulted in the ‘moving out’ age spiking, which combined with known U.S. repressionist tendencies, resulted in a corresponding spike in the incest fetish export trade. (psych sidebar about how fantasies serve as an escape valve for being trapped in one's circumstances). (citations needed)

If you really want to know, see the 215 page report commissioned by the UK governments Independent Pornography Review

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creating-a-safer-...

I'm guessing that incest porn is apparently so popular in the US that it's made finding anything that isn't incest porn on US porn sites much harder for these perfectly upstanding members of the House of Lords.

Wait, am I still allowed to say upstanding members?

The UK government wants to ban porn entirely. Requiring website users to identify themselves (the age verification thing) is the first step. This is another step.