Control

"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free...to a time when truth exists, and what is done cannot be undone...From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink--greetings!"

George Orwell, 1984

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In today’s installment of your favourite online magazine “Nude Totalitarian Weekly” we have two new juicy topics for your entertainment:

First:

Geography, History and hard subject disciplines for all U.K. primary school children are going to be abolished. The curriculum will be “slimmed down” and knowledge and facts will no longer be of paramount importance. Instead these subjects will be replaced by free form “human, social and environmental” learning, based on practical exercises and play. The only way children under eleven will be able to study traditional geography and history will be for parents to send their children to independent (private) schools (which no-one will be able to afford anyway.)

The problem of course is that if you take away a person’s history, you take away their sense of belonging. If History is erased, how are our children going to understand their origins? If Geography is abolished, how will children learn where their world comes from and how it was formed? As The Spectator Magazine opined, a thorough study of history and geography is far more important for innovation, democracy, freedom and human rights than practical “play based” learning. The mind boggles as to what sort of education our children will receive. Will they learn the truth, or just the selected version of “truth” that our Government chooses to feed them?

Second:

It was announced today that yet further heavy duty legislation will be introduced next year to “crack down on offensive and harmful online activity.” Our culture secretary announced that he will be negotiating with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites. So before you dismiss this as irrelevant, it appears that our new rules may well be your new rules too.

Options being discussed between both countries' administrations are:

1.Giving film-style ratings to all individual websites, so that this web site, for example, would be forced to have an “18+” rating (I’m not sure what the American equivalent is:“R”?) O.K. So far it doesn't seem too bad does it? But wait...

2.All ISP’s would be forced to offer internet services where the only websites accessible are those deemed suitable for children. The onus would be on ISP’s to regulate the web sites (I’ve no idea how they are supposed to pay for this – the cost would be phenomenal) and failure to comply would result in prosecution. Indications are that Google (who are currently responsible for policing what is acceptable and unacceptable on their search engine) would be only too glad to hand over the responsibility of regulating the internet to someone else. So it looks like the ISP’s will be forced to be the internet police of the future. In essence, the U.K. Government is seeking a PG (Parental Guidance) rated world, whereby the public would be unable to access any web site which had above a PG rating. If this came into force, it may well mean that web sites like ours would have to close because our ISP would threaten to pull the plug on us because of our mature content.

Regulation of the Internet. We all knew it was coming. Our freedoms are about to be re-written.

"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."

George Orwell

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Images are of Lou Lou

Church Ladies of the World Unite!

We are having a nice Christmas thanks, notwithstanding everyone appears to have a nasty cold. Thanks to all for your nice Christmassy wishes!

I wasn’t actually going to post today, but as 85% of our readers are American, I felt compelled to mention the new section 2257 regulations, in case some of you don’t yet know about them. Yes they affect all who photograph nudes, yes they affect the majority of people reading this.

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Honey B

The basics appear to be that the existing but stringent record keeping requirements of the adult industry will now apply to anyone who shows images which display "the pubic area in a lascivious nature."

Dave Swanson has (very kindly) been covering this extensively during Christmas week, and has provided in-depth analysis. Start reading here and work your way forwards. I urge you to read the comments too, as many readers have also supplied helpful information. You can read the law in its entirety here and Dave and George have provided the latest amendments here.

As Dave has noted, the wording of the legislation has been left intentionally vague. Nevertheless it is likely that most nude photographers will fall under its umbrella. What is worrying is not keeping proper records can get you charged with something that can ruin your career. Failure to keep the proper records would result in a charge under the sex crimes category, which in turn can lead to a fine and/or a lengthy prison term. Who wants to take the risk of that? My guess is that many photographers will simply stop shooting nudes, which is exactly what the Church Ladies want of course.

Yeez, and I thought our new laws were bad! Whereas I fully support detailed record-keeping (Stephen and I have been recommending this for a long while now, in the interests of covering one’s ass) this is nothing short of the State trying to regulate internet nude photography. At the risk of inflaming you all at Christmas time, this is pure censorship by the back door. I thought our totalitarian ways might sneak across the pond eventually, but I never thought it would happen so quickly. What happened to your First Amendment, or am I missing something here?

What interests me is the timing on this. We have our own new Criminal Justice Act Law coming in at the end of January (which criminalises bondage and certain fetish photography), and then in March you guys have a similar infringement of your liberties. As I said, interesting timing indeed. The U.K. and U.S. Church laydeez have formed a coalition and are plotting to regulate nude photography by the use of vague wording and scare tactics.

Welcome to our brave new world :-)

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HoneyB, displaying her pubic area in a lascivious nature

Note for U.K Photographers:

As far as UK photographers are concerned, I have been reading up on this, and if you host your web site within the U.K. then you do not need to comply with this legislation. We only have to comply with 2257 if we ship prints to the U.S., which we will not be doing after this because section 2257 conflicts with certain clauses in our own Data Protection Act which explicitly prevents making publically available or passing on any third party (model's) data without their explicit knowledge and consent (for every print sold.)

However, it appears that section 2257 does apply outside the U.S. to any photographers who host their pictures on U.S. servers, and in theory this includes the likes of Blogger, Wordpress, MM and Deviant Art. U.K. photography sites are therefore increasingly becoming section 2257 compliant (despite the conflict with U.K. law), and stating this on the front page of their web sites.

Destroyers of Art

A mammoth epic of a post. Sorry, but this is important. And for those who thought I was being paranoid last time, well, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

You’ll all have noticed that Rich’s photography has become significantly less…er…edgy this year. No bondage or fetish in recent months, nothing kinky, just art nudes. In fact the poor chap has been given quite a bit of flack on and off blog. His work has been accused of being bland and repetitive. Readers have encouraged him to “step outside the box,” experiment more, the edgier the better. Kink is good, the commenters say. More bondage please! Eight out of ten readers love a bit of kink ‘n’ spice, don’t ya know?

Well, those days are over, my friends.

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Banned?

Yesterday evening Rich sat down at his computer, loaded up every image he had ever photographed, and permanently erased a significant chunk of his work, specifically any images involving bondage, BDSM and any images which so much as hint at (pretend) violence. I have therefore lost a significant chunk of my port, and we are seriously looking at which blogs and web sites we will link to and view in the future.

From 26th January 2009, certain clauses from The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 will come into effect, which makes it illegal in the UK to possess certain types of sexually explicit imagery, specifically what it calls “extreme images.”

An “extreme image” is defined as one which portrays in a realistic way any of:

1.An act which threatens a person’s life
2.An act which results in or is likely to result in serious injury to a person’s gentials, anus or breasts
3.A sexual act with a corpse or animal (which will not be discussed here because no-one will dispute that this is revolting and should be banned)

And the image…

1. Is grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character
2. Has been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal

The law was originally designed to prevent rape and sexual assault by men who look at such images online and who then go out and commit these acts. No-one is denying that the law is well intentioned, and I fully agree that men who commit these acts should be locked up and the key thrown away forever. The central issue here is not whether violent and abusive behaviour is defensible. Clearly it is not. Rather, the issue is “whether this proposal will criminalize non-abusive activities engaged in by consenting adults,” and moreover, whether this law now forbids photographing these consenting adults and then distributing (showing) the images.

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Think we’re making mountains out of molehills? Think we’re paranoid and fussing about nothing? Not so. Remember the new anti-terrorism and surveillance laws which we were told would only ever be used to monitor suspected terrorists? This legislation is now being used by council officials to monitor our waste bins, whether we live in the right catchment area for our schools, and other trivialities which were never originally intended, but which because of the loose wording of the terrorism legislation, can now be used to watch everyone, everywhere. This new law is simply another form of censorship by our beloved nanny state seeking to control us.

Despite superficial reassurances by the Government, it remains unclear just how far reaching this new Criminal Justice Act is going to be. It is certain that it does apply to bondage images (see analysis below), but to what extent depends on the exact image in question. There is no definite rule, each image is judged by the subjective interpretation of “a reasonable person,” and so confusion reigns. The wording of the Act is so woolly and nebulous that the probability is such that it will (in time) completely re-write what images we can create, publish and look at, and it seems that the Government is leaving it up to the courts to define the exact meaning of “an extreme image.” What is clear is that the Act not only covers movies and photographs and online material, but books too (our spicy fetish book collection is about to shrink rapidly.)

The fallout from this legislation is a mess. There has been a lot of publicity in the press, a great deal of supposition and no-one quite seems to know the full extent of how this will apply to fetish photographers. One thing is clear. It will apply to ALL photographers, and it is irrelevant if a sexual offence is being committed or not. The image merely has to appear realistic to a reasonable person. Although it won’t (in theory) affect BDSM between couples (they may still keep pictures of themselves engaged in consensual acts) they are not allowed to publish or distribute them. And being photographed by someone else is also very risky, no matter how artistic the photographs are. Prominent British erotic photographers such as Ben Westwood certainly believe that most bondage photography and a large chunk of photographic erotica will be banned by the Act.

Rich and many other UK photographers we know are not taking any chances. We can’t afford to have this tested in court. We can’t even risk mere suspicion of Rich having ever photographed violent sexual images. The mere accusation of being violent pornographers would surely ruin us, because our internet-based day job depends on our computers, and if the Police suspect that we are in possession of such material which violates the Act, then they will have the power to enter our premises, seize all our computers, files, books and equipment, and keep them for inspection indefinitely. No kidding. It really is that scary.

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Banned?

Another point which has been made clear is that viewing these images, and thus loading them onto your cache, all count as having them on your computer (The Government guidance tells us that if we come across such images by accident, we should permanently delete them immediately.) To that end, from the end of January next year, we will be forced to stop linking (and in theory viewing) blogs or web sites which might potentially fall under the nebulous “catch-all” of this legislation. Yes, even though that means we can’t view the work of some of our friends in case they decide to venture into the world of edgier erotica. Hotel Room Nudes latest (most excellent) post falls under this Act, as do some of my dear friend Lela Rae’s stunning (but incredibly realistic) recent work. The only blogs we will be able to link to are those few which we are sure will only publish squeaky clean art nude or glamour images (because these are the only ones we know are safe.)

Likewise the forthcoming Fluffytek Awards will almost certainly be our last, simply because after January we won’t be able to feature any blogs which may contain images that could be classified as “extreme” under the law. Sorry folks, but our hands are tied (Ha!) It may be that in time UK photographers get clarification on this issue, but until the case law has worked through the courts, we simply do not know exactly what images we are not allowed to "possess."

Do BDSM images glamorize and encourage violence? Will the world be a better place without such art? If anyone is thinking of hurting another person, surely that comes from the product of a psychologically disturbed mind, not from looking at pictures? If a guy sees a picture of a woman being tied up, does that mean he’s then going to go out and grab a woman, and then tie her up?

To me photographs of bondage and BDSM are just erotica. Such images are not sinister if all parties consent. It’s just a bit of fun. We’re not perverts, we don’t even indulge in BDSM ourselves. We’re just ordinary people trying to create art.

Should we really be banned from photographing and publishing kink?



Further Links:

When Does Kinky Porn Become Illegal?
Backlash
Photographer Ben Westwood's Protests

Seagulls, Sand, Sex, and Surveillance

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment...it was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.”
George Orwell, 1984

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A British couple were jailed in Dubai yesterday for having sex on a beach after an all-you-can-drink champagne brunch. Not quite the done thing to do in public when living in a strict Muslim country, methinks.

In complete contrast, a UK Police Review report "Guidance on Policing Public Sex Environments" published new guidelines this week recommending that the police turn a blind eye to couples having sex in public. Considering there are copious numbers of CCTV cameras on pretty much every cliff top and beach in the UK, I now have a vivid vision of the police officer at the station regularly drooling over his nightly dose of beach-porn videos on the surveillance cameras whilst sipping on a nice, steaming cuppa Tetley tea.

“Calling Constable Smith…Come in? Report. Report. How’s the surveillance shift tonight Winston?”

“Good to hear from you Superintendent O’Brien! It’s pretty quiet here Sir. Nowt to see apart from camera twelve. Justa couple of birds on the beach...”

“Birds? Well, I’m glad they’re proving stimulating, Constable. I know the nightshift can be a rather dull affair.”

“Cor, woooweee, Super! Looky at that 'un …I didn’t know they could do it as fast as that. Lordy that’ll make a heckuva mess in a minute.”

“Is a seagull fouling the lens, Constable?”

“Nah, Super, but I can report it’s really hammerin’ away down there … blimey it’s a speedy bugger, an’ such flexibility too, I didn’t think it was capable of such maneuvers…I wonder how it does that? Maybe I should go look-see.”

“Is it really worth investigating further Constable? After all, it’s only a bird. What interest can it possibly be?”

“Yeah Boss, but you should see its chest…I’ve never seen one that big. It’s just not normal.”

“Speckled or grey, Constable?”

“Difficult to tell from this angle, guvnor, although I can see a nice flush on its breast…”

“I didn’t know you were such an ornithologist, Constable?”

“Ah, funny you should mention that Super, it’s a new hobby I’ve taken up just this week. It’s bloody amazin’ what you can see on all these little cameras. Ya learn somethin’ new every day in this job. A new growth experience for me, Boss. In fact it’s very useful practical trainin’, if ya know what I mean?”

“Good, Winston, very good. I’m very glad to hear you’re finding your job satisfying.”

“Oh yeah Boss! I can vouch I’m totally, utterly satisfied. In fact I reckon all officers would benefit from this sorta on-the-job learnin’…”

“An innovating new training regime you mean? Gosh yes, Constable. What a jolly spiffing idea! Let’s mention it at tomorrow’s Ingsoc Divisional meeting. Make it so! A full report on my desk by 9 a.m. please. Do make it detailed, won’t you?”

“I’ll make it truly graphic, Boss, I promise…”

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I last had sex on Bournemouth beach in 1984 (oh the irony!) It was 1.30 a.m. on a warm moonlit night after a rowdy beach party. There were big, foamy white waves and no cameras. It took weeks to get the sand out. Those were the days, eh?

Damn, I feel old.