As I understand it, it's either now illegal or will be illegal (in the UK) to sell/possess/something footage of two consenting adults who are not engaged in rape, but are simulating rape. They simulate this through force, words, threats, all that sort of thing.
So if that's illegal, even though it's provably not an actual rape (depending on who made it, obviously, but in theory we could call up the participants to check, or if they let the cameras keep running someone will shout "Cut" and they stop and go for a coffee), what protects similar scenes of simulated rape in books (if indeed they should be protected)?
I must say the idea of FSoG being banned does make me think there's an upside to this :p
> As I understand it, it's either now illegal or will be illegal (in the UK) to sell/possess/something footage of two consenting adults who are not engaged in rape, but are simulating rape. They simulate this through force, words, threats, all that sort of thing.
This is already a really dangerous thing. Rape is sex without consent and rape doesn't always look like a struggle with violent resistance. If enforcement looks only to a violent struggle as a requirement for labeling porn as rape porn, that gov't is reenforcing existing stereotypes about rape and sexual assault.
How someone depicts rape or how stereotypical it is is irrelevant. The dangerous component here is the limitation on freedom of expression. This horse has been beaten to death 10 million times, but here's a distillation of the argument:
If you ban, for example, all simulation of racist themes, you eliminate a certain kind of harmful imagery, which is a good thing. But this also prevents one from educating people as to why racism is wrong, by showing a depiction and how harmful it can be. It would ban things like movies about the life of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr or Emmett Till.
As relates to rape, this would ban Lifetime movies which show the gritty horrible reality of rape and the subsequent damage it does to people's lives. That violent struggle is a stereotype of rape that hides non-consensual sex as a form of rape is irrelevant to the main point: this law destroys our ability to educate and our freedom of expression.
> That violent struggle is a stereotype of rape that hides non-consensual sex as a form of rape is irrelevant to the main point: this law destroys our ability to educate and our freedom of expression.
I totally agree with your point. However, promoting stereotypes about rape does diminish our ability to educate about the facts and experiences of survivors and makes it so that causes of and solutions to rape as a form of institutional violence become obscured.
kink.com does this in all of their videos (at the beginning of each scene discuss what is going to happen and then at the end discuss how they though it went). This is a lot better than most "vanilla" porn.
Does anyone have the text of the law? Will it, for instance, be illegal for BDSM practitioners to tape their own sex acts for "private use" after this? This often involves simulated rape, albeit mutually consentual.
I must say the idea of FSoG being banned does make me think there's an upside to this :p