Penny

Name: Penny (Women's Views editor)
Age: 32
Occupation: Editor
Lives: London

How would you describe your sexuality?

A surprise, for one thing. Until my mid-20s I thought I was pretty much asexual. I had a lovely boyfriend but the physical side of our relationship I found incredibly frustrating for no reason I could name. At the same time, images which I found disturbing kept floating across my mind - fantasies of bondage and domination, with myself on the receiving end. Without even consciously considering the issue, I worried I must be some kind of anti-feminist degenerate, and squashed my unwanted impulses as best I could.

Unsquashing them took some time (see below). But the first time I negotiated BDSM activities with a man, who then tied me up and hurt me in some of the ways I had been fantasising about, I did not transform into an abused doormat. Instead I rediscovered a dormant capacity for play.

What role has 'violent pornography' played in your life?

I'm a fairly infrequent user of pornography, but without it I might never have come to understand and accept my sexuality. The key step in that process was my acquisition of a home internet connection. It took a while, but one day when one of those curious mental images floated into view, I did an internet search - and suddenly I found the contents of my head spread out before me. There were other people who liked this stuff! Women who did what I wanted to do! It was similar to the excitement of finding the blog of my favourite cartoonist - only on a much larger and more emotional scale, because of the unnecessary fear and loathing I'd felt towards my own sexuality.

I'm not pretending that I have never come across material that I find disturbing, or that I think that because my use of 'extreme' imagery is sane and responsible everyone else who looks at the same pictures is a model citizen. But the alphabetical list of folders in my browser Favourites goes "Authors, BDSM, Clothes", and if the BDSM sites need to be banned for public safety then we'd better ban those sites about Authors and Clothes too, because Shakespeare is riddled with murderous violence, and contemporary fashion leads to the size zero problem. I find Titus Andronicus disturbing and prefer Macbeth, but I'm not lobbying for the former to be censored. In the same way, I dislike grisly Hollywood movies but enjoy BDSM imagery, and don't believe that banning either is a solution to real-world crime.

What do you think of the UK government's proposal to ban 'violent pornography'?

Politically, it's an attempt to be seen to 'do something' about crime without having to grapple with any real issues. Instead, the government is simply expanding the definition of criminality to include an irrelevant soft target, i.e. users of pornography.

The government evidently believes that this bill will be a shoe-in because nobody will risk defending something given as condemnatory a label as 'violent pornography'. And of course they're technically correct: given the misconceptions about BDSM prevalent in society, many people will quietly accept this erosion of their rights rather than take the risk of job loss, social vilification and family rejection entailed in standing up for them. Under the fuzzy rhetoric about 'concern' and 'protecting society', government proponents of the ban are well aware of this.

Tabloid pronouncements, propagate the myth that the only two groups of people involved in creating or viewing 'violent pornography' are mentally unstable male predators and coerced female victims. The proposed legislation harks right back to the days when female sexual pleasure was assumed to be impossible, and homosexuality a secret that had to be kept from the masses lest they go wild.

In reality there is an enormous volume of female dominant and queer BDSM erotica on the internet, along with the female submissive material. But only the latter gets any attention, because it provides a (creaky) hook on which to hang the 'protecting women and children' nonsense without which the government would frankly not have an argument for further legislation at all, since there are already laws against child porn, and the Home Office itself admits there is no evidence linking adult 'violent pornography' to violent behaviour.

The proposed legislation will persecute even those women it is supposed to save. One of the government's strangest assumptions is that it will be doing the women who appear in 'violent' pornography a favour by depriving them of their livelihoods and threatening them with jail. Some of the people with the most extensive - and easily tracked - collections of 'violent' pornography are of course actresses who keep a professional portfolio.

While it would be na�ve to say the porn industry is an ideally regulated working environment, if the government wishes to improve conditions for sex workers it should work with them directly, on positive schemes, rather than infantilising them and demonising their clients. Instead of spending my tax money on criminalizing me, why can't the government use it to fund some of the policy suggestions of the UK-based International Union of Sex Workers?

The government is expecting a substantial minority of voters - gay people, straight women, and sane, non-criminal straight men - to accept that their sexuality will be censored, shamed and criminalized, all so that our leaders have a smokescreen of 'doing something' to distract from their unwillingness to make difficult decisions about real issues. Not all of us are going to comply.

Defending pornography is not a glamorous or uncontroversial cause, and it's not something I ever envisaged myself doing, but if we don't defend this liberty, which one will we lose next?

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