A view from the bottom

An insider's take on spanking, S&M and the new porn law
 Originally published 20th Feb 2009
This is a guest post by Pandora Blake.
[Caution: this article contains links to images that some may find offensive, disturbing and NOT SAFE FOR WORK]

"Show me a new medium and I'll guarantee it will attract censorship as soon as it becomes popular (or, in some instances, once it attracts public notice)" says Ramsey Campbell. He's writing in the introduction to Dances with Werewolves, the autobiography of Niki Flynn, an American-born writer, model - and star of "extreme" porn films. Niki is an intelligent, independent, articulate woman who has made a career as a "professional victim". She's also a friend. She has a website, a popular blog, large numbers of fans who appreciate her DVDs, photostories and internet movie clips. I act alongside her in a couple of them.

Niki and I make films in which we are punished, disciplined, abused, tormented, assaulted, abducted, tied up and generally mistreated. We do it because we love it. We don't earn huge amounts of money and no-one has ever made us do anything we didn't want to do - or at least, not more than once. You run into the occasional creep in every industry, but the world of corporal punishment porn is, in my experience, understandably careful about consent. Niki does it for her own intriguing reasons, which she describes eloquently in her writing. She finds danger compelling, and exploring the most extreme scenarios of the human condition through roleplay and acting, in a safe and consensual context, is when she feels most alive.

I can certainly identify with that. I also do it for a straightforward reason which is perhaps easier to understand, which is that I like pain.

Not everybody does. Not everyone who plays with pain likes it in the same way, either. Even I don't always enjoy the pain of a kink experience. Sometimes the point of the scene is that I won't, that I'll be frightened beforehand and, afterwards, proud of my endurance. It takes courage to surrender absolutely, however much you trust your partner. Usually because you can trust them to push you. Because you need them to push you.

I can't explain my kink to you in a single article. I've been writing about it for years and still haven't fully expressed it. Partly this is because it's as hard to make generalisations about kink as to make them about sex. I enjoy certain erotic pain experiences and I find sexual surrender profound and fulfilling, but the nature of my submission differs from partner to partner. With every person I play with, the texture and meaning of the experience is different.

I can't speak for perverts in general, or even for submissives and masochists in general. What I can tell you is that my earliest memories are my four-year-old daydreams of being hurt and helpless, that kink has been a core part of my identity even before I knew what it was. I can tell you that I'm not a victim of violent abuse, and I'm not a rape survivor. My parents are kind and liberal and smart, and I was raised to ask questions and critique the arguments I was presented with; this isn't about re-enacting some traumatic event of my childhood.

I can also tell you that it is absolutely possible to consent to suffering. People consent to suffering all the time. We risk broken bones to go skiing; we get tattooed; we fall in love. We get drunk even though we know the hangover will be horrible.

I'm an independent, self-employed, over-ambitious perfectionist. I work hard and play hard and set myself tough goals. I need the profound emotional release that comes from, just for an evening, having no responsibilities at all. I need the deep, kittenish satisfaction that comes from offering myself to my lover, doing what I'm told and being found pleasing. I need the emotional simplicity that arises from being given very simple goals. Don't move. Trust me. Endure this. Pain grounds me in my body better than any meditation technique I've ever tried. It cleanses my psyche of all the self-inflicted anxiety and guilt that accumulates during my average working week. It leaves me feeling renewed.

Being a professional fetish model is less intimate, but no less intense. When I'm working I strive to create something emotionally powerful and visually beautiful, something I would enjoy watching. I take pride in my performance, and get a kick out of testing my bravery and stamina. The heightened emotions create strong professional bonds, and there's always a lot of laughter on set.

I have a deep and abiding fascination for the more creative expressions of human sexuality. I don't need to be turned on by everything I do on camera: it's all about getting inside the mindset, discovering what it is about this particular act that gets people going, and learning to push those buttons. It's one of the most exciting challenges an actor can face.

Some of us are more adventurous than others. My friend Beverly Bacci is a well-known spanking actress, but she also models for fetishes I'd never even heard of before she told me about them. One of her regular clients is a "horror variety theatre" specialising in murder fetish. Not my cup of tea; I like my pornstars alive and wriggling. I couldn't say whether Beverly enjoys her work in that way, but her professional enthusiasm is infectious. It's an ambitious challenge in acting and make-up, with obvious appeal to those with a taste for the gothic and macabre. She writes candidly about the shoots in her blog; it's perfectly clear that no models were harmed in the making of these videos. Like me, Beverly is an independent agent, and any misguided outside attempts to deny her that agency are infantilising and misogynistic.


On Monday 26th January, the new legislation making it illegal to possess "extreme" porn came into effect. The day before, I stood in Parliament Square clutching a hand-made placard, protesting against a badly-worded and unnecessary curtailment of our civil liberties. Parliament didn't listen, of course, any more than it had listened to nearly three years of protests and discussion since the consultation was released in 2006.

Mark Mackenzie

As adult members of a democracy, we are entrusted with a vote in choosing our countries' leaders. We have a voice, however much it may be drowned out by others. We are granted autonomy over our own bodies, up to a point; we can eat and exercise as much as we please, smoke, drink, and cut ourselves with razors if that's what we want to do, without breaking the law. Every adult in this country has the legal right to conceive and raise children, and fill their heads with whatever ideas as they fancy. That's a hell of a responsibility.

What this government does not trust us with is sexual agency. The extreme porn legislation sends a strong message that UK citizens are not to be trusted with pictures of violent sex. The excitement might go to our little heads, and we might rush out and re-enact them with no thought for the safety of ourselves or others.

This is tremendously insulting. I'm female, so I'm used to legislation and media trying to deny me volition and agency. It happens all the time in films and TV. Now, the government is telling me that I'm not allowed to possess obscene pictures because it doesn't trust me to use them responsibly. What will the government do next? Make it illegal to rape a blow-up doll, wank over a photo of a friend or desecrate a photo of an enemy? Make it illegal to draw violent pictures, or write about extreme fantasies? Make it illegal to talk about them?

Let's think about the argument here, for a second. The one championed so passionately by Liz Longhurst and the Daily Mail, that violent porn causes violent crime. The court case into Jane Longhurst's tragic murder did not demonstrate a causal connection between the extreme porn Graham Coutts liked to look at and his act of homicide; nor has it ever been demonstrated that there is a de facto link between one act (looking at violent imagery) and another (committing violent crimes). The debate on violent videogames has raged for years without conclusion.

Everyone in the country is now affected by this law, despite the fact that the vast majority of us are not violent sexual offenders, and never will be,especially if we're female. This law has nothing to do with violent crime, and everything to do with censorship.

Censorship never works. It never has. Here's a bit of relevant history from Ramsey Campbell's introduction:

In the 50s, horror comics aimed at adults apparently had to be stopped, and so they were in Britain by the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Bill, encouraged by a newspaper outcry under headlines such as 'Now Ban This Filth That Poisons Our Children' and 'Make Bonfires of Them' (the comics, not the children), along with a persistent media claim that a gunman called Alan Poole had been influenced by his own collection of hundreds of horror comics, although in fact he owned just a solitary comic, a Western one eventually described in Parliament as 'not very alarming'.


A media campaign that uses an unexamined scare story or a single unrepresentative crime to whip up hysteria until the government feels forced to bring in extra censorship - it's a recurring turn of events. In the early 80s it was the "video nasty": while the term was coined by a publicist to sell horror fiction, it was hijacked to describe videos the public was supposed to find objectionable. The Daily Mail urged 'Ban the Sadist Videos' and clearly had the ear of Berard Braine, who referred in the House of Lords to 'a grave and growing social evil which no civilised or caring society would tolerate ... a filthy and pernicious trade' (which is to say, making and distributing horror films he didn't like).

How is a fetish movie different from any other TV of film scene attempting to realistically depict a violent event? Do we assume that all actors taking on gritty or gruesome roles must be helpless abductees with no ability to give informed consent? It's not even as if Hollywood is particularly asexual - half of the violent scenes in modern films are intended to be titillating, and to criminalise fetish porn while making an exception for classified films is to set up an explicit and unashamed double standard. The scariest thing about the extreme porn legislation is not that it assumes sexual narratives are automatically immoral, it's that the difference is defined as not being in the intention of the creator, but the mind of the viewer.

Owning a DVD of Kill Bill is fine, but owning an excerpt of the schoolgirl death scene in a folder marked "wank material" gives the police grounds to prosecute - particularly if they've already decided you're a bit dodgy and don't have anything better to pin on you. This legislation creates a thought crime in UK law, and Big Brother is watching YOU masturbate.

I'm familiar with the old excuse that some murder fetish porn and some rape porn depicts real non-consensual acts, and that's the nasty stuff this law is aimed at. Give me a break. Rape and murder are already crimes. It's stupid and dangerous to criminalise fiction just because ignorant prudes can't tell the difference. At best, this law has achieved nothing except fuel prejudice against kink, and at worst it's open to abuse or over-zealous enforcement by the whole judicial system, from street bobbies to high court judges.

The ironic thing is that in some ways kink has become increasingly acceptable. Films like Secretary and shows like Diary of a Call Girl bring fetish into the mainstream. Ever since Max Mosley successfully sued The News of the World, the press has, with some exceptions, tended to be positive. Certainly the industry has been getting increasingly progressive. Feminist porn is coming into its own; an increasing number of kinky sites are woman-led, and the internet has enabled a level of transparency and accountability that makes it very difficult to mistreat a model and get away with it. If the legislators were at all familiar with this industry rather than making uninformed assumptions from the punter's point of view, they'd know all this.

Put bluntly, the government doesn't trust us. Especially if we're doing anything it doesn't understand.

© 2009 Pandora Blake

Pandora Blake blogs about her life and films here. Read the rest of this article

The trial of Simon Walsh at Kingston Crown Court

This report is dependent on the live-tweeting from inside the courtroom by solicitor Myles Jackman (who represents the defendant) and academic sex-researcher Alex Dymock. Follow them for further updates.

Simon Walsh, barrister and alderman of the City of London, was arrested at work in April last year. It is not clear why. As a result of the arrest he was sacked from his position on the London Fire Authority. The arrest has also inevitably had serious repercussions for his legal career. Although Walsh admitted to the police that he had an interest in "BDSM, coprophilia and urethral sounding" (of which more anon), he doesn't seem to have been unusually obsessed by violent pornography. According to Myles Jackman, none was found on either his work or home computers. But he had been sent something by email. And that was enough for the Crown Prosecution Service to think it worthwhile putting him on trial at Kingston Crown Court.

Walsh is being charged with several counts of possessing extreme pornography under the notorious s63 of the 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act. This makes it illegal to possess (and looking at something on a website technically counts as possession) any pornographic image depicting animals, dead bodies or "an act which results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals." I've written about this illiberal piece of legislation on several previous occasions.

The trial began yesterday. After the prosecution barrister outlined the charges, the first witness was called. DS Callahan described how the police had accessed the defendant's hotmail account - the password having been freely given to them - and discovered an email which contained nine attachments, including images and a story about a young soldier being hanged. The email subject line read "pics of me, cbt etc" (cbt="cock and ball torture"; I had to look it up. In fact I had to look up quite a lot of stuff while preparing this report. Thank me later.) So the man sending the pictures was presumably the one depicted in the images.

Of the six charges outlined by the prosecution barrister, three involve "harm" to genitals, two feature anal fisting and one is described as an "indecent image". This relates to a photograph of a young man whose age is ambiguous; the prosecution argues that he might be under 18. Myles Jackman says that a further charge, relating to a picture of a man wearing a gas mask, was later dropped. Presumably it was too ridiculous even for the CPS. As to the other images, one involves a medical implement known as a urethral sound which (as I discover) is inserted into the tip of the penis to increase the inner diameter of the urethra and to locate obstructions in it. Count two involved a "metal restrictive device around testicles." This is something known more informally as a "cock ring". Google Images may come in helpful for illustrative purposes as long as you don't use SafeSearch. And don't tell the police.

A third picture was described by DS Callahan as showing a man in a harness with his legs apart and another man's arm inserted into his anus. There was excrement over the man's body and arm. A depiction of fisting formed the core of another case brought at the beginning of this year at Southwark Crown Court under the Obscene Publications Act. The jury in that case, after hearing from several defence witnesses, decided that the activity did not meet the ancient OPA test of "depraving and corrupting" the viewer. Lawyers at the time expected that as a result CPS and police guidelines would be re-written and that the BBFC, which rules on the legality of sex videos, would remove its blanket ban on fisting porn. None of this has happened. Instead, having failed to have fisting accepted by a jury as obscene the CPS are hoping to have it accepted as "extreme", the test for which was intended to be considerably more stringent.

The detective also read out extracts from the "hanging" story. The jury was then sent out for legal arguments. When it reconvened the next day, DS Callahan was allowed to inform the jury that the defendant had been a registered user of a website called "Nasty Kinky Pigs". This, I discover, is a social networking and image-sharing site for gay men with a taste for BDSM. No actual pigs, you will no doubt be relieved to know, are involved.

Today's main witness was a urological surgeon, Mr Paul Hegarty, who appeared for the prosecution. He had brought a box of urethral sounds with him (there are several varieties and widths), and discussed both their medical use and the health risks that they might pose in the wrong hands. They were mainly used, he said, to extract foreign objects from a patient's bladder. Among those he had come across in his career were a biro, a thermometer, some industrial plastics, a piece of wood and a catheter. He was aware that urethral sounds were also used for erotic purposes, a practice that he maintained was potentially dangerous, carrying risks of infection or injury if the sounds are not sterile or held properly. He admitted, however, that serious complications were rare. This might turn out to be an important admission. So might his statement that patients were sometimes taught to use a urethral sound on themselves, which implies that it is not a procedure that requires medical expertise to be performed safely.

Hegarty maintained that the use of a urethral sound would be especially dangerous in conjunction with a constrictive device such as a penis ring, which featured in at least one of the images under consideration. But he also said that he had never seen the use of sounds and constriction device in combination before. Indeed, he had never never (to his knowledge) seen a patient who had an injury caused by the use of a urethral sound for sexual gratification, though he had caused minor injuries himself by accident. He did not agree with a medical report produced by the defence which suggested injuries sustained in erotic play using urethral sounds was rare; he disagreed with the methodology used. He did however state that the image being prosecuted showed clear signs of lubrication having been used, which would reduce the risk of injury or infection.

That ended today's evidence; the court will resume on thursday. In the meantime, I did my own brief research into the use of urethral sounds for the purpose of sexual gratification. The practice is not as uncommon as you might suppose, or as I supposed. There is a well-developed subculture of "medical play" in which such instruments feature strongly. You can buy them quite freely on websites devoted to BDSM paraphernalia. One such outlet describes urethral play as:

an exhilarating way to gently stretch the urethra, and for men, stimulate the prostate from within. Both men and women will enjoy the scintillating stimulation when you add vibration into the mix. We carry vibrating sounds or you can add vibrations with the help of a tuning fork set.

It's worth noting that, when investing in a set of urethral sounds customers are invited to buy antiseptic wipes, lubrication and other hygienic accessories. Other sites go into more detail about the practice, giving advice on safety as well as on techniques to ensure maximum pleasure, while a number of dominatrices offer it as part of their repertoire. I won't link to any of these sites, which may contain potentially illegal images. But they're not difficult to find should you want to explore this fascinating topic any further.

From all this I conclude that, despite the CPS's wish to categorise it as life-threatening or threatening serious injury, urethral play is, if done properly, relatively safe. If a senior consultant urologist had never come across serious complications arising from the activity, but nevertheless it is regularly indulged in by a particular subculture, it is likely that the majority of those practising it are well aware of any dangers and anxious to avoid them. Of course they are. People who are into serious BDSM are after erotic pleasure, not bladder infections. There's even an acronym for it: RACK - risk aware consensual kink.

I have no idea what the rest of the trial will hold, though there will no doubt be a similarly intricate discussion of anal fisting, as there was in the January trial of "Sleazy" Michael Peacock. Already, though, some things are clear. Once again, a law intended (so Parliament was assured) to catch a small number of people with a supposedly dangerous "addiction" to pornography of extreme violence is being used to prosecute someone's private indulgence of sexual tastes that present no harm to anyone. The pictures themselves depict nothing that is not in itself legal to perform or to watch live: but of which it is, according to the prosecution, illegal to possess a photograph or a recording.

This is the kind of case, as illiberal as it is absurd, that campaigners against the law warned about more than four years ago while it was being passed. They were told that their fears were being exaggerated, that the law posed no threat to practitioners of consensual BDSM and that it would only be used in exceptional cases. This has turned out to be untrue. People with no unconventional sexual tastes have been prosecuted for receiving video-clips unsolicited on their mobile phones, and in this case, it appears, police have gone into a man's email account on a fishing expedition, turning up very meagre results but proceeded with a prosecution anyway. In its vindictiveness, and in its targeting for no apparently good reason of a prominent gay man, it recalls the prosecution in 1954 of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Peter Wildblood and Michael Pitt-Rivers, who were convicted of consensual homosexual offences in what most of us must have supposed was a forgotten dark age.

For the CPS, this case represents further evidence of cluelessness and disproportionality after last week's dismissal of the charges against Paul Chambers in the Twitter Joke Trial. It shows, once again, that the CPS guidelines are woefully inadequate when it comes to assessing the public interest. In the year 2012, a man is on trial because someone sent him, by email, pictures of himself engaging in legal sexual activities. Words fail.

Thursday update

In today's short session, DS Callahan was recalled to the witness box. The main point of contention involved the image that the CPS claim is indecent, and whether or not the defendant had even seen it. It was contained in an attachment to an email that had remained on Walsh's hotmail inbox for three years. DS Callahan admitted that the police were unable to prove that the attachment had ever been opened. The image was held on a server located outside the UK. This in itself raises questions of the meaning of "possession" - a hotmail account, after all, does not technically belong to the account holder but to Microsoft, who merely give permission to the holder to access it using a password. The CPS are unable in any case to produce any clear evidence that the attachment was opened: how this is meant to prove possession "beyond reasonable doubt" is profoundly mysterious.
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Alain de Botton's guide to porn

The writer and philosopher Alain de Botton has spoken of his desire to create a new form of pornography, one "fit for thoughtful, good human beings" and that could be "harnessed to what is noblest in us." Here, writing exclusively for Heresy Corner, he outlines his vision and offers some more reflections on the modern porn industry.

The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any pornographic film is whether or not it turns me on. To save time, and at the risk of losing readers painfully early on, let me bluntly state that, of course, no pornography turns me on in the visceral, blood-pumping, testosterone-surging, genital-engorging sense familiar to many, if not most, regular consumers of the genre. That is, needless to say, a symptom of the intellectual and aesthetic deficiency of most contemporary erotica, its increasing irrelevance. It must also be the root cause of the crisis in confidence among many of its traditional consumers, a crisis exhibited most clearly in an increasing unwillingness to pay.

There are those whose response to the alienating, ennui-inducing nature of today's pervasive internet smut is to reject it entirely, to see in its garish, unimaginative images and its hackneyed and implausible scenarios proof of porn's inherent exploitativeness or degeneracy. Or, at best, as demonstrating Schopenhauer's observation that, for most people, sexuality is a "source of brief pleasure and protracted suffering." This would be a mistake. By far the wiser course would be to harness the undoubted power of the erotic so as to turn people on to philosophy and art, to provoke deep and noble feelings. Instead of being an aid to masturbation, it could become an aid to cogitation, a genuine art form in which the viewer might emerge from watching an intense thirty-minute session of group sex with a new (and hopefully lifelong) appreciation of Proust.

To this end, I have compiled a short (and sadly not exhaustive) guide for the pornographically perplexed:

ANAL

Of all variations of sexual practice, the anal must be the most inherently futile, at least in its heterosexual manifestation. Quite apart from being, both in practice and in contemplation, somewhat uncomfortable, it is also a case of, quite literally, missing the point. To take a wrong turning, to proceed willfully up a blind alley, to mistake one's destination when it is, or ought to be, in plain view: these are the most obvious analogues of anal intercourse. How then can one explain its prevalence in contemporary porn? It is, I feel, a sure indication of modern man's fear of commitment, either to people or to causes, a preference for the gesture over the inner reality, a refusal to face facts. Anal sex is denial sex. It is sex in which the flesh might be willing but the spirit, ultimately, is weak. Transcending the anal will provide the key to a revived and truly philosophical pornography.

BDSM

As Friedrich Nietzsche so wisely observed: "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip."

CELEBRITY SEX TAPES

For Descartes, it was sufficient to think in order to be confident of one's own existence. The human being was self-determined. He or she had no need of external validation. Modern culture inverts this insight: I am seen, therefore I am. The sexual act, precisely because of its imagined intimacy, is especially vulnerable to this externalisation of perspective. Just as one cannot truly exist except in the minds of others, so to be a sexual being is to be, in some sense, an exhibitionist. Hence the paradox of celebrity. The singer or actor (male but most especially female) is available to the world (in most cases) in all senses except the sexual -- and thus not truly available at all. He or she remains a figure of remote fantasy. A celebrity without a publicly released sex-tape is thus only half-formed and so, for all his or her ubiquity, not quite real. Understood this way, the sex-tape is less a violation than a validation. It represents the visible consummation of the marriage between celebrity and public on which the modern system of fame ultimately depends. Coeo ergo sum.

FEMINISM, Pornography and

Sex might be "chiefly an affair of the man" (Schopenhauer again) but porn tends to be mainly about women. Feminists see in this evidence of misogyny and oppression. Yet outside of the porn industry, the only place one is likely to see such a prioritisation of the female experience over the male is at a feminist conference or in the women's pages of the Guardian.

FISTING

It is impossible to watch, still less to perform, the act of fisting (or impugnation, as it is of course more properly called) without contemplating the many metaphorical meanings of the fist. It was, from the first, a symbol of power. In ancient Mesopotamia, the clenched fist of the goddess Ishtar proclaimed her divine omnipotence; and already by classical Greek times boxers had discovered that, wrapped in leather, a fist made a potent weapon. More recently, a raised fist evokes feelings of solidarity, of the struggle against oppression. The fist is the instrument of liberation: it breaks through the barriers of the past. This is why the depiction of fisting has always proved especially troubling to censors.

The fist, furthermore, is about achieving the impossible. Thus in porn fisting represents the trampling of boundaries, transcending the limits which nature seems to set upon us. It is not that it is worth doing for its own sake; rather, it teaches us a valuable lesson in perseverance. One finger at a time. No pain, no gain. But it can also hold out false hope. Like the so-called American dream, it promises to everyone an earthly paradise as a reward of effort and virtue. But as Seneca was well aware, even the successful insertion of a whole fist cannot guarantee an orgasm.

GANGBANG

Group sex is the ultimate reflection of the shallowness of the consumer society, in which people are defined not by their inner uniqueness but by their outward interchangeability. In a gangbang, the ostensible goal of variety is paradoxically undermined by the repetitiveness of the action and the clone-like appearance of the participants. One may fuck one person in a hundred different ways, it seems, but one may fuck a hundred people in only one way -- or, at most, two or three.

GONZO

As is well known, "gonzo" porn takes its name from Duke Federico di Gonzaga, 16th century prince of Milan and patron of Pietro Aretino. Aretino's "Postures", the name commonly given to a sequence of erotic poems with accompanying, highly graphic, illustrations, was banned by the Catholic Church for many centuries and remains to this day a key source of inspiration for pornographers. The term "gonzo" is thus a reminder of the noble artistic tradition of which modern porn partakes and to which today's producers too rarely seek to aspire.

ORAL SEX

Whenever I watch a porn actress performing a blow-job, I am forcefully reminded of the West's problematic relationship with food. The prevalent method of "deep-throating", in which the man's penis is fully inserted into the woman's mouth, is a visual metaphor for excessive consumption, the more so given pornography's preference for outsized male genitalia. It cannot be a coincidence that the popularity of deep-throating should exist in parallel with an obesity crisis. Yet the act itself is plainly bulimic, a fact demonstrated not just by the excessive skinniness of many of the female performers but also, more significantly, because oral intercourse is often the immediate prelude to ejaculation.

SOFTCORE

Perhaps the most honest form of pornography. Hardcore porn promises what it can't ultimately deliver. Softcore promises nothing, and thus cannot leave the viewer disappointed.

WEBCAMS

The Webcam offers the most exciting, yet most tragically underutilised, vehicle for porn I know. Nothing offers more completely the prospect of real communication, a genuine (if technologically mediated) connection between producer and consumer. Yet what do we find? Bored girls going through a circumscribed repertoire of repetitive acts. Equally bored customers whose deepest, most secret fantasies turn out to be no different from anyone else's. And at the end, a sense of frustration, of utter futility. How much more fulfilling it could be if, instead of merely touching herself intimately, the webcam girl took time to open her customer's mind to the glories of French literature! Just think of the satisfaction of knowing that, at such a remote distance, one could bring another human being, not just to orgasm but to a deeper knowledge of Kant! That surely would be a pornography in which eroticism would support, rather than undermine, our higher values. A pornography which even the greatest of philosophers would not be ashamed to download.
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Off topic

Some rather strange comments have appeared beneath Laurie Penny's anti-princess rant in the New Statesman, not all of them clearly related to the subject in question. For example this from "Mr Divine", responding to "Buckskins":

I miss Stuart too .. we had some great moments. He'll look back and realise that the engage he had with me was a pivotal moment in his life. That and his new girlfriend.

The whipping scene was ace, him trying to pull me off my camel, and me whipping him on his tiny willy with my diamond tipped whip. Those were the days. But I miss his Big Issue stories and unique perspective on todays events.

Was I hard? I was hard and I was soft. You were just soft soft to him. I made him angry, and I made him laugh at himself and at those words that made him angry. He said more than once how much he enjoyed his engages with me. Of course he liked you because you were nice to him, but he loved me because I made him laugh and cry.

The site could probably do with some moderation. Just saying... Read the rest of this article

Why privacy isn't just for the rich

Cross-posted from Heresy Corner

The Daily Mail - along with several other respectable news outlets - brings us the story of Faith-Anne Lesbirel, primary schoolmistress by day and "kinky dominatrix" by night, whose unconventional second job has now led to a dressing down from the General Teaching Council. Found guilty of "unacceptable professional misconduct" (is there such a thing as acceptable professional misconduct?) she has received a two-year reprimand. She has, however - as the Mail was forced to report - "escaped being struck off." The panel also displayed a perhaps unexpected - and welcome - degree of enlightenment when it concluded that her essentially private activities did not make her a danger to children.

By most accounts, indeed, she was an excellent and well-loved teacher, working at a school in Milton Keynes. But she was also into things like domination and sploshing, and as "Mistress Saffron" advertised her services online, both on her own website and on a forum for like-minded people called "Informed Consent". It was this advertising, we are led believe, that got her into trouble. The report quotes the tribunal's ruling that "the reputation and public standing of the profession was placed at risk by your choosing to initiate and run such a website and indeed the exposure of this did in the event damage the school and the profession." The clear implication is that the "publicly accessible" nature of both her website and the online forum was responsible for bringing her activities to the notice of local parents, who complained to the school. And that her exposure was therefore her own fault.

That isn't really what happened.

Faith-Anne Lesbirel - who was also known as Faith Hamilton - carried out her BDSM activities for a long time without any of the parents or children finding out. And there was little reason why they should have found out. Informed Consent might be "publicly accessible", in the sense that anyone can view its contents without registering as a member, but it unlikely that many people would come across it without at least having a pre-existing interest in the subject. The same goes for her Mistress Saffron website. This is a niche area of the web, inhabited mainly by mistresses, their clients, and the odd tabloid journalist. Her two identities should have remained quite separate, as long as she observed a certain degree of cicumspection.

Faith may have been a victim of the Max Mosley scandal. Those who are in a position to know believe that she was betrayed by "Woman E" - also known as Mistress Abi, "Michelle" and latterly Mistress Kiera - the dominatrix who secretly recorded the goings-on in that notorious Chelsea basement as part of the News of the World sting operation. You may recall that the relationship between "Abi" and the newspaper went sour after she was unable to provide Neville Thurlbeck with cast-iron proof that Mosley's party had had a "Nazi theme". In an interview with Sky News, she said that she had never claimed that there was a Nazi theme - it was all a product of Thurlbeck's lurid imagination. Whatever the truth, it seems that the Screws pressed her to provide some additional titillating information to justify their payments to her. And so she gave them Mistress Saffron the kinky schoolteacher. Who was supposed to be a friend of hers, as well as a fellow member of the Milton Keynes dungeon sorority.

The story appeared under the headline "Miss gets strict with PVC punters" and was illustrated with pictures taken from her website. The paper predicted, not as is happened inaccurately, that "parents of the kids she teaches would go ballistic. While they’re reading their youngsters Winnie the Pooh at bedtime, their teacher is hard at it as a Miss Whiplash hooker."

The involvement of Woman E has never been officially confirmed, I should say (though the coincidence of time - May 2008 - and place - Milton Keynes - is striking). What is beyond doubt is that it was the exposure of Ms Hamilton/Lesbirel in the News of the World, not her website, that led to her departure from the school - leaving her out of a job and the children, to whom she was devoted, confused and upset. To the News of the World, it was all in a day's work, of course. As Clair Lewis - longstanding friend of this blog - says in a statement released today by the campaigning organisation CAAN, "some media people remain unconcerned about smearing people and the dangers this poses. Shame on them."

With Mosley's lawyers breathing down their neck, ruining the career of an unknown schoolteacher represented a much safer strategy than continuing to pursue that increasingly threadbare scoop. Faith-Anne Lesbirel wasn't going to sue them for invasion of privacy. She was in no position to get a super-injunction from Mr Justice Eady. She certainly didn't stand ready to petition the European Court of Human Rights to demand prior notification of embarrassing revelations. The most someone like her can hope for is a positive ruling from the largely toothless Press Complaints Commission.

Sadly, with celebrity exposés now threatened by the advance of privacy law we may see more stories like hers, with the press attempting to justify their prurient interest in people's private lives because they happen to be teachers, nurses, social workers or police officers. And while professional bodies continue to have widely-drafted - some would say discriminatory - policies against "bringing the profession into dispute", anyone falling foul of a tabloid "outing" may well face much more devastating personal reperpercussions than the fleeting embarrassment of some footballer who has visited a hooker. Read the rest of this article