Monday, February 13, 2012 

Blocked!

It's come to my attention thanks to the good people at the Open Rights Group that this blog is being blocked by the mobile phone operators O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Orange for those who haven't verified their age and opted out of the default censorship on their networks. Hopefully apparent as it is that this blog isn't pornography, ORG point out that those who do opt out of the default firewall are often actually asked to "opt-in" to porn.

This blocking wouldn't be so bad if it was easier to appeal against, yet it seems as though the only way to get a site removed from the blacklist is for users themselves to complain, rather than site owners. ORG have the contact details for each of the major networks on their Blocked site, and I wholeheartedly support their recommendations for how the current system can be improved:

Phone companies should ensure that:

Labels: , , ,

Share |

2/13/2012 03:08:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, October 13, 2011 

The pornography of terror.

It's proving to be a busy three months for the good people down in Soho Square. No sooner had the BBFC rejected Tom Six's magnum opus the Human Centipede II, a decision which last week they reversed after the director offered to truncate his work, removing scenes of sandpaper masturbation and barbed-wire rape, than they're banning a slightly more serious work, Adam Rehmeier's The Bunny Game.

The two films, although both in the horror genre, could hardly be more different, despite it seems sharing the same black and white aesthetic. The Human Centipede is pure fantasy, albeit it "torture-porn" indebted fantasy; The Bunny Game is startlingly grounded in reality, to the point where the film's star and co-writer Rodleen Getsic, according to the makers, genuinely endured the treatment her character receives from the truck driver who abducts her, everything you see apparently being real. Agreeing to be branded with a hot iron for your art is not the only disconcerting apparent detail: Getsic according to some reviews has experienced abuse herself in the past, something alluded to in this piece she links to from her Twitter account.

If the making of the film was in some way meant to act as both therapy and catharsis, then it poses further uncomfortable questions for both censor and viewer: the BBFC, concerned as ever with the potential for harm, for once quite reasonably worries that "the lack of explanation of the events depicted, and the stylistic treatment, may encourage some viewers to enjoy and share in the man’s callousness and the pleasure he takes in the woman’s pain and humiliation". For the viewer, there's the knowledge that if this is part of an attempt by Getsic to turn her very real past pain into a performance while also emphasising the fact that suffering ends and life goes on, then by watching are you playing a role in something which very few therapists would advise? Are those attracted to such material complicit in deriving entertainment from the very real acts of violence committed by murderers and abductors?

Without having seen the film, it's difficult to be able to say for certain just how brutal the violence is, and whether it genuinely does break new ground in the horror endurance stakes. Unlike the also recently banned Grotesque, which fitted into the Japanese mini-genre of pseudo-snuff horror associated with the Guinea Pig series of films, it instead appears to bear a resemblance to the final act of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where the character Sally endures almost a full half hour of terrorisation at the hands of her captors, before finally escaping and experiencing the euphoria of freedom. TCM was one of the few films that the BBFC's former director James Ferman felt could not be released in any form, with the organisation's student case study revealing he described it as "the pornography of terror". What it doesn't make clear is that Ferman overruled all those under him at the organisation who felt it could be released, with the unsurprising result being that almost as soon as he retired the film was passed 18 uncut.

It's this fear of the "pornography of terror" which it seems has returned to claim a new victim. Even considering the fact that The Bunny Game is far more graphic than TCM ever was, one thing that is absurd for the board to complain about is that there's no apparent explanation for the violence depicted in the film. The idea that violence, abduction and murder can always be given such an explanation is to ignore the fact that on some occasions there is no real reason; it's simply because the perpetrator can. They may well derive and sexual and sadistic pleasure from their crimes, but that is to only partially understand why. If the film's whole raison d'etre is to portray the grim reality of what some victims have gone through, then it appears the BBFC would rather that such accounts are toned down before they can be accepted as fiction. Indeed, in passing TCM the BBFC noted that

any possible harm that might arise in terms of the effect upon a modern audience would be more than sufficiently countered by the unrealistic, even absurd, nature of the action itself.

The implication appears to be that film-makers at the extreme end of horror can't win either way. Go for too much realism and you'll be banned, while you'll also find your work cut if you cast aside reality and stitch together multiple people from mouth to anus and put abrasive materials into the mix. That adults should be able to decide for themselves what they personally can stomach and experience seems as distant an ideal as it has ever been.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

10/13/2011 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 

We need to talk about porn.

This government, by its own admission, has a problem with women. Despite being able to keep the majority of this country's men convinced that a policy of economic suicide is a fantastic idea, the women for some reason don't appear to be taking to the plan of retreating to the bunker and hoping desperately that something will turn up, probably because they're the ones losing their jobs while the retirement age is being pushed up. Austerity, inflation busting fuel bills and the prospect of working even longer for those lucky enough to still be in employment are the bleedingly obvious reasons for why support for the coalition has been slipping.

What then do the geniuses in Number 10 suggest to arrest this alarming fall in contentment? As the coalition refuses to go beyond Plan A+ on the economy, the obvious answer is to simply make a number of gestures: no one besides the incredibly easily outraged cared that David Cameron had been slightly rude to Angela Eagle and Nadine Dorries in the Commons, at least amongst those that even noticed, but nonetheless shiny head came out and apologised. Next came some slight changes to child care, which are still a couple of years away and where it's not clear where the money's coming from. Now we have the similarly slight implementation of some of the proposals made by the blessed Reg Bailey, chief executive of the Mothers' Union, in his report on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood.

If you've spotted a theme here, it might be that even though it's women the government is attempting to get back on side (itself potentially patronising), it doesn't appear as though the boys in charge could find a single one to either consult or advise them on what might just do the trick. Instead it seems as though they've just guessed, and flailed around looking for policies and legislation they'd either delayed or cast aside that at least gives the impression of doing something. Hence the latest wheeze, the adoption of an opt-in system where those who take out new contracts with any of the four big internet service providers will have to make clear that they want full access to "adult" content. Otherwise, much of the web will be off limits, behind a firewall designed to protect children from seeing explicit material.

In this the government has picked up at least one curious ally. The Guardian, the same organisation which last year brought us the Wikileaks files, deciding quite rightly that publishing American cables on Iraq, Afghanistan and general diplomacy online was in the public interest, has decided that's quite enough internet freedom as far as they're concerned. "The internet's many benefits were never intended to include the bombarding of people's homes and children by pornography", it intones. Indeed, David Cameron's modest proposal simply doesn't go far enough, especially as "the destructive effects of pornography on relationships and values, harming not just children but also adults, far exceed any liberating effect which some claim to discern".

Putting aside the fact that almost as soon as dial-up bulletin boards came into being they were used by the teenagers of their era to swap unbelievably low quality semi-pornographic images, and how you could make an arguable case that without the easy access to porn that came with it the growth of the internet may not have been as exponential as it was in the 90s, it's incredibly dubious that the overall effects are as destructive as has been claimed. As we still have an understandable if debilitating aversion to openly discussing the use of pornography, pretty much all we're left with is the two opposing sides in the debate making equally unconvincing arguments. Whether it's the "feminist" porn director Anna Arrowsmith declaring that porn is unequivocally good, or Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle du Jour, saying much the same, or the Graun's surprisingly unenlightened view, no one seems prepared to delve into the middle and do research into whether the porn free for all is having an adverse effect, either on children or adults.

For there's very little even anecdotal evidence to suggest that it's as a result of this new supposed hardcore culture that other aspects of life have becoming increasingly sexualised. It has to be remembered that hardcore wasn't legalised in this country until 2000, when internet video sharing was still in its relative infancy. Rather, the pushing of sex has come overwhelmingly from the tabloid media and its hangers-on, the very same organisations which are now so vociferous in calling for the protection of children. It takes a lot of chutzpah to complain about Rihanna and friends when tits are on every other page of certain papers, and when they follow the every movement of such upstanding role models as Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and Katie Price, all of whom have featured in their own homemade escapades.

This isn't to suggest that the internet and the cornucopia of perversions available at the click of a mouse isn't potentially problematic: while "rough" material has been around since the very beginning, there's little doubt that American produced "gonzo" porn (and it is overwhelmingly American made porn which is the most widely distributed on the internet, even if European porn is equally guilty and may well have even started the trend) has had an effect on the genre as a whole. Where once it was rare for a film to feature anal sex, it's now probably rarer for a full-length movie to not have at least one or even two scenes containing it. Likewise, the "facial" has now become so ubiquitous that it's difficult not to look for a deeper reasoning behind why almost every scene must end with the man ejaculating onto his co-star's face. Is it all about male power, and more to the point, is it having an effect on the impressionable? There's little doubt that at the very least this, along with the grooming issues which have also been picked up upon, is having an impact on the young and their expectations of sex, something which desperately needs to be properly quantified.

None of this however justifies a blanket prohibition on internet porn at the source unless you "opt-in". Not only is it doomed to failure when the technology moves faster than that which aims to block it, as such filtering will not block the sites where copyrighted material is freely exchanged, such as Rapidshare, with individuals now using social networking sites to swap links, it also makes a mockery of this government's responsibility agenda. The parents are the ones who should decide what their children can and cannot see, with filtering software being so easily available and installable; the government should not be intervening and making that decision for them, let alone in effect decreeing that adults are to be treated like children unless they expressly ask not to be. We already have the Internet Watch Foundation, which along with its praiseworthy work of filtering child pornography also blocks material which is "criminally obscene" and "incites racial hatred". Giving ISPs the power to block effectively whatever they feel like with government approval almost invites censorship.

Equally, blocking porn, even if popular with women, is hardly going to win back their support. 79% of women might want an opt-in system (PDF), but 53% thought it would be easy to get round, as it would be. The last government was authoritarian but ineffective; this one seems determined to carry on repeating the error.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

10/12/2011 11:33:00 pm | | | links to this post

Friday, September 30, 2011 

In the Garden of Eden...

Ah, the BBFC. Not only deciding what we can and can't watch, but also commenting on the shape of the bodies on display in the early naturist films:

"I think Garden of Eden would provoke very noisy reactions at tough cinemas like The Elephant. There are some unconsciously funny nudes. Especially one young lady with peculiar glutial muscles."

Arses commenting on arses is though rather appropriate.

P.S. Also see BenSix's post here, with a comment from yours truly.

Labels: , , ,

Share |

9/30/2011 03:21:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, June 08, 2011 

The censoring of a centipede.


It's most likely a indication of my slow, all but unnoticeable declining interest in "extreme" cinema that I haven't seen the original Human Centipede. Like a good few films in recent years, the hype surrounding it was that it could well be the sickest ever made. Unlike those other, mostly flaccid entries in what became known derisively as the "torture porn" genre, it wasn't an unoriginal retread, remake or homage to either a 70s exploitation piece or an 80s slasher flick. No, here was something resembling an idea, even if it was being pulled off in the confines of a traditional mad scientist/maniac plot: you can after all only be brutalised or killed in so many ways. What's more frightening than being slowly hacked to pieces by an unknown assailant? It's surely not just being deprived of the ability of any means of escape on your own, but also being forced to share the experience with others, and when I say forced I mean literally. However ridiculous and scientifically ludicrous the idea is of three people being able to survive surgically joined together at, to put it in the nicest possible way, bottom to mouth, it's a concept so horrible to the average person that it just about works. For anyone else, well, there's got to be comedy lurking in there somewhere.

Opinions differ as to just how well director Tom Six pulled off his undeniably affecting conceit, with Peter Bradshaw in the Graun, notoriously difficult to please, giving it three stars, while Roger Ebert decided it was beyond his own star system of ranking. Kim Newman, the veteran horror journalist, declared it was odd and unforgettable but never quite as outrageous as it threatened to be. Indeed, discounting the gross-out inevitability of the lead person in the centipede failing to control his bowels, there was relatively little graphic footage in the film of the necessary surgery to construct the human insect, nor much once it had been created. Everything else was left to the over-active imagination. The BBFC, that august body tasked with the always onerous duty of deciding just what we can and can't see was similarly unmoved and passed it 18 uncut. There is however a clue to just how seriously they took the nastiness Six had put to celluloid, contained in their extended classification information:

The Board has taken legal advice which indicates that THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE is not in breach of the Obscene Publications Act 1959 or any other relevant legislation. In terms of harm, the scenario is so far fetched and bizarre that there is no plausible risk of emulation.

This is in contrast to the two most recent new submissions which the board has cut, the remake of I Spit on Your Grave and A Serbian Film, neither of which it seems they sought legal advice over before issuing a certificate.

The reason for rejecting The Human Centipede II (Now it's personal, err, sorry, I mean Full Sequence) then is not that anyone is likely to emulate what's portrayed, even though that's exactly what the entire plot is based around, for Six's concept this time is that someone has been so taken with his original that they put it into actual practice. This breaking of the fourth wall, or attempt at post-modernism ala Scream, call it what you will, is what it seems has really upset the BBFC. Sure, they've dressed it up as they always do in terms of sexual violence, about the only thing they still do cut non-sex works for containing, on always questionable subjective grounds, and make much of how the Full Sequence "presents graphic images of sexual violence, forced defecation, and mutilation", unlike the original, yet you can't help but feel that it's because Six has specifically shown someone doing just that which they said was so "far fetched and bizarre".

David Cox has pretty much hit the nail on the head in his piece for the Graun. The BBFC complains that since the principal focus of the film "is the sexual arousal of the central character at both the idea and the spectacle of the total degradation, humiliation, mutilation, torture, and murder of his naked victims" that cutting any one section will still fail to make the whole acceptable. This is rather odd, as it passes hundreds of works each year that while not necessarily arousing the characters in the film are clearly aimed at stimulating the sections of certain individuals that other parts can't reach. What is it about this fictional character that makes what he inflicts unclassifiable, when numerous serial killer films on the market are just as unflinching in depicting their crimes, like Henry or Man Bites Dog? Key it seems is this passage:

There is a strong focus throughout on the link between sexual arousal and sexual violence and a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure.

A link between sexual arousal and sexual violence? You don't say? Is it really so awful that this be shown, even in what is an exploitation film? As for a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure, it seems that this is still too transgressive, too beyond the pale for the BBFC to even contemplate that it exists. It's certainly not clear from the BBFC's justification just how truly graphic the lead character's sexual arousal is shown as: we're told that he masturbates with sandpaper wrapped around his penis, although not whether this is implied or actively shown. The same is the case with the scene in which he apparently rapes the woman at the back of the "centipede", this time with barbed wire around his member, excited at seeing his walking, living shit eating machine in "action" as it were. If any of this sounds just slightly silly, going beyond even what some of the good people over at Bmezine have done to themselves then congratulations, you are just a little more mature and well-balanced it seems than the BBFC.

The problem the BBFC have is that so much of what they object to presented in this context they've passed in highly similar or distantly related genre pictures. Many horror films present the victims of their protagonists as "objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated for the amusement and arousal of the central character, as well as for the pleasure of the audience"; what are the Friday the 13th pictures and many other knock-off slashers than exercises in showing how creative the writers can be at killing their teenage fodder off? Those characters exist solely as one-dimensional beings, so unappealing and impossible to emphasise with that the audience actively looks forward to seeing them getting chopped up. Sit someone down in front of Salo who knows nothing about the film whatsoever, and would they understand at the end that it's meant to be a vicious allegory of life under fascism replete with Pasolini's despair at modern society, or would they just remember the naked children being served up a meal of their own faecal matter as the degradation they're subjected to intensifies? As for rape, is there a scene more visceral, more agonising and extended than the ordeal which Alex undergoes for nine long minutes in Irreversible?

And so, inevitably, the board is left with relying on the Obscene Publications Act, that outdated and increasingly laughable piece of legislation. The United States has the Miller test, where three separate distinct clauses have to be satisfied before any work can be defined as obscene; we rely on a jury deciding simply if a film is liable to "deprave or corrupt". During the 1980s in the aftermath of the video nasties panic perfectly respectable men and women were brought before the beak for owning, distributing or selling copies of such films as Evil Dead, Last House on the Left and Zombie Creeping Flesh, with juries deciding that such tapes could indeed do just that. Almost all of those banned at the time have now either been passed completely uncut or with piecemeal edits: the most heavily truncated while still given a certificate is House on the Edge of the Park, shorn of an astonishing 11 minutes 43 seconds for its 18. Clearly when motivated enough the BBFC can slash a film into something they deem acceptable. Notably, one of the most notorious nasties, Cannibal Holocaust, has recently been passed with only 15 seconds of cuts, with just the on screen killing of a muskrat removed as required under animal welfare legislation.

Bounty Films and Eureka!, the distributors of Full Sequence plan to appeal the BBFC's decision, taking the film before the Video Appeals Committee, another collection of the great and good. They could well have a chance: Rockstar Games successfully appealed the decision of the BBFC to reject Manhunt 2. If not though, the BBFC instead of merely deciding that the film could be successfully prosecuted as obscene ought to put their case before an actual court: let a jury decide whether it really is likely to "deprave and corrupt", harm, or even slightly desensitise a significant majority of those that encounter it. What could they possible have to lose?

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

6/08/2011 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, June 06, 2011 

Everyone else's problem.

If you thought New Labour were bad when it came to the seemingly endless policy reviews they ordered, many of them helmed by people of the moment, almost all briefly made famous by lifestyle television programmes, then the coalition has gone one better. Previous reviews on the state of childhood by Dr Tanya Byron and Dr Linda Papadopoulos have now given way to the Big One. For such an important and definitive report on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood, a truly big beast was sought. As none could be found, Sarah Teather chose Reg Bailey, head of the Mothers' Union charity instead.

Yes, if you too are scratching your head at the apparent cognitive dissonance involved in a man being the chief executive of a charity calling itself Mothers' Union, then much soon becomes clear. For Mothers' Union is nothing if not forthcoming in its actual aims, as made clear on their website:

In 81 countries, our members share one heartfelt vision - to bring about a world where God's love is shown through loving, respectful and flourishing relationships. This is not a vague hope, but a goal we actively pursue through prayer, programmes, policy work and community relationships. By supporting marriage and family life, especially through times of adversity, we tackle the most urgent needs challenging relationships and communities.

Yes, they're a Christian charity. For those who think that perhaps God has very little to do with either loving relationships or indeed, childhood sexualisation, all such complaints should be taken up with Teather and friends, although one suspects that this might be a case where Iain Duncan Smith had some influence.

Bailey at least admits that he has no special qualifications for helming such a review, other than being a parent and grandparent himself, as well as the head of a charity (he notably doesn't state its religious ethos, and the word Christian doesn't appear once in the entire document) that supports families in 83 countries. In fairness to Bailey, his introduction to the review (PDF) which follows covers its bases well: he has harsh words for the "prurient approach that has sometimes characterised the wide media coverage of these issues" and he more than once emphasises the fundamental responsibility of parents themselves to control the environment in which their children grow up in. This is a review ordered by a Conservative-dominated government, after all.

The problem that the review barely touches, if puts its finger on at all, is that for all the calls that have been made for children to be children, adults need to try to come to terms with how they project their own worries about the world they're living in onto their offspring. The report informs us that 9 out of 10 parents surveyed agreed that children were under pressure to grow up too quickly, yet it doesn't seem that the finding prompted the researchers to do the obvious thing and ask children themselves whether they felt they were under pressure to do so. The answer might well have been illuminating. For while adults fret, mainly due to how quite a considerable number yearn after their own carefree years as a child, and wish they could return to it, children on the other hand either don't think in such terms, or instead wish that they were older and so have more freedoms. I cannot at any point during my childhood recall feeling that I was not being allowed to act my age, at least within reason, or that outside influences or pressures were bearing down on me; it's only now that I look back and contemplate how quickly time passes that I regret not making more of it while I had it. I suspect this is the emotion that especially drives parents, who after all are in effect seeing little facsimilies of themselves growing up before their very eyes, into wanting them to remain in that state for as long as is possible.

As the report then can't put it as brutally as advising parents to try as hard as they can not to fuck up their children with their own neuroses in the finest Philip Larkin fashion, while still advocating proper boundaries and limits on material from whatever sources they consume, it instead either beats around the bush or puts the onus on the retailers, broadcasters and media. To be sure, they have more than their fair share of responsibility, and it is difficult to argue with the conclusion that we are living in "an increasingly sexual and sexualised culture", yet it's hardly the case that there isn't any getting away from it. Rather than it being the children pressurising the adults into giving them what they want, it seems more to be about adults demanding things that either already exist or which they can't seemingly be bothered to put in place themselves. Take the very opening of the report, where Bailey sets out the "simple" views of a child:

“I don’t know why grown-ups find it so difficult, it’s really very simple. There should be another button on the remote control like the red button so that if you see something that isn’t right on television then you can press it to tell them you don’t like it. And if more than a thousand people press it then the programme is automatically cut off”.

So said the enthusiastic 10-year-old at a research presentation from a group of children to the Review team. “It’s really very simple.”

It is indeed very simple, or at least it seems so to this simpleton. There doesn't need to be an additional button which takes the equivalent role of Caesar at the Coliseum, you already have either the "off" button or the change the channel button, neither of which it seems see much usage. Television executives, believe it or not, make decisions based on the ratings the programmes they commissioned receive. If you don't like what you're watching, switch it off or turn it over.

This it seems is simply no longer good enough. Instead, and mainly prompted by the X Factor final where two of the least sexy performances in living memory took place in front of millions, images which the Daily Mail made its hypocritical best out of, broadcasters must "involve parents on an ongoing basis in testing the standards by which family viewing on television is assessed", as if they weren't already enough compliance procedures in place. It's still difficult to understand why there was such synthetic outrage generated by the X Factor final, especially when old Top of the Pops routines by the likes of Pans People and friends could be almost as risqué nearly 40 years ago, but then all broadcasters had to face was Mary Whitehouse and her clique. Now we have Mumsnet, which doesn't just want to interfere with factual and entertainment programming, it also wants to decide what is and isn't permissible in a soap opera, for goodness sake.

Other recommendations just seem to be the kind of gestures which these reports have long settled for making in lieu of, in this case, doing something far more counter-productive and potentially inhibiting on adults making a free choice. Hence "modesty boards" are recommended for lads' mags in newsagents, which have been in freefall circulation wise for some time, despite the effect they may still have on teenage girls' perception of what boys expect, while the proposed introduction of age ratings for music videos seems to miss the point entirely. They can conceivably be too explicit for younger children, yet the older teens will have long since moved on from their wares. Bailey recommends that the "internet industry must act decisively to develop and introduce effective parental controls", but there's only so much that NetNanny type software can block; most kids will exchange material now over social-networking sites. Parental monitoring is always going to remain key, and putting the onus on others will continue to be a cop-out.

The contradictions then are manifold. Nine out of ten parents worry about children growing up too fast when asked, yet they don't really think about it, or consider concerns about sexualisation and commercialisation too much when they aren't confronted with it, as it should be. Bailey wonders why "so many parents seem to lack confidence in their ability to help their children navigate this commercial and sexualised world", but why should he be so surprised by that when not a single one of the recommendations he makes urges parents to take action themselves? Instead of empowering them to take control or even to help them overcome what are certainly in some cases irrational fears, it remains everyone else's problem.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

6/06/2011 11:11:00 pm | | | links to this post

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 

Japanese torture-porn and working out how the BBFC works.

I think I've finally managed to work out how the modern British Board of Film Classification works. After abandoning the ridiculous prejudices of previous, and most famous former director of the board, James Ferman, they realised that every so often, in return for passing "art" films that nonetheless the right-wing press get up in arms about, such as Crash, Irreversible and most recently Antichrist, they have to ban a decidedly non-art piece of trash which makes up somewhat for them not banning something else.

Hence Manhunt 2 had to be banned because the previous game had been (wrongly) accused of influencing a murder. Murder Set Pieces, the last non-sex work to be banned by the BBFC, was refused a certificate shortly after a ridiculous furore involving the BBFC passing SS Experiment Camp, a former video nasty, far more memorable for its original VHS cover art of a partially-clothed woman being crucified upside down while an SS trooper loomed behind her. And now, the Japanese horror film Grotesque has been banned only a number of weeks after Antichrist was causing Daily Mail hacks to wail despite not having seen it.

Perhaps they're all coincidences. It's probably not a coincidence that all three share the attribute that they're not very good. Grotesque, despite not many people having seen it, appears to be the latest tiresome, low-budget entry in the sub-horror genre of "torture porn", which existed before the likes of Saw, but which definitely kick-started its re-emergence. Doubtless some will link the film further back to its Japanese predecessors, such as the "Guinea Pig" series, notorious for their effects on ultra-low budgets and how often they've been mistaken for "real" snuff films, but this seems far more linkable to its American sisters. Plot, of which there isn't apparently much of one, revolves around a couple who are kidnapped and then degraded, tortured and assaulted until one is offered the chance of saving the life of the other, a distinctly Saw-like device, before, and I'm only guessing, both are in fact killed.

As for the BBFC's reasoning, it's difficult to ascertain as the statement which was previously up on their website purporting their decision has mysteriously vanished, leaving us with the Sun's mangling of the press release, or the BBC's rather slimmed down account. Apparently it presented "little more than an unrelenting and escalating scenario of humiliation, brutality and sadism", "[T]he chief pleasure on offer seems to be in the spectacle of sadism (including sexual sadism) for its own sake," and "Its "minimal narrative or character development," he continued, set it apart from such other "torture-themed" works as the Saw and Hostel movie series. Really? Have they honestly sat down and watched the most recent entries in the Saw series, which have nonsensically convoluted plots and where the deaths and torture devices are clearly came up with first and then the story woven around them? The key might well be the sexual sadism, with the BBFC still being cautious when it comes to sexual violence, but that might just be them covering themselves lest the company that submitted the film decides to appeal to the Video Appeals Committee, who overturned the BBFC's rejection of Manhunt 2.

It's also not as if highly similar films featuring high similar plots and doubtless highly similar graphic violence haven't been passed 18 uncut. One was Frontiers, a French film where two young women fall into the grasp of sadistic Nazi cannibals, as one (or two) does. The BBFC justified passing it 18 uncut with the following description:

FRONTIER(S) is a subtitled French film that has been classified '18' uncut for very strong bloody violence.

The film contains scenes dwelling on the terrorisation of victims and the infliction of pain and injury. The inclusion of several 'strongest gory images' (mutilation) preclude the possibility of a '15' classification. However, all elements in this work are containable, uncut, by current guidelines for the '18' classification.

Current guidelines state: The BBFC respects the right of adults to choose their own entertainment, within the law.

Another was Captivity, starring ex-24 starlet Elisa Cuthbert, which I remember mainly because of Peter Bradshaw's review in the Graun:

But there's a twist. The wacko has imprisoned a pretty boy too, Gary (Daniel Gillies) and, against the odds ... well, boy meets girl in the torture dungeon and the old chemistry starts a-fizzin'.

It could have been the basis for a bizarre black comedy, were it not for the chillingly misjudged porn-seriousness of everything on offer. It asks us to believe that Jennifer would want to have sex under these conditions, and furthermore asks us to believe that she would still look like a total hottie. Even after being tortured. Unconsciously, the storyline participates in the madman's gruesomely naive fantasies.


If that was Bradshaw's verdict, you can imagine what the likes of Christopher Tookey thought. Captivity was also naturally passed 18 uncut by the BBFC, who quite rightly don't get involved in matters of taste. Otherwise they might have also banned H6: Diary of a Serial Killer, a Spanish horror in which a killer takes home prostitutes and locks them in a room, strapped to a table, depriving them of both food and water. One begs, pathetically, for a drink: the killer obliges by urinating into her mouth. That was also passed 18 uncut.

Undoubtedly, the BBFC will have justified its rejection in terms of the possibility of "harm", a subjective definition if there ever was one. That it's unlikely that anyone other than a horror/gore hound, undoubtedly already somewhat jaded with the current material on offer was likely to rent or buy Grotesque doesn't enter into it. It also doesn't matter that in the broadband internet age that it's even more impossible to ban films than it was in the video nasty era, when copies of copies of copies of copies circulated, and when those who watched the grainy, almost undecipherable to watch sleaziness thought they were all the better for it. And of course, now that it's been banned by the helpful BBFC, the DVD cases in countries where the censorship laws are not so archaic, ridiculous and opaque will have the legend emblazoned across them that it's illegal in the good old United Kingdom. Achieved? Absolutely nothing, except for proving to the likes of Mediawatch that the BBFC does still ban some films, albeit ones that no one cares about.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

8/19/2009 09:16:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, June 29, 2009 

Girls (Scream) Alone.

The prosecution against Darryn Walker, the author of the story "Girls (Scream) Aloud", has collapsed without a jury even needing to be troubled by any of the evidence. Despite having had since last July to come up with a case, although it seems it didn't come to the attention of the press until last October, the Crown failed to offer any evidence after Walker's defence demolished any hope of a conviction.

It does now appear that as I wondered back then, the key factor in Walker being charged was that his story mentioned the very real girl group Girls Aloud. It's still unclear whether he first wrote the almost identical "Pieces of Candy", which has a fictitious girl group undergoing the same torture as the members of Girls Aloud do in their version, then adapted it, but regardless, it was his decision to make it "real" that led to his prosecution. According to the prosecution, it was undertaken under the fear that those merely searching for Girls Aloud might be unlucky enough to come across Walker's fevered writings, featuring the rape, mutilation and murder and all five members of the group, and so, presumably, be "depraved and corrupted" as the Obscene Publications Act requires for there to be a conviction.

The idea that either of those things was likely was always laughable. Walker's story was (and still is) contained on an archive for writing posted on the Usenet group alt.sex.stories, and even then is not easily found; search the website itself for Girls Aloud and it is not even on the first page. It is instead hidden away on the Kristen archives section of the website, which itself has a warning which states that it is filtered by most net nanny software, then on the "putrid" sub-section, which has a further warning. You won't find it on the list though, as it's been removed, presumably at Walker's request. The page itself though does still exist. Having jumped through these hoops, you then have Walker's own warning. However, by the simple fact that the CPS thought it was worth prosecuting someone for writing a bad story, the Streisand effect has taken over, with the story now mirrored and far easier to access. My post alone on the prosecution has had a large number of hits today, meaning that any intrigued younger reader wanting to read what all the fuss was about has had far more opportunity than they ever would have had before.

That truism alone, that when you try to ban something cultural you instantly make it more alluring and more desirable regardless of its quality ought to be enough to discourage the censors, especially in this age, from attempting to do so. Walker's story can hardly be defended on artistic grounds, but it can be on the grounds that it is highly unlikely, as the psychiatrist called to defend him argued, that it would turn anyone into a sexual predator. It's also completely true that it was only likely to appeal to those already interested in such material; if someone was simply searching for "erotic celebrity fan-fiction", which fills a rather specific niche on the internet for those who prefer words to pictures, they were likely to go for more easily available writing featuring the gorgeous pouting quintet, rather than that which also involved the sawing off of arms and breasts. Unpleasant as it doubtless is for those depicted to be written about in such a way by complete strangers who then share their fantasies with others, there seems to have been very little legal action taken against sites hosting such stories. Most will admit to the vanity of searching Google for their own name; whether stars themselves dig deep into the darker recesses of the internet and discover such writing is another matter entirely.

Walker though should certainly have never been prosecuted. It raises questions, not only of those who authorised the prosecution, but also of the Internet Watch Foundation, which initially brought the police's attention to the story. Supposedly, why they simply didn't block access to either the page or the site as a whole is because it's hosted overseas and because there is no international agreement on what is obscene, quite rightly, yet as we saw during the Wikipedia/Scorpions debacle, that didn't stop them then. Presumably the page was reported to them, unless they themselves came it across during one of their own trawls, and they decided that it was so terrible and so shocking that the police had to be involved. It certainly makes you wonder about those who are in charge at the IWF; if the likes of "Girls (Scream) Aloud" makes them rush to involve Inspector Knacker, what do they go through at the sight of "2 girls 1 cup" or even the video of the death of Neda? This is, it needs stating again, a completely unaccountable body that doesn't just censor child pornography, but also material that "incites racial hatred", potentially breaches the OPA, as Walker was accused of, and now "extreme pornography", since the law came into effect in January. The law has already been used, although it seems mainly to prosecute those selling beastiality DVDs along with pirated blockbusters.

Quite how much it cost for Walker to be brought to trial, let alone the police and CPS time dedicated to considering whether he should be charged over fantastical words he wrote is irrelevant when it comes to what it has done to the man himself. Regardless of his own sexual predilections and fantasies, and that he wrote such things is no indication whatsoever that he is partial to acting out anything like that his protagonists do in his stories, his life has quite possibly been ruined. Anyone now "Googling" for him when he applies for job, having lost his as a civil servant when he was charged, will soon discover he was up before the beak on the charge of writing perverted stories about a popular beat combo, which is likely to do wonders to his chances of finding employment. It ought to be ridiculous in 2009 that anyone writing fiction, even if it is fiction which features real people, should be charged with obscenity; that someone should be potentially ruined because of it is not just ridiculous, it's disgraceful. No thought however seems to have been put into this before charging was proceeded with, just as no one at the IWF presumably thought through the consequences when they boggled at the original submission to them. This ought to lead to a reform of our obscenity laws, yet if anything they seem likely to be tightened further still.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

6/29/2009 09:10:00 pm | | | links to this post

Thursday, May 14, 2009 

Hey mummy, what's a sex pistol?

I don't know a lot about art, but I know what I like. You can't help but think that's exactly what four supermarkets thought when they saw the cover art for the Manic Street Preachers' new album, Journal for Plague Lovers, above. 15 years on from the release of their opus, The Holy Bible, the vast majority of the lyrics for which were written by Richey Edwards, who went missing less than a year later, the band have finally had the courage to return to the remaining lyrics which he left behind for them. Appropriately, they decided upon using a painting by the artist Jenny Saville, who also provided a confrontational cover for the THB, a triptych of an obese woman in white underwear. The art for JFPL is undoubtedly striking; it's also quite clearly one of the best album covers in years.

Quite why the four supermarkets think that a painting of a young girl (as it is, although like with THB's art Saville has gone with both ambiguity and androgyny) that, if you don't look closely enough, has a tear rolling down her bloodied face is so potentially disturbing or challenging that it needs to be hidden behind a plain slipcase is perplexing. Presumably the defence they would rely on is that it potentially depicts an abused, bruised and frightened child, a startling image that some would find upsetting, or difficult to explain to a child and which might seem out of place staring down amidst the distinctly unchallenging covers from the CD aisle. You would imagine that would be their argument: as it is, all Asda have said is that it "wanted to be extra cautious" in case it upsets any customers, while Sainsbury's said it "felt that some customers might consider this ... to be inappropriate if it were prominently displayed". In other words, they haven't a clue how the public is likely to react; they just think that some might not like it.

In a bid to see whether they're at least being consistent, I had a look on their websites to see if they were showing the same caution online as they are in-store. To Tesco's credit, or cowardice, whichever you prefer, they aren't using Saville's painting for their main CD page link to the album, although on its actual page it's there in all its glory. Asda however, despite being "extra cautious" in store, and in fairness to them their corporate parent Wal-Mart is notoriously sensitive to which CDs and magazines it stocks in America, even when it's also the nation's biggest seller of ammunition, has the art uncensored on their main CD page. Sainsbury's and Morrisons don't seem to yet have pages up for it.

The Manics' singer quite reasonably points out that "[Y]ou can have lovely shiny buttocks and guns everywhere in the supermarket on covers of magazines and CDs, but you show a piece of art and people just freak out". Although there have been occasional campaigns to censor the front pages of "lads mags", and they're usually put on higher shelves and sometimes at least half covered, it's rare that the front pages of the likes of the Daily Star and Sport are similarly felt to be "inappropriate", despite the abundance of flesh which usually beams out from both. As for CDs, a quick browse through the current week's top 40 has some album covers which would more than benefit from being placed in a plain slipcase, and which could well offend some of the more delicate souls out there. These though are photographs of the artists themselves, although whether that word can possibly be used to describe the Pussycat Dolls should be left perhaps to the more inventive swearbloggers out there. Surely no one could possibly find inappropriate a spreadeagled P!nk, a vomit inducing horrendous photoshop disaster featuring the gorgeous pouting Dolls, or a presumably distinctly deliberately unsexy shot of Alesha Dixon in fishnets, could they? After all, these are artists which appeal directly to the supermarket demographic, where the crap is piled high and sold cheap. The Manics, who might have once been mainstream but have rather faded from their height and have followed up one of their most accessible albums with one which is the diametric opposite, are unlikely to sell by the bucketload, and so their record company and they will need every last sale. Hence they can be bossed about.

With the downfall of record shops, and the spectre of even the likes of HMV eventually falling victim to the internet, there is the danger that anything outside the vast selling stars starts to become completely ghettoised. Doubtless this will appeal to the genre nerds who already stop liking bands they formally idolised once they breakthrough, but it also threatens to greatly compromise what has always been great about music, as of everything else: the iconoclasts who genuinely do push things forward. Once, as alluded to in the song from JFPL, Jackie Collins Existential Question Time, the Sex Pistols were seen as so threatening that they were banned; it's surely a sad state of affairs that in 2009 an album cover which is simply a portrait is censored lest anyone be upset should they see it.

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

5/14/2009 10:29:00 pm | | | links to this post

Tuesday, December 09, 2008 

Wikipaedia part 2.

Almost as quickly as it was imposed, the blocking of the Wikipedia entry on the Scorpions' Virgin Killer album has been lifted. Don't imagine however that this is because the Internet Watch Foundation has suddenly decided that the image after all isn't indecent, or that regarding the context of it, it's ridiculous to now declare 32 years after its original release that it is. Their statement again says it all:

Following representations from Wikipedia, IWF invoked its Appeals Procedure and has given careful consideration to the issues involved in this case. The procedure is now complete and has confirmed that the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.
Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the UK will be assessed in line with IWF procedures.
IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect. We regret the unintended consequences for Wikipedia and its users. Wikipedia have been informed of the outcome of this procedure and IWF Board’s subsequent decision.

In other words, the only mistake the IWF is owning up to is that they overreached themselves in blocking a site that was always likely to stand up to them. While admitting that they flagrantly failed to consider the contextual and extenuating circumstances surrounding the image, they make quite clear that if the image was hosted on a server in the UK that they reserve the right to demand that it either be taken down, and/or blocked. It is, after all, in their view, in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. That the "child" didn't object at the time and still doesn't object today is irrelevant, as is the context of the image when it isn't hosted on a encyclopaedic or shopping website.

The entire case highlights the secretive and undemocratic nature of the way the IWF operates. If, rather than Wikipedia, they had simply blocked a page on a Scorpions fan site, no one would probably have been any the wiser, and even if it had been noticed, seems unlikely to have spread beyond the tech based sites. It's only because they overreached themselves and completely failed to think through the consequences of blocking a site of the size of Wikipedia that they have come so unstuck.

It also highlights the disparity between the increasing tenor of our laws and those of our peers abroad. Once the ban on "extreme pornography" comes in, our own smut purveyors which dabble in such material will be essentially out of a job, unable to know what is and isn't illegal without running up obscene legal costs. Similarly, the same reason why there isn't much of a porn industry in this country is because of the draconian and ridiculous laws on, if you'll excuse the expression, "hard" copy distribution of the finished product. The only place you can legally buy a hardcore DVD from is a council sanctioned sex shop, again usually for an obscene price. This doesn't stop mail-order or internet companies from existing, but essentially they are breaking the law by operating in such a way. There is however no such ban on you importing hardcore material from abroad, although customs can still be sniffy about the more extreme material - meaning that our overseas cousins have a monopoly on the market. Some will think there's nothing wrong with that, as after all, pornography is without doubt exploitative, but it still seems ludicrous in this day and age.

The entire episode has also shown the haphazard way in the which the IWF was founded, and its rather curious legal position. As noted by Richard Jones in the comments on the previous post, the IWF or rather its predecessor, SafetyNet, came about primarily as an invention of ISPs to avoid direct government censorship, which our ever prurient media and police were advocating once it became public knowledge the delights that the internet could offer, with the Met threatening to raid an ISP over the contents of 132 newsgroups which it considered the ISP to be personally publishing by carrying. As laudatory as this was, this also means that there is no specific legislation concerning the IWF's legal status. Agreements between the government and the ISPs themselves effectively govern its entire being and what is and isn't censored. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has said that his first intention was to send in the lawyers - until they informed him that because the IWF isn't a statutory body it isn't even clear that they can be sued. That is remarkable in itself.

Moreover, the IWF has just more or less admitted that there is very little it can do about large foreign opponents complaining and attempting to get around the bans which it might well impose, come the 26th of January. They'll have no problems banning "extreme pornography" from UK servers, but considering very little of it exists as it is in this country, Longhurst's win might well turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. If the IWF shows the same level of intellect in blocking the likes of "Necrobabes" or other such sites as it has Wikipedia, it might well find itself being shown up as ineffective as well as unaccountable. That the IWF's blocks can easily be circumvented using anonymiser websites or open proxy servers should be irrelevant.

Again, it's worth stating that this is not primarily about child pornography, or "child sexual abuse images", as the IWF term them. No one has any real problem with what are clearly abusive images of children being either censored or removed from the internet, as images or video above the "level 2" scale are, with images at the "level 1" scale being very carefully considered before they are similarly removed. It's with the IWF's extending mandate and their apparent inability to exercise what appears to good common sense. After all, shouldn't a court establish what is and isn't material which incites racial hatred before they block it, especially when the IWF has no solid legal basis? You can argue that this is what it is doing in the Darryn Walker case, but should any fictional textual material now be considered to be potentially obscene in the first place? The IWF's whole existence is based on a compromise, one that we ought to be careful before we challenge, considering the potential to make things a whole lot worse rather than better, but shouldn't there at least be legislation put forward which sets up the organisation as a separate independent legal body, like the BBFC, which can be challenged and held to something approaching account, and so the organisation's current set-up can be discussed in parliament? By bringing itself into disrepute over something so apparently inconsequential, a whole hornet's nest has been opened up.

Related:
Wardman Wire - Privatised censorship
Frank Fisher - A nasty sting in the censors' tail

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

12/09/2008 11:59:00 pm | | | links to this post

Monday, December 08, 2008 

Wikipaedia.

Another erotic album cover pose?

It occasionally takes a decision made ultimately by an underling to expose the stupidity that often underlies some of the laws which govern us - and the moronic, for it can only be described as moronic, decision by someone simply doing their job at the Internet Watch Foundation that an album cover by an otherwise almost forgotten metal band from the 70s amounts to child pornography, although of the very lowest level, resulting in the blocking of the editing of Wikipedia for sections of the UK deserves to be one of those.

The Internet Watch Foundation's main work is blocking images of "child sexual abuse images" (according to them, terms such as child pornography "are not acceptable", as apparently the "use of such language acts to legitimise images which are not pornography, rather, they are permanent records of children being sexually abused", which suggests they don't just want to censor images but words also) which for the most part, with the exception more than ably illustrated today, is uncontroversial. Less well-known however is that they also block material which incites "racial hatred", although again how much of it they actually do block is impossible to know, but also material which potentially breaches the Obscene Publications Act. The OPA, notoriously, defines an obscene publication as something which is liable to both "deprave and corrupt", something wholly subjective and which juries, notably during the 1980s, could not decide upon when the "video nasties" were prosecuted. Some found some of the films brought before them to be obscene; others decided that the exact same films were in fact, not obscene. Most recently this remit resulted in the prosecution of Darryn Walker, author of a short story depicting the kidnap, rape and murder of the pop group Girls Aloud, apparently first reported to them and passed by them onto the police. His trial is upcoming.

That decision was one of the first to alert us to the vagaries of an apparently unaccountable organisation which still deigns fiction to be liable to bring out the inner Daily Mail reader in us all, but the blocking of the "Virgin Killer" cover is far more instructive of what might be yet to come. According to the IWF, the Virgin Killer cover amounts to level 1 indecent image of a child, as defined by the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Level 1 images depict "erotic posing with no sexual activity". Whilst all the successive levels involve actual sexual activity of one variety or another, level 1 is, like the OPA definition, utterly subjective. Is the girl in the image posing erotically? Quite possibly. Even if she is however, surely the extenuating circumstances surrounding the image should have been taken into consideration. Not only is the image over 30 years old, been available on the high street without causing any real high profile attention, but a tiny amount of background reading from the controversy that had arisen over it would have shown that the girl depicted was someone related to those behind the cover design, that she had posed willingly at the time and has no objections to it now still being used. That the image is not just available on Wikipedia, but also on Amazon (or at least was) and a dozen other places via a Google search, ought to have suggested that this should be a special case.

Instead what we have is an organisation which thinks that using a sledgehammer to crack a nut is both a good idea, and one which is only concerned by doing things entirely by the rules as set out before them. Image is, according to their thinking, obscene, therefore it must be blocked. As it isn't hosted in this country and therefore the ISP responsible cannot be ordered (surely asked politely? Ed.) to take it down, proxy servers and fake 404 pages are set-up to do the job. No thought is given to how this might affect what is after all a rather larger endeavour than a Scorpions album cover repository. The statement from the organisation doesn't even begin to delve into how the decision was came to be made in detail: instead, all they've done is added the URL to the list "provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child". Protect is the key word; that's after all what they're doing. It doesn't matter that no one would ever be prosecuted over a single image, especially one in such wide circulation; the general public but most of all their customers needs to be saved from potential "inadvertent exposure".

Where after all does all of this end? As others have already pointed out, children have throughout art history been depicted naked, perhaps, it deserves to be pointed out, in more innocent, less hysterical times. Recently the London Underground briefly banned the image of a nude Venus lest anyone be sexually aroused by the advert for an exhibition. If someone for instance posted images of their children online in a photo album (not advisable by any yardstick), and one of these was reported by the same apparent busybody that reported this one to the IWF, and was decided by one of their employees to involve an "erotic pose", would that find itself being blocked too? If "Klara and Edda Belly Dancing" was reported to the IWF, would they demure from the police decision not to prosecute after it was seized from an exhibition and potentially suggest that it also involved erotic posing?

The real concern here though is not over idiotic individual decisions, but rather that from the end of January next year the IWF will also have the power to block "extreme pornography", the kind recently outlawed after parliament abjectly failed to prevent the campaign by Liz Longhurst reaching its ultimate conclusion. This will potentially lead to the blocking of any pornographic material, which is again subjective, which portrays the threatening of a person's life or which results or is likely to result in serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitalia, to say nothing of the ban it also places on apparent necrophilia or bestiality. The Heresiarch noted at the time of the Brand-Ross frenzy that the fragrant Georgina Baillie had appeared in material which could well find itself falling foul of the law and which the Daily Mail had republished. To suggest that the law in this case is nonsensical is perhaps to be too kind; the contradictions and lunacy of banning out and out pornographic material featuring necrophilia, for example, when "art" films such as Visitor Q, which features a man killing and then having sex with the corpse of his victim (although that's not by any means an adequate explanation of what goes on and it is a rather excellent film by the consistently outrageous Takashi Miike), Kissed and Love Me Deadly are considered fine to be seen by those over 18, despite the fact that what one man deems culture another deems beating off material have to literally (or ought to be) be seen to be believed. Who has any confidence whatsoever in the IWF making sensible decisions based on the current performance?

It would be nice to imagine that it ends there. But it doesn't. There are plans to ban drawn material which depicts "abuse" or sex between child and adult, which sounds fair enough, but which is likely to be used not just to ban "lolicon", as such anime-type material is known, but hentai and other anime where the age of those involved is not so obvious. Having therefore made those predisposed to sadomasochistic material potentially breach the law to otherwise further their perfectly legal personal habits, the government seems to wish to criminalise those that enjoy the likes of La Blue Girl (already admittedly banned or heavily cut when submitted to the BBFC) or other fantastical hentai as well. Along with the plans to prosecute those who have sex with prostitutes "controlled by others" with rape, with ignorance not being an excuse, you'd similarly be excused for imagining that the government was determined to diminish sexual freedom as a whole by stealth, all so that one-off campaigners and tabloid newspapers can sleep secure in their beds knowing that perverts aren't masturbating and potentially incubating deviant thoughts which they will subsequently carry out on others. Although whether someone will ever successfully create a tentacle monster remains to be seen.

If this sounds like a slippery slope argument, suggesting that child pornography isn't so bad really honest, then it isn't. It does however come down to whether you think that the likes of the Scorpion album cover is an image of abuse, as the IWF does. If you don't, then you have reason to be concerned not just that an organisation like the IWF which claims to be self-regulating has such a potentially chilling control over the internet in this country, but also that the government seems convinced that far less exploitative imagery must also be banned for all our sakes. Then we won't just that IWF to blame and attack, but ourselves also.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

12/08/2008 09:47:00 pm | | | links to this post

Friday, October 03, 2008 

Censorship, obscenity and Girls Aloud.

(This post links to offensive material which may well be illegal.)

Since the days of Lady Chatterley's Lover, censorship in this country has become something less of a cause célèbre. This is down in part to changing mores, but also down to the changing of the virulence of the material which some seek to censor. The last real outcry against censorship was during the 1980s video nasties debacle, when films which today look for the most part tame were banned after campaigns led by the ever loathsome tabloid press and Mary Whitehouse, resulting in the Video Recordings Act, and nigh on 16 years of films which upset the sensibilities of the British Board of Film Classification's director James Ferman either being banned or cut to ribbons. Hardcore pornography was only legalised in 2000, long after it had appeared, readily available on the internet. Even today pornography where consenting actors take part in "rough" sex is routinely cut from the DVDs submitted to the BBFC. "Violent" or "extreme" pornography has recently been directly criminalised, mainly as a result of a crusade by the mother of Jane Longhurst, murdered by Graham Coutts, a man allegedly "obsessed" with such pornography. Plans to make illegal drawings of naked children as said to be in the works. Few outside of those who enjoy such material bothered to raise their voices at this latest knee-jerk reaction to a terrible but isolated event.

The written word, as opposed to the moving image, has mostly fallen out of favour as a medium to censor. The biggest threat to it now is not the law, but rather the groups likely to be offended themselves, such as in the case of Random House refusing to publish The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones, a novel involving Muhammad's relationship with his youngest wife Aisha, with the publishers who picked up the slack having their offices fire-bombed by three men who have since been charged with plotting to endanger life and damage property. The last notable novel to be banned was Lord Horror by David Britton, a fantastical tale which imagined a post-war Britain in which the Nazis had won. Quite clearly a work which celebrated freedom of thought, and as fiercely anti-fascist as anything ever written by the current jokers who worry themselves silly about Islamic fascism, its ban was thankfully overturned on appeal.

It now seems however that we have an incredibly unlikely similar martyr waiting in the wings. According to reports a 35-year-old civil servant, Darryn Walker, has been charged with publishing an obscene article. His crime is to have imagined the five members of Girls Aloud being kidnapped, raped and murdered. Writing under the pseudonym Blake Sinclair, he submitted a number of stories to Kristen's Collection, an archive of erotic fiction posted on the internet, some of which are still available, including his piece entitled "Girls (Scream) Aloud". In it, in largely tedious, turgid prose, he describes the 5 women being hung on meat-hooks, performing forced fellatio on their kidnapper, and in turn having their legs and breasts sawn off, at times perversely enjoying their torture. Interesting perhaps is that there is another, almost identical story available entitled Pieces of Candy, which imagines a fictitious girl group going through the same degradation. Whether Walker adapted the original after requests or at his own endeavour turned it into describing the real group being killed might be something the court ought to know. Another story by Walker, titled Laura's Execution, involves a teenager being sentenced to death for "pre-emptively resisting rape", with her legs being sawn off the method of execution.

These stories are, to state the obvious, extremely unpleasant. They are however far from unique online. Indeed, the directory in which they are held on Kristen's Archive is entitled "putrid", and there is a warning and additional link to click before they can be accessed. Also contained in the directory are stories, perhaps typically, involving the Nazi concentration camps, one describing the mutilation of Britney Spears, castration, necrophilia, a killer who "grills" his victims while he has sex with them, and the raping and pillaging of a convent by knights, to summarise just a few. The ones by Sinclar, or rather by Walker, are pretty average fair: not horrendously badly written, but disjointed, repetitive, and not really very interesting. Doubtless, it appears, he has something of a leg fetish, but if these are the work of a supposed dangerous mind, it's one that is hopelessly banal. The definition by which the Obscene Publications Act convicts is if the work in question would "tend to deprave and corrupt". His stories are undoubtedly depraved, but are they likely to deprave anyone else, let alone corrupt? I find that incredibly difficult to believe. Offend certainly, with enough content to make someone worry about the writer's state of mind, but not deprave or corrupt.

Mark Stephens claims in the Mail's article that "'I think it is certainly the first fantasy case because nobody has been able to come up with a fantasy so bad before." This is abject nonsense, especially coming from someone supposedly a media lawyer. Far more famous, certainly far better written as well as imaginative is a story which has been floating around since the mid-90s, describing the slow and appalling torture of of all characters, the Pink Power ranger. Described in minute detail, it is far more effective than Walker's efforts, and despite its childish targets, fluently documents very real torture techniques. It too though is hardly likely to deprave or corrupt. This is without even beginning to consider the works of say, the Marquis de Sade, or any erotic fiction which strays from the pleasure principle into physical pain, subjugation, rape and murder.

One instead has to wonder whether this prosecution has been brought purely because of whom it describes being murdered. None of Walker's other works are apparently being thought likely to deprave and/or corrupt, including, it would seem, his story of a fictitious girl group going under the exact same treatment. Is it because he has described a very real band being killed that his work is considered potentially dangerous, or is it that he himself is considered potentially dangerous because of what he has written about the group? It doesn't seem he has attempted to actually contact them, or that he poses any genuine threat to them at all, or such information would likely have been additionally made available. Also of note is that the story was apparently either reported to or found by the Internet Watch Foundation, the body set-up primarily to block access to child pornography, although also within its remit is the blocking of "obscene" material, as well as that thought to be likely to incite racial hatred. It has long been feared that the IWF could potentially move from just removing child pornography to censoring other, far less instantly objectionable content, such as terrorist propaganda, as was seemingly proposed at the beginning of this year. That the body seems to be completely unaccountable is another legitimate cause for concern.

It has to be hoped that Walker will be acquitted of the charges against him. The Obscene Publications Act has long been far too vague a piece of legislation, although the alternatives, such as the Miller test in the United States, are also far from perfect. Fundamentally though, words themselves should almost never be censored; it is not the words that are dangerous, but the potential actions that come from. However warped Walker's fantasies are, they should not be acted upon unless he is likely to act upon them. As there has been no evidence presented, or likely to be presented to suggest this, he is until proven otherwise only the latest person to be victimised for what others decide is beyond the pale. His own words at the beginning of his pieces deserve quoting:

The following is a work of erotic/sadistic fantasy set in a world in which women are disposable sex objects that exist solely for the pleasure of men. It contains themes of extreme sexism, misogyny, torture, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, murder, execution and male supremacy over women. I cannot stress enough that this is STRICTLY FICTITIOUS and in no way reflects my own views or opinions towards women.

Under no circumstances should the violent situations of this story be re-enacted in any way. ALWAYS practice safe sex with consenting partners of a legal age.

The characters in this story are fictitious and any similarities between any persons living or dead are purely coincidental.

If you are easily offended by the themes I have described above then please read no further. If you are unable to differentiate between fantasy and reality and your actions are in any way likely to be influenced by these fictional events then you are not the sort of person that I want reading my work and you should commit suicide before an innocent person gets hurt because of your sick and perverted persuasions.


Hard to disagree with.

Labels: , , , ,

Share |

10/03/2008 11:58:00 pm | | | links to this post

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Last posts

Archives

Email me
Syndicate this site (XML)
Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates