Peers vote to ban pornography depicting sex acts between stepfamily members (opens in new tab)

There are several edge cases like this in the UK.

It's obviously not legal for say, me, a middle aged man, to possess a photograph of some 17 year old girl with her tits out. Right? Except well... wait no, because what if I have a photo of my middle aged wife shortly after we first met, so the photo shows a 17 year old girl with her tits out, but the person is my wife, who is like "Yeah, remember when I had long hair? Also, I wish my tits still looked like that". So clearly that is OK after all, it's legal.

And then we have a huge row, she divorces me, now that photo is illegal after all, because I'm definitely not allowed to have photos of under-age girls with their tits out, and now the photo isn't of my wife... not any more.

Knife laws similarly have weird edge cases. 12" long sharp blade? Crime. In a Kebab shop to make delicious kebabs? Legal. I took it with me to the pub after work? Crime; Walking down the street with an ordinary Swiss Army Knife (oversize)? Crime. Tiny version of that knife? Legal. Sword, like an actual medieval sword? Crime. But I need it for this mock battle we're staging? Still a crime. No swords. Use a fake sword which can't hurt anybody or go to jail.

Edited: The "original" Swiss Army Knife is barely short enough that it's always legal, but some oversize variants are not. Like that Kebab knife you can have a lawful reason you needed to carry the knife regardless of size but I hope your reason make sense ("Self defence" is never a lawful reason to carry weapons in the UK)

The greater irony to me is how this relates to the sometimes interwoven family tree of British royalty.

In the infamous words of George Carlin:

"Selling is legal, and fucking is legal; but selling fucking is not legal."

> This is amusing to me. Legal to do, but not legal to film.

I don't know if it's amusing but the comparison is incorrect. Doing it in public is not legal. These laws are about the public part, not about the doing part.

Carlin's quote in this thread suffers from the same problem, he was eager to say something amusing, instead of correct, and did it prematurely.

That's not that unusual though. Many countries' age of consent is ~15 so you can legally do it sooner than you can film it.

First they came for the porn, and I said nothing, for I am not sexy enough to produce it. Then they came for cryptography, and I kept my peace, for I don't understand the mathematics involved. Then they came for my browsing history, and I could not hide the porn in there, as cryptography was illegal. Well fuck...

> I don't get the point of banning specific pornography niches/fetishes that are otherwise legal.

A typical practice for dictatorships to create a legal system capable of exerting pressure on any opponent.

> Are there not much more objectionable fetishes than this one?

The goal isn't to combat sexual perversions, but to silence anyone the dictatorial regime deems necessary.

You pass a law that's clearly unimplementable, and therefore won't cause much outrage, and then, as expected, the law doesn't work. But when you need to silence someone, a complaint emerges that someone accessed and distributed illegal content (some anonymous on some forum saw their IP-address doing that). In the public consciousness, the violation isn't serious (the law isn't actually implemented), so there's no significant outrage. Meanwhile, you conduct searches of the victim's home, confiscate their computers, laptops, smartphones and other gadgets, and open a criminal case against them.

And then you simply close the case, saying, "Yeah, nothing illegal was found, we are sorry". And the victim (and others) will think twice before going against the dictatorial regime next time. Typical practice, all dictatorships do it

This exactly. I don’t believe the government should be censoring porn, but I have a really hard time arguing that principle against studies that suggest it is normalizing choking and slapping women among the young men exposed to it. Why is this roleplay fetish the beachhead and not something like that?

Not that have reached the top twenty in prevalence at major sites, no. Incest porn has grown (in concert with the typical move-out age increasing due to economic pressures*) from a long-tail niche decades ago to, looking through a certain United States site’s category list today, being approximately 4x as prevalent by quantity than category ‘British’ and 2-10x more prevalent than most other categories. I would imagine that British leaders are particularly hostile to that U.S. cultural export (and we are a, if not the, top exporter in that industry!) for various reasons beyond simple disinterest in it. Monarchies tend to disfavor that which diminishes their ‘above’ness relative to commoners, and export of this now-widespread U.S. fetish into British society certainly could be estimated to have that diminishing effect by British leaders.

* For anyone looking for a controversial Econ/Psy dual-major thesis topic, inflation-adjusted wage and job losses for teens reaching their age of maturity resulted in the ‘moving out’ age spiking, which combined with known U.S. repressionist tendencies, resulted in a corresponding spike in the incest fetish export trade. (psych sidebar about how fantasies serve as an escape valve for being trapped in one's circumstances). (citations needed)

If you really want to know, see the 215 page report commissioned by the UK governments Independent Pornography Review

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creating-a-safer-...

I'm guessing that incest porn is apparently so popular in the US that it's made finding anything that isn't incest porn on US porn sites much harder for these perfectly upstanding members of the House of Lords.

Wait, am I still allowed to say upstanding members?

The UK government wants to ban porn entirely. Requiring website users to identify themselves (the age verification thing) is the first step. This is another step.

Intentional pun?

I care more about how it's warming people up for more age verification and other censorship laws. I don't really care what happens to porn producers. Most of which are exploitative, abusive, and many times downright criminal. There is a non-moral argument to specifically target porn. Your libertarian argument falls flat on it's face when you start looking into who owns the majority of porn and what they've been known for. Extend this to OnlyFans, which simply turned pimps into shareholders. This is of course the fundamental problem with libertarians in general. They stand for absolutely nothing ("allow everything" is not a stance) which makes them simultaneously the worst ally to have and a formidable enemy to societal security.

The moral argument however is worth considering. Numerous well cited studies have discussed the deliterious effects of porn consumption. Porn (over)consumption directly correlates to loneliness, especially among males, for example. It also correlates to poorer relationship outcomes, increases in the rate of STDs, and other interpersonal issues. In general, porn is no different than any other drug with all the downsides associated.

We cannot say the same for "mainstream entertainment centered on murder". Murder in general has trended down year over year since the 60s. One would be able to make a stronger counter argument: the exposure to violent media has possibly made violence less appealing. You are bordering on using "violent video games create violent people" as proof we should not view porn differently. These are not the same argument as shown by a trivial search of elsevier.

When this has come up in the past the conventional wisdom seems to be the other way around. At some point they noticed that if they slapped a stepfamily label on an otherwise normal vid that most people wouldn't care and still watch it, but it'd also attract the fetish crowd. This way they get more views for the same content.

My assumption is that it's just easy to add and widen the audience to a random shoot? You put in a few lines of dialogue at the start and change the title, and it's not seen as so taboo that viewers will turn it off from that. But it gets some dedicated perverts searching for it where they might have ignored it before, etc.

Reminds me of the time the porn "actress" doing an AMA on Reddit was innocently asked about the proliferation of incestuous porn, only to go into a meltdown over rampant anti-semitism. Someone accidentally got too close...

I typically watch porn with the audio turned off, because all of the dialog is just so bad in one way or another. I'm not there for the dialogue, and I don't care about the fake set-up before the actual porn starts happening.

They have some kind of story and buildup, the thrill of doing something morally objective, sometimes the "getting caught" aspect

... or so I have heard

> well established part of their history

Any historic examples ?

As with most laws that are "useless in practice", this just opening the door and preparing/numbing the public to laws that will further extent control and censorship on internet and everywhere else.

Age verification system just push users towards alternative websites or other ways to access it

Guess why a friend of mine who is not into computer science was telling me about him using VPN a few days ago

The law also punishes possession. Therefore, it doesn’t matter that the UK does not produce this good.

And, until very recently, seemingly encouraged by the NHS?

> A blog published on 22 September by NHS England’s Genomics Education Programme said that marriage between first cousins had “various potential benefits,” while acknowledging that children of first cousins had an increased chance of being born with a genetic condition.

https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r2061

Yup you you just can’t film them having sex

First cousin marriage is legal almost everywhere... in Canada, one can marry their niece or nephew.

Why would child pornography laws have anything to do with someone pretending to be under-18?

That's distasteful, sure, but objectively, people over-18 are not children.

Basic recordkeeping laws should make it easy to ensure that everyone involved is of age, even if they're sucking on a pacifier, wearing a diaper, and saying "goo goo ga ga".

I'm pretty leery of criminalizing possession here, especially if it's material produced before the law was passed, but even in general. It's not like the material is depicting actual abuse, where you can argue the participants would be harmed by people watching and sharing the material.

Sounds like going forward the way around this would be to emphasize in the script that all the characters aren't related by blood and that everyone is of age.

The UK has been far better at this than the US thus far.

While we were having "No Kings" rallies over our elected Epstein co-conspirator, they arrested and demoted a royal family member over it. And a separate lord.

This is worse than 1984. Next is EU, which has been happily copying all the great inventions in the matters of citizen liberty from Great Britain.