Have you ever read The Story of X by A.J. Molloy?
It tells the sultry tale of a young, naive, and beautiful American student, Alexandra (hence X) who is spending a year studying in Naples. There she is seduced by Lord Marcus Roscarrick, a tall, handsome, dominant and impossibly virile Cornish-Italian aristocrat. By page 30, Marcus is spanking X in his palazzo; by page 90, she has been initiated into a secret sexual cult, modelled on the Hellenic mystery religions, which holds glamorous BDSM orgies in the nicer parts of Italy. You probably haven’t read it, because the book is both quite silly and because it bombed in Britain and America. It did surprisingly well in France and Korea, where it still produces modest royalties. I know all this because I wrote it.
The St Trinian’s franchise should take legal advice
I did it in 2012, in about a month, when publishers were desperate to find the next Fifty Shades of Grey and offering nice money to anyone who looked as if they might provide it. The genre did not fail; my book did, in places. I mention this for two reasons. First, I’ve just co-written another erotic novel, darker this time, out in the next year or two. Second, Britain has just criminalised particular kinds of pornography on the grounds that they ‘endanger women’. Which is odd, because I know who buys these steamy books full of rough sex, and the data says it’s women – just as it is women who often watch the vids.
Since Friday, it has been a crime in England and Wales to possess or publish pornographic images that explicitly and realistically depict strangulation or suffocation, along with penetrative sex between relatives, real or pretend, and adults pretending to be under 16. You can get two years in prison for possession, five for publishing. Possession is, note, a ‘continuing act’: so anyone with an old clip on their phone had until Friday to delete it. If it’s still there today, oops, you’re a criminal.
The origin of these laws is Baroness Bertin’s pornography review, which found that porn had made strangulation a ‘sexual norm’. Ministers took this on board, and is selling the laws as protection for women ‘violated online and victimised by violent pornography’. In other words, the premise is that this material is made by men, for men, and done to women.
The numbers, as I say, undermine this thesis. In America, women are 82 per cent of romance buyers, and the fastest-growing corner of romance is ‘dark romance’, in which the ultra-dominant spanking-and-choking heroes are stalkers and kidnappers, even murderers. Haunting Adeline, about a man who breaks into a woman’s house, has sold two million copies. Men do not read these books; women love them.
The women who read the books do not stop at the page. When the Fifty Shades film opened in 2015, Pornhub’s BDSM searches rose 30 per cent among men and 186 per cent among women. Sociologists at McGill University interviewed 300 regular viewers and found women likelier than men to enjoy aggression in porn, choking included; women were also keener to seek it out in the first place.
Strangulation is potentially dangerous. The argument that video teaches teenage boys to do something harmful should not be ignored. But a law meant to protect women seems keener to infantilise them, even as it ignores reality. Aspects of the new laws are borderline surreal.
Consider a couple who film themselves pretending to do some consensual choking. They may have a defence for keeping the film, as long as they did not actually engage in strangulation or suffocation, since the Act grants a defence to participants, but if either of them shows it to anyone else, it might be five years inside.
Worse, the pictures need not be of anyone or anything real at all: for strangulation and incest, the test is whether a reasonable person would think the people real, so an AI-generated image of two adults who were never born, in an act that never happened, could garner a prison sentence, provided it is, in the Act’s word, ‘realistic’. The better the software, it seems, the longer the sentence.
Nor need the depicted incest be actual incest. Footage of two unrelated adults having sex becomes a crime when someone types ‘brother and sister’ underneath, unless it is ‘fanciful’ that they could be related. Judges will now jail people for mere words attached to an image of ordinary sex. The same, again, applies to imaginary AI non-incest, where the unrelated people are, in fact, pixels.
There is an odd exception on the list of bad incest things: cousins. Sex between first cousins is lawful, so pictures of it are lawful. Yet cousin marriage is a practice whose price is indisputable: roughly double the rate of birth defects among offspring. A Conservative bill tried to ban cousin marriage, but Labour refuses to pass it, for reasons nobody in government will say aloud.
So: you may marry your cousin, conceive with her at twice the risk of birth defects, and film the sex and share it. Meanwhile, an image of two adult women, in tartan miniskirts, pretending to be schoolgirls, possibly earns several years in the clink. The St Trinian’s franchise should take legal advice. My new novel is out soon enough. Its heroine does many things that are perfectly legal in print and might be a crime on film. We are not expecting movie offers in the UK.
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