1. On December 1, Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 were introduced to subject British made online porn to the same restrictions as R18 material sold in licensed sex shops.
2. This means that some sex acts have now been banned, but only from films that are produced and sold in Britain. The UK porn industry is up in arms because porn made elsewhere will continue to be accessible online, which doesn't seem fair.
3. It's an own goal for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport who have already acknowledged that restricting access to R18 material may lead to businesses moving outside the UK's jurisdiction in order to avoid regulation.
4. The acts that are now banned include spanking, caning, aggressive whipping, penetration by any object "associated with violence", physical or verbal abuse (consensual or not), urolagnia (known as "water sports"), role-playing as non-adults, physical restraint, humiliation, female ejaculation, strangulation, fisting and face-sitting. According to the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) the last three on that list are potentially "life-endangering".
5. In what must surely constitute the most original 'sit-in' ever held outside the Houses of Parliament, on December 12, protesters staged a mass demonstration against the censorship by sitting on each others faces dressed in fetish gear and singing Monty Python's Sit On My Face song.
6. The protestors are against porn censorship in general, but they are are particularly incensed by the fact that female ejaculation has been banned from porn films, yet male ejaculation has not.
7. It seems incredibly naïve of the BBFC not to recognise the inherent sexism in that decision. Their argument was that female ejaculation was too close to water sports, but discriminating against a sexual emission on the basis of it's consistency is surely the ultimate prejudice.
8. The regulations have been introduced to protect young people from being exposed to potentially harmful content. That's fair enough because there is evidence to show that porn impacts young minds.
9. In 2013, academics from Middlesex University reviewed more than 276 research papers which addressed how porn affects adolescents and they found that it was linked to 'unrealistic attitudes about sex, beliefs that women are sex objects and more frequent thoughts about sex'. They also found that young people who view pornography tended to hold 'less progressive gender role attitudes'.
10. Bearing this in mind, the most egregious aspect of the recent amendments is the way in which the censors have specifically erased sex acts which are associated with domination and female sexual empowerment and yet they have maintained sex acts such as double penetration and bukkake - where several men ejaculate on one woman - which are synonymous with female sexual humiliation. This glaring inequity will do nothing to challenge prehistoric male attitudes to gender roles and objectification. It will, instead, confirm them