I’m just dropping in here after 10 hours after reading literally 3 comments to say lol this seems like a weird ass struggle session where “reactionaries are against kink” but like uhhhh youse guys, the porn industry is profit driven and capitalist controlled and what it chooses to depict and the frequency of it isn’t “kink” and it seems like people are weirdly defending what’s widely seen, in any other context, to be a predatory industry that needs extreme reform if not outright abolition (as it exists under capitalism), as I’ve frequently seen it spoken of due to its inherent, abhorrent exploitative nature, because they see it as like some kind of attack on “kink” (spoken of as some sort of amorphous concept)
what the fuck’s wrong with y’all, dick cheney died today go fucking celebrate or something, christ
Unfortunately this is vaguely defensible even if the overall british policy on the internet & prostitution etc is awful
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Sex work is coercive sex i.e. rape
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Advertising everyone & their grandma to choke someone out for quick thrills and lightheadedness is VERY DANGEROUS does not even distinguish between air and blood choke etc. People are way too cavalier about regularly air choking even if it is “safer” than blood choking, you need training on how to do that stuff or you can crush or bruise somebody’s windpipe
Not replying to any pro-rape comments, thx
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Guys, an evil Bougieoise state having a moral panic about a sex kink to appease it’s rabidly reactionary honkey population is actually good thing!! :D
My general stance is that pornography and sex work contains a whole bunch of contradictions. There are harmful behaviors, practices and coercions that should be policed. But an overzealous bourgeois state having a moral panic will rarely fix these issues and often overcorrect into punishing innocent people and even victims, while absolving perpetrators. Ideally any change should be driven or with input by the workers and community.
Damn, talking about kink really brings the reactionaries out of the woodwork. What consenting adults do in their spare time is their own business.
Obviously the UK is just doing this out of puritanism. If they wanted to help folks be safer, they’d run PSAs or other educational material.
Edit: I suppose this is good if applied to the porn industry, but as per usual I imagine this mostly gets weaponized against vulnerable people.
Lets say one was an industrial worker making textiles at a spinning loom. Every once in a while the fibers get caught in the loom and require manual intervention to untwist the fibers. The boss doesn’t want to stop production so they ask the worker to reach into the loom, next to the fast spinning parts, and unhook the fibers. 99% of the time the worker can do this, 1% of the time they lose their arm and it gets crushed. Should they be allowed to do this? Is it consensual when an industrial worker does something unsafe at the risk of losing their job and not making money?
From the article:
Research shows strangulation is never a safe practice, despite a widespread belief it can be performed safely. Though it often leaves no visible injury, oxygen deprivation, even for very short moments, causes changes to the fragile structures of the brain.
Multiple studies have specifically shown brain changes in women who have been repeatedly “choked” during sex, including markers for brain damage and disruptions in brain hemispheres linked to depression and anxiety.
In most cases these aren’t consenting adults in their spare time. Producing pornography is a job. These people are workers. Workers need protection and regulation from exploitative capitalists who would risk the workers bodies for profit. Is that reactionary?
Like I said, I trust the UK government to use this to protect workers about as far as I can throw them.
99% of the time the worker can do this, 1% of the time they lose their arm and it gets crushed. Should they be allowed to do this?
hot take but if a worker wants to do something dumb they should be allowed but if their boss makes them they should be crushed to death in a wine press
Removed by mod
Setting aside any safety issues (which I’m not qualified to talk about and you don’t mention), “I don’t want to see it” is a bad reason to support the state locking people up. If this is the metric by which we ban kinks, then the logical endpoint is banning depictions of pretty much any kink that exists, since by definition any given kink is something that appeals to a relatively small number of people.
Oh for god’s sake. Look, I’m all for end of the line thinking, but I don’t exactly think trying to weed out some of the more harmful and disgusting aspects of pornography is the same as banning all kinks from online porn. I don’t want to see a lot of things in my porn, which is why I don’t specifically watch them.
Legitimate question, how do we determine what is harmful and disgusting enough to lock someone up over? Because I’ve seen people say this about kinks ranging from furry to hypnosis to petplay to bondage. None of the people making these arguments ever seem to draw the same line as each other or apply any real standards of proof, it’s always just vibes based “well obviously this is harmful” type of shit which is not a good standard for subjecting people to state violence.
Good. The industry is really dangerous for actors and unsafe practices in workplaces need to be regulated. I guess this is one of the things Hexbear doesn’t agree with the CPC
None of this censorship effort is being directed against medical misinformation or reactionaries BTW. Compare this bourgeois moralism with Chinese censorship efforts. Even though their state censors go too far at times, at least they attack online misinformation and harmful shit.
The West (most of it at least) doesn’t care about misinformation or harmful content/hate speech, they even help promote it with shit like Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Cuba, and the millions of christian fascist missionaries they finance to travel around to world that spreads their hateful ideology and views to the Global South.
They just want to use the excuse of “banning pornography” to crackdown on LGBTQ+ media.
To be fair, China bangs all pornography
There’s actually a really funny loophole/phenomena where China bans all outright sexual pornography, but it doesn’t ban the adjacent non sexual bondage erotica type videos and photos. So you can find videos of a “relationship drama where a woman is kidnapped by another woman and menaced” type thing that is super horny but never sexual. Then a funny subset is there are people who dress up as the police or PLA etc and do horny trials of spies/corrupt official etc. They pretend it’s a morality type play, but it’s just entirely horny. Then photos of these hit the Western internent and they get presented as proof of China’s secret purges. When it’s just a bunch of horny larpers and BDSM nerds.
China bangs all pornography
If Sigmund Freud were alive in 2025 he would love glide typing
That’s my point exactly. They have a blanket ban which makes much more sense than kink policing.
Although to be honest, I’m no expert on the Chinese legal code so I don’t want to make too many comments on their approach. I’ve seen much conflicting information.
China banning porn is like the single issue thing I don’t agree with the CPC on, but from what I gather it’s super easy to use a vpn in country and sidestep the firewall so it’s really whatever.
idk i haven’t read my kollontai yet but i kinda think the first act of a proletarian government should be to ban sex work. obviously if you’re making sex tapes not for survival it’s a little different but
there’s also drugs for fun, but in both cases it’s fairly understandable why they arrived at their prohibitions. it isn’t religious moralizing.
there are also… creative sidesteps ive seen in some chinese works
I’ve never seen actual porn from China and now I’m curious.
im moreso talking about yuri stuff like GTB and please bully me miss villainess.
A comment above I made added some context
It wouldn’t even take much either, most of the tech platforms can reasonably detect hateful and shitty content. They could block it before anyone sees it, they just choose not to until it’s reported. Government could easily place a burden upon the operator to pre-emptively remove content just the same as they’re doing here with kink porn and they would enforce it.
Most tech platforms and western governments even promote reactionary content. A neutral no censorship approach would be an improvement over the current situation.
They’re banning the pornography but are they banning searching for the pornography?
Like, whatever man if they wanna try and stop it from existing by blocking it fine, they’ll fail. Are they gonna arrest me if I look up and find asphyxiation porn though? Am I going on a sex offenders register for viewing consensual adults doing consensual kink?
More important question than the poor hard done by pornography producers tbh. I don’t give a fuck about them particularly.
Didn’t they ban face sitting porn and some other years ago?
Jesus what’s next banning blowjobs because it’s a choking hazard?!
Banning sex purely because it leads to an increased rate of physical injuries.
Heavily armed cops at the door of the ER, checking to make sure no one is there because they shoved something up their ass
They brought it back in 2019
Nature is healing
Never have understood why sexual violence but pretend was an ok kink tbh
pausing the s*xual act to lecture my gf on internalized misogyny
Imagine having a gf smh my head
Love is bourgeois. Embrace eternal loneliness and crushing isolation
Love is bourgeois
I know we’re shitposting, but everyone should read Make Way for Winged Eros by Alexandra Kollontai . It has an albeit brief, but very interesting section that’s a Historical Materialist Analysis of love, and how it manifests differently in different modes of production.
Personally would prefer the former but I’m too old now and don’t have any social engagement soooo
missionary with the lights off for the purposes of procreation ONLY
Bro if I could get my wife to leave the lights on, I would be a happy man.
I mean we don’t excuse kink when it comes to other flagrantly immoral acts as long as they’re fake, right?
We do that all the time. A lot of kink is about recreating situations that would otherwise be unsafe or abusive but within a safe consensual “pretend” context.
Tying someone up and whipping them? A fucked up immoral thing to do.
Tying someone up and whipping them but it’s sexy and everyone involved consents? Fucking awesome.
Getting tried at the Hague for crimes against peace because I annexed Belgium in Victoria 3
Belgium deserved it.
The point is that it’s contextual. Normally it would be flagrantly immoral to tie up another human being against their will and force them to eat from a dog bowl.
But if two people engage in that activity, with informed consent, have a safe word, etc. The normal rules of social niceties are suspended.
It’s playing pretend. It’s not real.
While there are obvious concerns about the set of a porn film, that make it distinct from a regular film set, just as with regular film, such environments need to be regulated for safety and related concerns.
Anyone who’s had sex can tell you that porn isn’t Exactly realistic. It’s actors, filming a scene that woman being strangled is, on a properly regulated film set, is not actually being strangled. Just as two dudes shooting guns in an action movie aren’t actually killing people.
By passing all of these laws, they’re pushing pornography production into a legal grey area where film set safety regulations increasingly don’t apply, which actively puts people at risk.
Edit: I also want to make sure that I don’t come off as somehow whitewashing the porn industry. Others in this thread have rightfully pointed out that porn stars are often abused on set.
Many Marxist Feminists, especially in the global south, have advocated for the immediate abolition of sex work. This makes sense in a context where the sex work industry is serving a largely white, bourgeois, clientele. A manifestation of larger Imperialist value extraction.
In the global north, however, I think sex workers are largely under-theorized as a peripheral part of the proletariat (or often lumpen-proletariat) that ought to be organized by Socialists.
While we ought to strive to live in a world where no one must sell their body to survive, sexually or otherwise, I think the short term response to these contradictions is to advocate for, and organize sex workers, and that includes pushing back against these laws, which further ostracize an already uniquely exploited part of the working class
Just going to reply to you because I don’t want to retype this a hundred times in the thread. I get exactly what you’re saying and I find it very hard to disagree with any of it. But if this kind of fantasy play acting ever crossed into someone pretending to be underage I don’t think I’d say it’s okay and maybe I’m badly misreading the room but I’m not sure anyone else here would either. So there has to be some line somewhere and I can’t find it
Ageplay is a relatively common kink, certainly in many trans kink spaces I’ve been in. If adults are risk-aware and engaging in consensual kink, there’s nothing wrong with it at all.
into someone pretending to be underage I don’t think I’d say it’s okay and maybe I’m badly misreading the room but I’m not sure anyone else here would either
Again, it’s pretending. it’s not real. It might personally give you the ick, and that’s fine. That’s the point of consent, none one should be made to engage in a sexual act that they don’t want to. But when you start drawing arbitrary lines about what consenting adults can and can’t do, based on your own personal icks, that’s an issue.
For example, Age play is something that a lot of trans women engage in, and that fact is often weaponized against them by people who want to demonize trans people as inherently dangerous to children.
I am transfem and while ageplay isn’t my thing, my first exposure to the very concept of transness, as a young kid, was an episode of a reality show. In this episode the brilliant minds over at TLC took this otherwise very sweet seeming trans woman, who was into ageplay kink because it allowed her to reclaim a childhood she never got to have, and demonized her for it.
The other half of the episode was, if I recall correctly, about a person who drank bleach. The show went to great lengths to demonize this trans woman for her otherwise harmless quirk, and treated her behavior as equivalently dangerous to that of the bleach drinker. That kind of framing did a lot of damage to my self conception. Told me that my desire for transition was not only inherently a perversion, but actively dangerous.
So, while you might not like it, demonizing behavior done between consenting adults just ain’t it. Personally, I trust the person engaging in consensual play between grown adults more than I trust someone who conflates fiction and reality, because they think it’s yucky. The content of that play is irrelevant.
Then I guess I don’t understand why we hate the really a 4000 year old dragon stuff
“age play” where an adult plays a child = ok sometimes
drawing of CP for pedos to crank it to = not ok
Personally, I don’t necessarily care. I’ve see real children be incinerated by US made bombs in Palestine enough times that I struggle to care about some fictional drawings. Plus, I’ve never seen a firm causal link made between 4000 year old loli hentai, and actual abuse of children. It just doesn’t sound like any of my business. Not when the West is undeniably killing real children as we speak.
Weebs and GamersTM famously have less of a grasp on sex than your average porn watcher anyway. But I could always be wrong about all this, I suppose.
The point I’m making though, is that scurrying around, looking for some moral, ethical, line for what kinds of consensual acts between adults are “good” vs “bad” is a fruitless exercise. Was consent enthusiastically given? Is everyone involved adequately informed, and taking safety precautions? Then who cares? Not my monkeys, not my circus. People should be empowered by the systems around them to make their own decisions about their gender and sexuality, not arbitrarily restricted.
You expressed concern earlier about “badly misreading the room”. Just for some perspective, I have concerns about expressing my, I think very tepid, opinions about this because I know how trans women’s sexuality is twisted and warped to attack us, and I know that Hexbear is a place that can be a little trigger happy with discourse and dunking. I wouldn’t be surprised if I caught a ban for my opinions in this thread, because transmisogyny runs deep, and it doesn’t take a lot for a trans woman’s word to be twisted against her. The stakes for us are different here.
In general yes? There are lots of “when real, this is extremely bad and not fun at all” things that when remade into safely ritualized and/or sufficiently fantastical forms become exciting and safe ways of coping with real anxieties and fears, whether this is through some sort of ritualized roleplay or more explicit fiction and art.
i mean, yes? is it really flagrantly immoral if (actually) consenting adults agree to participate in an activity together? like sure if someone on the street stabbed me out of nowhere I’d be pretty put out but i would consider that categorically different than asking my partner to carve her name into my thigh with a razor blade bc it gets me going even though their actions (cutting my skin) and the outcome (me being wounded) are functionally identical
not all violence is created equal. we can understand this outside the purview of kink (violence against the workers bad, violence against the ownership class good) so I don’t really see why we should struggle with it here
In many people’s moral systems, pretending to do things isn’t immoral.
I saw a flagrantly immoral video the other day, where a man was visiting his parole officer who was a woman, when he got up to use the toilet she found a ring he had, that she thought he had stolen, she tried the ring on and it turns out it was magic, because her whole personality changed and she was very horny. The scoundrel knowing her consent was impaired by the magic ring, still agreed to tie her up (while fondling her!) and at the last minute he took the magic ring off her leaving her stranded and not enjoying the situation as she previously had been.
It was all fake but those creators should be in jail.
Never have understood why violence but pretend was an ok fictional genre tbh
an ok kink
We all accept that not all kink is ok don’t we? I don’t think anyone here thinks that preteen dragon girls who are actually 6000 is ok
Anything that consenting adults do and enjoy under safe conditions is okay.
Anything other than that is obviously not okay. The “pre-teen dragon girl” stuff is problematic because it doesn’t fulfill the “adult” requirement.
Is it kink? That is a matter of definition, some definitions sets a discrete border between kink and abuse, other definitions allow an overlap.
it’s kink if the 6000 year old preteen dragon is an adult in a costume.
Is “you can’t pretend not to be an adult” the line? I think I’d accept that but it does seem arbitrary to me
obligatory “got a loiciense for”
I expect to see the same reaction from you guys when they ban wargames normalizing and encouraging unlimited genocide.
Games Workshop is like 40% of the UK economy, sadly they will never ban the plastic army men.
unlimited genocide
I never found strangling to be particularly up my alley, and I get that it is introducing a lot of people to a potentially very harmful sexual practise without giving them the tools to actually do it. However fuck off Kid Harmer. Why is literally the only bit of state capacity you endorse getting into people’s bedrooms, looking at their junk or monitoring their porn? Fuck off.
Just banning stuff basically never works and especially not for something like this thats overwhelmingly online and a lot of which is grey-market to begin with
Yeah. Even the “safe” way to do it is one of the most dangerous and “even done completely right, this can still just randomly kill someone[1]” kinks someone can engage in and it being mainstreamed into vanilla porn as just like a thing people spontaneously do is bad, but the solution would be like mandating warning labels with sex-positive education on how fucked this is on videos featuring real or simulated choking, not the UK’s usual “oh heavens a kink, I must send in the constables and retire to my fainting couch and pray to the depraved sex pest royals for salvation” shit.
Due to the risk of blood clots and stroke from stopping the movement of blood through the artery that’s entering the brain. It also probably causes minor brain damage every single time, even without a loss in consciousness, and as a result can cause neurological problems if that randomly happens to hit something important. ↩︎
I thought the citation would be a citation instead of you just saying it’s true :(
I just wanted to elaborate with a footnote without breaking the flow of what I was saying. Checking, the only thing I had saved that might have mentioned it 404ed, although I think that may have just been a resource on doing a blood choke without threatening the wind pipe. This is just general kink community knowledge though, like the risk of nerve/joint damage from poorly placed restraints or how blunt force impacts to the abdomen and particularly around the spine or kidneys are very dangerous.
But like, stopping blood from moving is bad and has a risk of making blood clots (this is why sitting for excessively long periods of time causes a risk of DVT, as blood pools in one’s legs more than it should), and cutting off oxygen to the brain is also extremely bad. The only bit that contradicts conventional knowledge is the more recent research that even brief reductions in blood flow to the brain cause brain damage that builds up over time in the same way that minor head impacts add up (another recent discovery, since before the assumption was just that serious concussions were bad but lighter impacts didn’t cause injuries).
The article in OP does mention and link studies about the brain damage risk though, I think.
I do not wish this to be true
Can’t see a titty but ai can coach young kids on how to take their lives, makes sense.
I wonder if this only extends to “IRL” porn or if it also extends to things like fanfiction and animations? I guess if the argument is to not promote choking then it makes sense to extend it to all types of porn. But if it’s only about actress welfare then it’s not clear how the law would be applied to types of porn with no actors/actresses.
But if it’s only about actress welfare
I doubt actresses/actors in porn are actually being asphyxiated.
I would absolutely not stake anything on that. Sexual violence against porn actresses is rampant.
Even people having private and consensual sex untainted by the profit motive practice choking in dangerous ways. There’s absolutely no reason to believe things would be more safe in the porn industry, and a plethora of reasons to believe they’d be worse.
I meant that I would expect many actors to be acting rather than actually choking, but I realize that was probably ridiculously optimistic.
I’ve read accounts of women who’ve left the porn industry and there’s a lot of fucked up shit that happens in scenes. There’s definitely a non-zero amount of choking scenes in porn that are real choking.
After learning about the whole GirlsDoPorn thing I honestly believe that a lot of the violence against women depicted in porn is real.
CW sexual abuse, drugging, misogyny, trauma for the article https://www.404media.co/michael-james-pratt-girls-do-porn-sentencing-memorandum-trial/
I doubt actresses/actors in porn are actually being asphyxiated.
I’d like to think so, but I’ve been on this planet long enough to know that’s not true. There’s plenty of horrendous stuff on the front page of every tube site. I think there was a study done on this, and the results were bad…
I was thinking specifically of professionally produced stuff, but even then I realize that I’m being far too optimistic.
The porn industry is so rampant with abuse I unironically think it should be a crime to consume (unless you can verify what you’re watching isn’t)
Yeah, I was thinking that the larger production companies might have more safety guardrails on average, but honestly I’m not sure the data would actually back that up.
