If pornography was to be made illegal what would the penalties involved be?

This thread is from 2011.

If porn is to be made illeagal, could it not be for the same reason that you can't go shopping without clothes, or walk around in public naked?
why create a chance of exploitation in a first place? i mean what is an actual need for that?
what measures will stop minors getting access to it?
how many minors officially actually accessed it?
only way to prevent harm to minors is if that is not created in first place.
if it is not sensible to be naked in own house while curtains are open, why would a sensible adult want to put their sexual action accessible over the internet?

A painting of anyone doing anything turns them into an object. A painting is not about a real person, it's about what the artist sees and the message s/he is trying to transmit - though how the viewer percieves the image/message is up to a viewer. People who want to destroy or suppress or ban art (whether good or bad) made by painting, drawing or computer skills are ignorant wankers who no one should take any notice of - same as people who want to suppress written art they don't agree with.

The Gauguin case also reminds me of the famous 1970s TV series 'Ways of Seeing' where the art critic John Berger compares revered 'Old Master' paintings of nudes with images from girlie mags (as they were called in those days).

His point was that, whatever their relative artistic merits, they both turned women into dehumanized sex objects.

I thought she meant they looked as if they might be lesbian lovers. Are you suggesting a play on words, that if Gauguin "had two women" it wouldn't be homosexual at all? Perhaps I'm missing something here.

And trying to keep alive the idea of the variability of pornography--there are women being strangled but there's also page 3 of The Sun. As porn goes, the second one is mild, but it's definitely still porn. Can any legal proposal cover this whole range?

TeiTua in the Gauguin case do you understand what the woman meant when she said:

"He has two women in the painting and it's very homosexual."

Frumentarii, do you think the men in your anecdote 'laughed and changed the subject' because they were all secretly guilty of ordering their partners to perform like women in porn films, or because they thought the bloke asking them was insulting them by calling them all ignorant rapists?

Yes, and a deranged crock of shit that is as well. Mackinnon and Dworkin were either never able to get their heads round the idea that if you instigate pro-censorship laws, there is no way of framing them so that only nice people get to use them (ie racists, homophobes and indeed misogynists are always delighted to jump on board pro-censorship bandwagons) - or they didn't actually care that some of their fellow travellers in the anti-porn wars of the early 90s were far more interested in suppressing things like Our Bodies Ourselves than they were bothered about tit&bum porn.

Dittany: that proposal was demonstrated to be fuckwitted a couple of decades as well. They couldn't work out a way of formulating it that wouldn't leave all manner of media producers open to being sued by all manner of bucketheads who considered that looking at a picture they didn't like constituted criminal harm against them.

No, she can't get it banned because it is not up to the feelings of an individual person. In much the same way I can't go into a National Trust property and damage a sculpture of an African slave girl simply because I think that there are racist elements to it.

It is about building some level of consensus throughout society and what we consider acceptable, and in which contexts it is considered acceptable. You will never get a complete consensus, but you can get some agreement. We already restrict many kinds of sexual explicit material in many contexts, so it isn't as of society doesn't have ways of managing these situations and dealing with the perspectives of different groups.

Here's an example from today's news:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12966698

An American woman attacked a Gauguin painting (it wasn't damaged). A feminist might say, quite right, Gauguin deserted his family and ran off to do nude paintings of his teenaged Polynesian lovers. But that wasn't it. "I feel that Gauguin is evil," she was quoted as telling police. "He has nudity and is bad for the children. He has two women in the painting and it's very homosexual."

So that's pornography for her. Can she get stuff banned for that reason? What makes her wrong and someone else right? This is just never going to satisfy everyone, or most likely anyone.

Is it not possible for them to sue just now?

Teitua, but that is what always happens when people negotiate laws. You are never going to get a consensus on everything, and issues will be constantly renegotiated as society changes. If every issue of law could be neatly defined and put in a box, much of what happens in court and in legal negotiations would not exist.

There is nothing unique about pornography, except that there isn't a great deal of debate over it, and the debate that does happen is polarised. It is clearly an issue that is going to raise a lot of fears about sexual liberty, the impact on sexual identity of both allowing porn and restricting porn and assumptions about the unspoken intentions and moral convictions of people who argue one way or the other.