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

[Frumentarii]

If pornography was to be made illegal what would the penalties for production, distribution and viewing of it be?

Would the penalties differ in regards to the type of pornography and the method of its production? For instance would a person who produces and distributes pornography featuring only themselves be penalised to the same degree as someone who hired people to perform it?

I don't think anyone (apart from perhaps some extremely religious people) are asking for all pornography not to be produced. If some people want to photograph or film themselves having sex, it is nobody else's business. The exception to that would be where a person was exploited, or that person was either unwilling or unable to properly consent. In that case, the law would be similar to other cases of non-filmed non-consent and coercion in sexual acts.

It is the distribution of pornography which would be targeted by law, and I suspect there would be different levels of punishment based on where and how the pornography was distributed, who was likely to see it, and what kind of sex was being recorded.

Why not start with a proper legal definition of what constitutes pornography that won't inadvertently target sex education material, art, any kind of film that features naked bodies...
There is nothing wrong with producing sexually explicit entertainment material as long as all performers are willing to perform and are properly treated.

Would that no be decided upon on a case by case basis, rather like advertising regulations are, or tv programmes shown before the watershed are? After test cases, distributors would know whether what they were attempting to distribute was likely to be illegal, likely to be legal, or fall somewhere in the middle and therefore likely to be accepted after some changes had been agreed upon and made.

It is extremely unlikely that all sexually explicit material would become illegal.

It would be like the Equality Act, and many other Acts. Exactly what is and is not illegal in terms of homophobia or racism has been established by test cases, not by being clearly defined in the original act.

To create a law forbidding pornography you could use the Sexual Offences Act as a base. It could define pornography as:

1. Any showing via any medium of the act of a person penetrating vagina, anus or mouth of another person with any part of their body or an object, or

2. Any act which a reasonable person would consider the stimulation of the genitals for sexual gratification.

3. Any person shown with exposed genitals and/or breasts.

4. 1, 2 and 3 will not apply if the medium had been approve by the British Medical Council for the purposes of sexual education.

5. 1, 2 and 3 will not apply if the British Board of Film Classification has classified the medium for release.

6. 1, 2 and 3 will not apply if Arts Council England reports that the medium is considered art.

I would like there to be more focus on evidence that the people involved in the making of the material were not being exploited, rather than just make a judgement based on what visual images were contained in the material.

In terms of professional pornography regular psychiatric, financial and health assessments of all those wanting to perform could be made mandatory. Failure for those hiring to check whether a person has been deemed fit to participate could be penalised with high fines or imprisonment, and all material produced involving people deemed unfit deemed illegal to distribute and view.

Your proposals are extremely invasive and indicate a wierd attitude towards sex and entertainment. People who do jobs which are recognised as hard and dangerous, or which involve risking the lives of other people do not have to put up with intrusive psychiatric, financial and health assessments against their wishes.
The problems with pornography that need addressing are the poor working conditions and exploitation of performers, which would be better solved by less stigmatizing of porn performers as desperate drug addled victims in the first place and more support for better working conditions within the industry.

Also, AGAIN, there is NOTHING WRONG with depicting human breasts and genitals, or stimulation of the same, for sexual gratification as long as performers (and viewers) are consenting adults.

My first thought is that one kind of pornography - the kind that involves children - is already illegal so if you wanted to ban all of it you might want to use that as a model.

Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the section on 'arranging or facilitating child prostitution or pornography' states that:

A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable?.
(a) on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or both;.
(b) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years.

Also, would you want to tackle the demand side by making purchase of pornography illegal? That of course is the case with child porn, and also to some extent with adult prostitution.

Another problem with mandatory testing of employees would be - like all the things that are heavily regulated - that it is harder and more relatively expensive for small businesses to comply. So it would work in favour of big producers rather than small groups of individuals who want to get together and do it, and this would, I imagine, tend to disempower performers still further.

I wouldn't support psychological tests on porn performers, because if someone did have mental health problems, they would be deterred from seeking help because of the job consequences.

If these ridiculous ideas were implemented, the working conditions of porn performers would worsen. There would be a thriving industry in forged assessments, additional pressure on unwilling performers to comply with employees' demands, and performers would feel unable to seek help because they would perceive themselves as already criminalized.
Once again, porn is a Good Thing if made by willing performers, and the answer to the problems within the industry is to empower from the workforce upwards, not try and formulate new laws which are only going to get hijacked by superstitious, sexually-dysfunctional fuckwits anyway.

SpringchickenGoldBrass

I must say I find the idea of official inspectors enforcing minimum standards in the porn industry pretty mind-boggling. Would they turn up with their clipboards to watch the filming?

If you ban pornography it means you criminalise the producers (and maybe customers) rather than the performers, who could be helped into alternative employment. This would work in the same way as the anti-prostitution laws in Sweden for example.

I'm not sayng a ban on pornography would be easy to enforce but I don't find your arguments against it very convincing.

SpringchickenGoldBrass these proposals are not necessarily something I would implement. I'm trying to gather what peoples views are on how legally, from definition to punishment, they would deal with pornography if they had the power to do so themselves.

Just in the 14 messages that this thread had when I started typing, it's clear how hopeless this is. It starts out "If pornography was to be made illegal" and then it becomes clear that people envision all kinds of pornography, produced in all kinds of ways, from the solo to the industrial. And there are also all kinds of definitions of what pornography actually is.

We might just possibly get some sort of safety-at-work rules to apply to actors in videos, but that could only cover a small part of the business. We might also get a consensus on "extreme pornography" and regulate that somewhat. But once people begin arguing, we either have to let one faction impose itself on others, or we'd just have to drop it (which means going with the free-for-all faction).

I agree with everything written by springchickengoldbrass

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.

Is it not possible for them to sue just now?

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.

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.

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.

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 I do on occasion look at porn, most of it I find dull rather than particularly arousing or abhorrent.

I have come across some questionable stuff, not on the face of it illegal but acts portrayed (and sometimes reactions to those acts) that makes me wonder whether the women truly want to be there doing what they were doing (as much as any average person usually wants to be in a job).

Another aspect that concerns me is the effect it may have on some people. I have heard some talk about pornography in relation to their girlfriends and partners. Some of rather crude and questionable. Whether this is mostly boasting is hard to tell, no doubt many men would never pressure or force a woman to replicate what they see in porn but I expect an equal number would without a second thought. Whether porn causes this or merely that they were always likely (due to upbringing, education, attitudes in general) to pressure women into sexual acts is another question I ponder.