Editorial

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Erratum

In our third issue we present a range of articles examining particular local, national and international regulatory frameworks applied to pornographic representations. As Kendrick (1987), O'Toole (1998) and Hunt (1993) have described, any history of pornography is also a history of regulation and the motives behind it. Writing of the early nineteenth century, when print and distribution technologies made widespread dissemination of sexually explicit materials both possible and profitable, Lynn Hunt argues that pornography ‘as a regulatory category was invented in response to the perceived menace of the democratization of culture’ (1993, 12–13). It is not difficult to see the parallels in our own era, as the internet makes the availability and accessibility of porn ever more visible and hence, for many, ever more worrisome.

Across the globe there are moves to legislate against pornography via limiting access and distribution, outlawing particularly egregious content, mandating condoms and other protective barriers, updating historical obscenity law, classificatory systems and criminalizing possession. In the UK, action has previously targeted producers and distributors through obscenity law and confiscation, but now we see moves to ensure that demand is curtailed via opt-in filters as well as the criminalization of possession of ‘extreme pornography’ with the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 and an addition to include ‘rape porn’ in the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill going forward to its third reading in the houses of parliament. In the States, campaigners have eyed these developments with interest and have made at least two attempts, via the ‘We the People’ website, to petition the President for ‘opt-in filters’. In an intensely contentious move, the California Assembly has passed AB 1576 to mandate condoms and other protective barriers on all porn shoots. As it moves through to further action in the State Senate, opposers of the bill have stated ‘The real goal of the bill is to push adult production out of California by manufacturing a crisis. It makes for great headlines, but dangerous public policy’ (Diane Duke quoted in Mason 2014). Proponents see ‘Measure B’ as only the first step in their fight against the industry.

The ‘need’ for regulation has been argued elsewhere and is not the primary focus in this issue. Instead our contributors look to the current state of affairs in particular locales. Our first double issue was a bumper one, in comparison this issue contains just five articles and they are long – exceeding our usual word count – but the nature of their discussions, in laying out the particular interests in regulation or legal precedents meant that longer pieces were necessary to detail the discursive constructions of the problems of porn and its regulation. Our five articles examine the performances of regulation which are local, national and transnational in scope, they examine the discursive constructions of zoning in Albuquerque; the very micro deliberations and justifications of the UK case of regulating Video on Demand; the prohibitive yet also productive nature of classification requirements in Australia; the historical and contemporary arguments over pornography in Iceland; and the ways in which access to or production of pornography are interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights.

In her examination of the rhetorical strategies employed by both sides in a zoning conflict over exhibition space for a porn film festival Pornotopia in Albuquerque, Kirsten Cole examines how moral orders that mimic feminist pro-pornography/anti-censorship perspectives and queer public sex perspectives talk past each other. Rather than focus on the rights and wrongs of the dispute, Cole shows how the seemingly irreconcilable differences in the Pornotopia debate stem from differences in moral assumptions about private versus public sex/pornography. With these primary moral assumptions in place and not subjected to properly critical scrutiny, Cole argues there is little possibility to broaden the moral grammars underpinning advocacy for, and arguments against, exhibition of pro-sex community work. Her conclusion that ‘Pornography and public displays of pornography are uniquely political’ highlights the need to open up debates about sex-positivity and public sex if we are to create more diverse representations, which are both inclusive and educational.

The stifling of diversity is also a theme of Zahra Stardust's ‘“Fisting is Not Permitted”: Criminal Intimacies, Queer Sexualities and Feminist Porn in the Australian Legal Context’. Stardust examines some of the ways in which legal frameworks are themselves productive of the very ‘problems’ they seek to address. While anti-porn calls for legislation detail the ways in which pornography might reinforce regressive gender ideologies, unrealistic expectations of bodies (particularly women's) and of sexual practices, the generative role of classificatory systems in producing intensely normative representations is often ignored. Stardust ‘explores the ways in which the Australian legal framework understands practices that are about intimacy, consent, trust and safety as violent, objectionable or abhorrent’ such that

queer and feminist pornographers in Australia report making compromises in terms of aesthetics and ethics in order to meet classification requirements and avoid law enforcement. In effect, the regulatory system prohibits the kinds of pornographies with the potential to challenge hegemonic representations and to model safety and consent.

In laying out the detail of the classificatory systems in Australia, we can see the intricacies of those systems but also their particularly one-dimensional approach to ‘sex works’ wherein ‘sex’ becomes the only issue of note and all other questions of context, narrative, education, impact, etc. are understood to be superfluous. Stardust observes that ‘the Classification Board is not given discretion to contextualize explicit sexual activity or to consider whether an X18+ film may provide sex education, contribute to culture, archive or document community practices, represent diversity, contain political messages or have artistic value.’ This highly suggestive account indicates the ways in which pornographic content is subject not simply to authorial intentions but to a range of filtering practices which produce particular ways of expressing sexual action, desire and desirability. Pornography's representational regimes do not operate in isolation but are responsive to the conditions in which they are allowed to be produced; and of course, such responsiveness is not necessarily in the interests of progressive gender and sexual politics.

Legislation is often engaged in playing catch up with technology and the uses to which it is put. As we transition from analogue to digital tech and platforms, governments are increasingly worried by their inability to police the accessibility of hardcore content within their national borders. In the UK, as Julian Petley demonstrates in his excavation of the integration of European directives on digital services, government has outsourced powers to various NGOs who have been given powers which those same organisations advocate for and justify through selective research and framing. With David Cameron's coalition government taking a hard stand on pornography in the name of ‘protecting the nation's youth’, the last two years have seen the institution of ‘opt-in’ filters, expansion of the criminalization of possession and the encouragement of ever more censorious practices by regulators such as the BBFC, Ofcom and its adjunct ATVOD, thus a ‘precautionary’ approach has become the default mode in the UK. Cameron has suggested that he wants to send a ‘clear message’ about the acceptability or otherwise of sexual representations but how that message will be received in our age of global communications is, as yet, unclear. Community standards across territories are not uniform and adult providers in the UK are currently confused as to what these regulatory moves will mean to them. The government seems more interested in holding back the ‘tide of filth’ than in educating its populace or contributing to nuanced and expansive discussion of sex and sexual well-being.

While the UK has held back from banning pornography outright, last spring (2013) saw the world's media aflutter at the news that Iceland was considering precisely such measures. In ‘The Icelandic Initiative for Pornography Censorship’ Ásta Helgadóttir outlines the existing and historical approaches to regulating porn within Iceland and offers an account of the debates around a Minister of the Interior's intentions to extend existing laws. News of the Initiative has seen Iceland's reputation as a nation of free speech advocates taking a battering internationally; in her article Helgadóttir draws attention, like Cole, to the adversarial and incompatible performances of pro and anti-legislation positions: while anti-porn activists are concerned about the ‘messages’ promoted by pornography, freedom-of-expression activists are more concerned about the internet as a social infrastructure of interconnected computers – the medium. Both sides claim to be fighting for human rights, although their understandings of what those might constitute in relation to sexually explicit representations remain divergent.

The interpretations of ‘rights’ is the focus of Paul Johnson's ‘Pornography and the European Convention on Human Rights’. Exploring ECHR jurisprudence relating to three Articles – the right to freedom of expression, the right to respect for private life, and the right to be free from degrading treatment – Johnson assesses Strasbourg's role in shaping the ‘practical and effective’ rather than ‘theoretical or illusory’ human rights relating to adult pornography in Europe. While member states often criticize the undue interference of the European Courts in national jurisprudence, Johnson's account of various appeals to the Strasburg Court illustrates the ways in which its understandings of the ‘protection of morals in a democratic society’, and judgments for limited protections to works which have substantial ‘artistic’ or ‘political’ elements, give considerable discretion to individual states to enact and enforce laws to classify particular materials as pornographic or obscene and regulate their production, distribution and sale. Johnson concludes that ECHR jurisprudence has failed to develop any ‘general standards’ in respect of issues relating to adult pornography and that the various Articles that constitute the Convention require evolution to take account of the ways in which electronic communication has disrupted the ‘traditional’ divide between the public and private and, in the context of the ‘pornification’ of culture, where Article 3 provides scope for an evolution of rights to protect individuals from forms of degradation.

All of the articles here make a case for further debate and exploration and invite questions about the scope and shape of regulation across the globe – questions we hope to see addressed in future submissions to the journal. Nevertheless, these accounts illustrate various shared concerns across jurisdictions about the role of technologies in increasing accessibility to sexually explicit media, the blurring of private/public spaces, the potential effects on minors and on society more generally. More particularly they illuminate the ways in which regulation of sexual content is not just a matter of history but is an intensely contemporary process, drawing on historical and juridical precedent, longstanding moral concerns and incorporating elements of progressive politics while at the same time adhering to normative notions of ‘good sex’. As the internet becomes ever more important to everyday life, nation states seek to discover ways of maintaining their borders. Of course, older forms of media such as print and video were easier to control through traditional regulatory means but new media mean new forms of regulation have to be explored. The issues these raise for individuals, consumers, producers, institutions and regulators will no doubt resurface in future issues of Porn Studies.