Why we run London Porn Film Festival despite protests, censorship, and hate

Below, Rude Jude, Ingo Cando, Max Disgrace, and Epiphyllum Oxypetalum write about the struggles they’ve faced while trying to run the London Porn Film Festival, supporting trans and sex worker rights, and mass surveillance

This weekend, we successfully ran the third London Porn Film Festival. We were attacked by trans and sex worker exclusionary radical feminists, who reported us to Camden Council. Despite increased costs, an aggressive threat of prosecution, being forced to censor sections of our closing film, and a visit from the police, we had our best year yet. We received incredible community support and were steadfast in our determination to ensure the festival went ahead.

Many people have written about the increasingly worrying issues of privacy, surveillance, and data collection in this country. The London Porn Film Festival was established at a time when many sex acts, including fisting, face-sitting and female ejaculation, were illegal under the Audiovisual Media Services Regulation 2014, nicknamed the ‘UK porn law’. The protests seemed funny and eccentric, but this law targeted and impacted queer, independent, porn producers, and by extension, sex workers.

Though the porn law has since been overturned by activists and allies, it showed that queer and kinky people would be targets for prosecution, despite making far more ethical, diverse, and humane content. Though the UK government boasts about LGBT rights, queer practices are still seen as inherently harmful, disgusting, and obscene – our rights are routinely, unthinkingly, attacked. This has been proven again with Age Verification (AV), a measure designed to stop children accessing porn by forcing people to share personal data proving they are over 18.

The issue with AV is that it will not stop children accessing porn, but the collection of personal data – which will include the types of porn people are accessing – is a privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Large, corporate porn companies will control the data, while small ethical DIY outfits will likely close because they cannot afford the tech infrastructure to enforce AV. The offer of free access to AV technology still puts the control of indie producer’s data into corporate hands. The fate of a niche porn website seems insignificant, but we have always warned that social minorities are the canary in the goldmine. Draconian laws are first practiced on those society deems disposable.

The London Porn Film Festival does not deny that violent, misogynistic, racist pornography exists – we just don’t accept that all porn is inherently violent. Sexual literacy in this country is appalling, but you do not change that by shutting down the tiny DIY festival while ignoring the laws enabling and re-enforcing mainstream, heterosexist content. We showcase critical, queer, ethical, DIY porn. We disagree that feminist porn is an oxymoron, and we defy anyone to say that production companies such as Pink Label, Four Chambers, AORTA and Dreams of Spanking are not artistic, forward thinking, and incredibly hot.

“Sexual literacy in this country is appalling, but you do not change that by shutting down the tiny DIY festival while ignoring the laws enabling and re-enforcing mainstream, heterosexist content”

We hosted a discussion around sex education with the Pleasure Project and Sex School, a group led by sex workers including our guest of honour Lina Bembe; we screened a documentary about trans sex workers’ efforts to form community and alleviate poverty; our Catharsis programme looked at recovery from cancer, eating disorders, and abuse. We showed an astonishing BDSM documentary commenting on Israel’s oppression of Palestine. Shockingly, we even screened a porn-critical film!

It was not the protests, but Camden Council’s spinelessness that caused our original venue to pull out, for fear of prosecution; we did not want to risk losing another independent arts space in London. Like the so-called feminists who reported us, the council had no knowledge of the films, how the edgier sexual content was presented, or the queer culture that produces them.

The irony is that days before we began, the Women’s Equality Party was found to have been involved in the non-consensual filming and sharing of naked strippers’ bodies at a club in Manchester. Object, the group who reported us, have said nothing about the WEP’s actual support of what amounts to revenge porn. The fact that the women involved are sex workers cancels out their ‘concern for women’.

“The protest this weekend was a tedious throwback to the 1980s sex wars, and it is a shame that this is what passes for feminism in 2019”

This puritanical thinking manifests itself in their definition of porn as ‘the filmed rape and degradation of women’. It is hard to overstate how low this kind of thinking is, for its main objective is not liberation, care or support, but vicarious pleasure. They share and spread examples of horrendous violence in order to self-appoint as saviours. We were not the ones sharing horrific stories about necrophilia taking place in an old people’s home  – they were. We screened a tongue-in-cheek, fictional comedy about the relationship between sex workers and their clients with the hashtags #necrophilia, #darkcomedy, #satire. Object conveniently managed to ignore the last two.

But of course moral panics often begin in the puritanical imagination – Charlie Lyne’s recent film Lasting Marks revisits Operation Spanner, a 1980s obscenity trial during which sixteen men were prosecuted for sadomasochism. A penis was supposedly nailed to a board. It wasn’t, and anyway – the issue was not the nailing, but the kinky homosexuals involved. The film Rebel Dykes chronicles the feminist group Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) attacking the dyke SM night Chain Reaction with crowbars; they were unable to see the irony of assaulting a group of women in the name of stopping violence against women.

The protest this weekend was a tedious throwback to the 1980s sex wars, and it is a shame that this is what passes for feminism in 2019. Feminism that does not support trans and sex worker rights, that is indistinguishable from religious and conservative groups, and has no analysis of the state it gleefully weaponises, is bullshit. It is also a distraction from the larger issue. The UK’s slide into authoritarianism is well underway, and it is crucial that queer people – and all minorities – recognise how surveillance laws, mass data collection, and privacy infringement are combining with pre-existing social prejudice to create an increasingly worrying threat.