I ain't no lawyer ...but....

[joe king]

R18s BARELY LEGAL #5 and CAPE TOWN have been cut.
Barel legal
To obtain this category cuts of 1m 27s were required. The cuts were Compulsory.
Cuts required to two lines of dialogue which described sexual activity by females when they were underage, in the context of an explicit sex video.
So in an R18 you can't say ' "When I was 15 I kissed a boy", is kissing sexual activity?

Cape town
Compulsory cuts were required to remove dialogue references to depictions of adults role-playing as non-adults in accordance with the Board's published Guidelines at R18.


'dialogue references ' = talk
'depictions' = verbal descriptions
'of adults role-playing' = adults acting
'as non-adults' = children

I am not sure how this works - "hello - how old are you?", "I'm 15"

A title 'UNNATURAL SEX' by John Dough was not cut. So, is it unnatural, what is unnatural?

[Klute]

I think it's fair enough. Anything which could baguely pertain to paedophilia should be self-censored anyway, to prevent the media kicking up a shitstorm and getting good ol' consensual adult porn a bad name. I don't need to hear a girl saying she first kissed a boy when she was 15 to get off on pictures of her getting f*cked.

[Otis]

One of the few Vivid movies I can bear is "Secrets & Lies" with Tia Bella - an entirely anal-free zone, never mind anything "extreme". The fact that that'd be censored too (Tia says something almost identical to the quote above) despite being probably the softest hardcore film I've ever seen is kind of funny. And also, a girl of 15 saying she kissed "a boy" has about as much to do with paedophilia as a film I saw in a booth in Paris once, "Agathe: Oldie But Goldie!" where a 70-year-old French woman shagged two young men visibly closing their eyes and thinking of Tabitha Cash. Come to think of it, if a bloke of 40 kissed a 15-year-old girl, that'd have fuck all to do with paedophilia either. If you shagged Charlotte Church, it might be morally dubious, but you'd be shagging her because of her fantastic big tits and great arse, while a paedophile would never think to look at her for exactly the same reason.

The point is, we're still being treated like twats by the censors. The actual level of hardcore permitted in British vids is now if anything greater than that in US vids (Ben Dover claims he's been told that anal will be cut from his next US release - so that'll be 11 minutes long then). But the WORDS used in dialogue or in the film title, and the ROLE-PLAYING of bondage or light (non-dangerous) S&M are still being censored. It's nice that the BBFC have faced the plain facts - that porn just doesn't "deprave" people like they thought - but this sort of nanny censorship proves that their attitude towards us is really still as patronising and anachronistic as it ever was, which might not be a human rights violation, but it's pretty fucking shit.

[Matt]

Not really.

Porn needs to learn that extreme doesn't necessarily equal goog. Infact, it rarely does. I'm predeicting that as porn slowly becomes more mainstream, the more extreme end of the market will ground to a halt - many like it cos it's not allowed. If it's ok in the eyes of the law, it won't hold quite the same appeal.

As for the paedophilia thing, I'm afriad you're wrong, Otis. References to age are always dubious when it comes to sex - the age of consent is debateable but not when it comes to hardcore pornography. It's really easy to fall into the trap of catering for people with twisted interests - Your Choice recently had to pull a review of a product for promoting it's (and I quote) "pre-pubescant looking" star. Porn is always going to attract the weirdo element but it shouldn't lower itself to creating products for them just cos there may be a market. The line has to be drawn somewhere in our soapbox rants and high-horse monologues about freedom - mentions of depictions of children in our pornography is not only crossing the line, it's way beyond it.


Matt.

[joe king]

Censorship based on fear. I think there are 2 reasons that the BBFC censor and that are recurring...
1. fear of paedophiles- 'paedophiles might use it'
2. fear that porn is getting a bad name, it might be considered sleazy.

The third one is 'potential harm'. This is not actually in the R18 guidelines. If putting ice into a vagina has 'potential harm' then where are the limits on 'potential harm'?

[Klute]

I agree. I just don't see why we need references to underage sexual experimentation in a film which is about over-age girls getting boned. As to the issue of extreme porn, I'm not into extreme fetishy stuff at all (except Bukkake, heheh) bu I do think there ought to be more anal in British porn. Ben Dover manages to do loads of anal scenes mainly by using the same five girls. In the US, for all their flaws, every single girl takes it up the arse. The way it ought to be.

[Mike]

The most disturbing film I have ever seen in reference to "underage" subject matter was the remake of Lolita with Jeremy Irons.
At the time I thought all the protests about it was the usual nanny brigade that always turns out for these protests but after watching it myself it was so over the line I couldn't
believe it had ever got passed without huge cuts.

Porn will always suffer more since the powers that be consider the consumers are less educated, prone to violence and easily
influenced. A mainstream movie from a respected director/studio can get away with murder at times.
Pretty Baby is another example, I'm sorry but full frontal shots
of Brooke Shields can not be justified on artistic merit.