Tag: Harper Eliot

09

Sinful Sunday: Obscenity

Over the weekend, I kept an eye on all the amazing tweets posted by those attending Eroticon 2014. (For those who don’t know, this brilliant annual event, founded by Ruby Kiddell, brings together erotica writers, sex bloggers, publishers and a host of other individuals who are interested in, to quote the Eroticon slogan, ‘writing sex right’.) There was one session in particular that generated a lot of Twitter action: a talk on censorship by Zak Jane Keir (@decadentmadamez), Pandora Blake (@pandorablake), and Myles Jackman (@ObscenityLawyer). And then I saw this tweet by @HarperEliot.

Screen shot 2014-03-09 at 21.21.38

The idea of burning a book – any book – makes me physically cringe. And if we’re talking obscenity? Well, the below image pretty much sums it up for me.

Obscenity

Continue reading →

23

Sense, Sensibility and Censorship

Maja desnuda censurata

Image: Maja desnuda censurata by Twice25 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Adult content. Pornography. Legal. Criminal. Consensual. Fantasy. Responsible parenting. Child abuse.

What do these words and terms mean to you? How do they make you feel? And if I asked you to separate them into ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ buckets, what would you put where?

In the wake of the U.K. government’s plans to default censor pornography (David Cameron announced last week that all British households will be required to ‘opt in’ if they wish adult content to appear in search results), these questions will become more and more pertinent. Everyone, and I mean everyone, regardless of whether they feel they’re directly affected by these proposed changes, needs to be asking themselves ‘How do I feel about government imposed censorship?’ and ‘What value do I place on my right to discover legal content on the Internet?’

I’m willing to bet money on the fact that any normal, well-adjusted person reading this post will have put ‘criminal’ and ‘child abuse’ into the ‘Bad’ bucket and ‘legal’, ‘consensual’, ‘fantasy’ and ‘responsible parenting’ into the ‘Good’ bucket. But where did you put ‘adult content’? Where did you put ‘pornography’? Continue reading →