Pornography in the United Kingdom
Under the Licensing Act 2003, works released in a theatrical setting must also hold a valid classification (either issued by the BBFC, or by a local council).
At the beginning of the 21st century, as a result of liberalisation in BBFC policy, mainstream hardcore DVDs began to receive R18 certificates, legalising them but restricting their sale to licensed sex shops such as those in Soho in London.
In the 2004–2005 fiscal year, the agents of HM Revenue and Customs seized 96,783 items of pornographic media carried by people travelling into the UK.
In his diary, Samuel Pepys records purchasing a copy of L'Escole des Filles, a French work printed in 1655 that is considered to be the beginning of pornography in France[6] for solitary reading.
The text is hardly explicit as Cleland wrote the entire book using euphemisms for sex acts and body parts, employing 50 different ones just for the term penis.
In the Victorian period, significant elements of sado-masochism were present in some examples of erotic fiction, perhaps reflecting the influence of the English public school, where flagellation was routinely used as a punishment.
[4] However, in 2008, a man was unsuccessfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act (the R v Walker trial) for posting fictional written material to the Internet allegedly describing the kidnap, rape and murder of the pop group Girls Aloud.
[18] At the beginning of the 20th century the invention of halftone printing led to the appearance of magazines such as Photo Bits featuring nude (often, burlesque actresses were hired as models) and semi-nude photographs on the cover and throughout; while these would now be termed softcore, they were quite shocking for the time.
[19] Following the Second World War, digest magazines such as Beautiful Britons, Spick and Span began to appear, with their interest in nylons and underwear.
Penthouse was also the first magazine to publish pictures that included pubic hair and full frontal nudity, both of which were considered beyond the bounds of the erotic and in the realm of pornography at the time.
[2] By the late 1960s, British magazines began to move into more explicit displays, often focusing on the buttocks as standards of what could be legally depicted and what readers wanted to see changed.
[citation needed] David Sullivan became his business partner[17] and by the late 1970s their company was in control of half of the adult magazine market, publishing major titles such as Playbirds, Whitehouse,[24] Rustler and Raider.
The market supported a growing number of specialist magazines whose titles indicated their contents: 40 Plus, Fat and 40, Skinny and Wriggly and Leg Love.
Given that the law now allowed councils to grant or refuse licences to cinemas according to the content of the films they showed, the 1909 Act therefore enabled the introduction of censorship.
The film industry, fearing the economic consequences of a largely unregulated censorship infrastructure, therefore formed the BBFC to take the process 'in house' and establish its own system of self-regulation.
After the Second World War, developments in cinema technology stimulated the growth of a mass market, particularly the introduction of the 8mm and super-8 film gauges which resulted in the widespread use of amateur cinematography.
[41] In the late 1970s David Sullivan produced several low-budget British sex films including Come Play with Me (1977) (directed by Harrison Marks).
[42] While the 1970s were the heyday of exploitation cinema, softcore sex films eventually succumbed to the combination of legalised hardcore pornography in other countries and the widespread availability of home video recorders in the UK.
Another director to take advantage of this unregulated period was Mike Freeman, who in 1979 set up the hardcore video production company Videx Ltd. and employed Lindsay Honey as an actor.
[49] Honey went on run his own mail order hardcore video business with his partner Linzi Drew until the pair were convicted in 1992.
[53] Home videotape was a booming market and it was relatively simple for individuals to smuggle hardcore material in from Europe or the United States, where it had been purchased legally, either for personal use or to copy it for distribution.
Finally, in 2000, following the dismissal of a test case brought by the BBFC, hardcore pornography was effectively legalised, subject to certain conditions and licensing restrictions.
Concerns about the visual impact of sex shops on the High Street resulted in the Cinematograph and Indecent Displays Bill in 1973, which failed to become law due to the change of government in 1974.
[4] The Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1982 provided new and tighter licensing controls for sex shops[38] and, along with the purges of the police force that took place during the 1980s, reduced the number of unlicensed premises.
Nevertheless, a majority of the content broadcast has been softcore pornography to satisfy the regulator Ofcom and it is not permitted to show an erect penis or penetrative sex on television.
Some companies took to broadcasting from other European Union countries in order to take advantage of their less restrictive regulatory regimes regarding sexual content.
These are broadcast live from a studio and usually feature female presenters advertising a phone sex line at a premium rate, through which callers can talk to the woman they see on the screen.
In 2004, a pornographic satellite channel called Xplicit XXX owned by Digital Television Production[65] was fined £50,000 by Ofcom for broadcasting hardcore pornography before the 9:00 pm watershed.
The industry's regulatory body PhonepayPlus (formerly ICSTIC) monitors and enforces specific community standards in terms of content and price for premium rate numbers.
The passing of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 resulted in the possession of "extreme pornographic images" becoming illegal in England and Wales as of January 2009.
