Incest porn is now banned in the UK, and it’s already filtering adult expression online. Porn filmmaker and performer, Vex Ashley, removed her films Maman and Maman II from the internet after the law came into effect in April.
Now, the films are back online — only significantly edited.
The ‘Mommy’ film banned in the UK
These two films delve into the “Mommy” kink, which is less mainstream than “Daddy” play. Ashley, the director of the films, told Mashable they were created after she and a friend discussed their sexuality and relationship to the mother archetype in sex. Maman and Maman II depict lactation, breastfeeding, and — of course — being called “Mommy.”
Ashley heads Four Chambers, a pornography project featuring short films with sex and cinema, and that’s where Maman and its sequel were published until the new regulations.
“We initially thought we were just going to have to completely lose them from the site, because really, the whole film is talking about mommy stuff,” she told Mashable in a phone call.
The UK’s Crime and Policing Act prohibits the publication of pornographic images of people who are related or pretending to be. “It didn’t matter if, at the beginning, you said, ‘We’re not related. This is all fiction and fantasy,'” Ashley explained.
Credit: Four Chambers
Laws about porn are nebulous and hard to pin down, she continued. She didn’t receive any communications from the UK government; instead, she had to keep up with its website to find out information.
There’s also been little fanfare about these new regulations, according to Ashley. “There might have been a point years ago when this sort of regulation would have received some debate within the public sphere in some capacity about like sexual freedoms, or about obscenity,” she said, but now we’re in a different time where “porn is sort of public enemy number one.”
Anti-porn rhetoric has been on the rise in the UK and elsewhere, like the U.S., in recent years. There’s been an increase in regulations over what type of porn is allowed (porn depicting strangulation is also now banned). In the U.S., some conservatives are calling for an outright ban on porn and imprisoning of its creators.
Due to porn being a touchy subject, it’s hard to fight for freedom of sexual imagination or the value of sex on film, or putting the human experience of sex on film, Ashley said.
Four Chambers conducted an internal investigation, discussed how the law would apply to the Maman films, and concluded that they had to remove any mention of “mommy” during the explicit sections.
“We basically had to go back and dub it out in a very retro-censorship kind of way,” she explained. Now, the film doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s back online with a “compliance” edit and a disclaimer at the beginning saying it’s been significantly reedited.
While Four Chambers didn’t receive a notice from the government that they had to do this, they feared what would happen if they didn’t. “We were just in a position where we were like, ‘We don’t want to go to jail,'” Ashley said. “It seemed like too big of a risk to take, really.”
Cracking down on sexual expression
These laws are deeply ambiguous and open to interpretation, which means that creators are over-censoring in order just to be sure, Ashley continued. It makes it hard to know where the line is, especially for sex that’s less normative and heterosexual.
Ashley said her filmmaking will be impacted moving forward, but not just due to this law, but because of other porn regulations and issues with payment processors. In recent years, many adult creators have been debanked, and some credit card processors refuse to work with sex workers. There are several more films that Four Chambers has had to remove from the site, though Ashley declined to describe them.
“If I was writing a book or if I was making a film that didn’t include explicit sex, I’d have a lot more freedom to show and explore different topics,” she said. “But the reality is that as soon as explicit sex is involved, there are different rules.”
Adult filmmakers aren’t encouraged or allowed to explore anything outside heteronormative and homogenized sexuality, she continued. “Everything feels like it’s becoming a lot less creative, a lot less descriptive of the really expansive nature of human sexuality.”
But the Maman series is one of Four Chambers’ most popular works, and some of the films Ashley is most proud of making, which is why they edited it so it can exist online. “We just really wanted it to exist in some form,” she said.
Four Chambers removed the films from the site with no immediate notification, and didn’t realize people would notice. Instead, they received multiple emails daily about what happened to it — which is rare. “It was very beloved by our audience, and so it was really missed when it disappeared from the site in a way that we weren’t expecting,” Ashley said.
She believes the series means a lot to people because it depicts a kind of sex not often depicted on screen. “I didn’t realize how necessary it was until I started having these conversations, and realizing how important it was to other people too.”
Human sexuality is diverse, interesting, and important, she said, and Ashley believes it deserves the capacity to be explored in its fullness like any other facet of the human experience in creative media.