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Comment by norea-armozel | Hacker News Reader

What is it with people in the US and pornography in general? I've never been able to wrap my head around it and I was born and raised here in the US.

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To be fair, it's not just us Americans. I believe the UK has a universal opt-out pornography filter. Somewhat less savory comparisons are to some of the autocratic middle eastern nations.

they also have explicitly banned certain sexual acts like spanking [0].

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/a-long-list-of-sex-act...

Wait, you can't produce porn with spanking in the UK, or you can't even view it? I'm at work, so I'd rather not click that link.

Pornography produced in the UK cannot include any of the following:

Spanking

Caning

Aggressive whipping

Penetration by any object "associated with violence"

Physical or verbal abuse (regardless of if consensual)

Urolagnia (known as "water sports")

Role-playing as non-adults

Physical restraint

Humiliation

Female ejaculation

Strangulation

Facesitting

Fisting

I never thought of the UK as being particularly puritanical or me as being particularly kinky, but I've participated in a surprising number of the acts on that banned list, and most of them seem pretty tame.

I die a little bit inside when I see stuff like this, I mean, what sort of cowards are afraid of free speech? Geez.

As long as everyone is consenting, it's all fair. In fact, my guess is this crap does more harm than good by pathologizing sex. There's enough people out there shamed by their sexuality. We don't need more.

And how did they come up with such a weird list? Caning, female ejaculation, and facesitting in the same list? ???

> they also have explicitly banned certain sexual acts like spanking [0].

Not just that, but they've banned the sale of a whole variety of porn that would be considered pretty tame in the US.

For example, it's pretty much illegal to sell porn filmed outdoors in the UK. You can do it, technically, but you have to prove that there is literally no chance that any minor could possibly have been within eyeshot of the scene at the time it was filmed, and the burden of proof for this is so high that it's impossible to satisfy. (Which was the intended goal of the act).

This ban applies both to physical media as well as online streaming sites, as noted in the article.

"Still Puritan After All These Years" - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/are-america...

I had never heard of a filter (at the government or ISP level) until now. Regardless of how Americans tend to treat the subject, they have in the past valued freedom of information on the matter.

It's been tried at the congressional level (COPA, and probably a few others that didn't make it very far). COPA was found to be unconstitutional.

Thanks, I did not know about that one. I suppose it says something about US precedent that it was ruled unconstitutional, and also says something (quite different) about our representatives in Congress.

Hey, at least you can watch a girl sit on a guy's face in the US.

I don't know. We're not alone though, the UK is further down this road than we are.

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