From Friday, distributing or possessing specific types of choking, suffocation, and breath-play pornography in the UK could carry a five-year prison sentence. This includes material recorded privately at home and not sold on adult sites. The law covers a wide range of acts, and sex workers report their content vanishing from online stores immediately after the rules came into force.
“I adore breath play. I love being strangled, suffocated and drowned, and I love strangling and suffocating others,” Melissa Todd, a UK-based writer and sex worker, told me. “Waterboarding: that’s my favourite.”
Todd explained that interrupting oxygen supply produces an intense sensation of euphoria. She enjoys these acts in her private life and offers them in sessions. Many women share this preference, and it is not limited to horrid men forcing others into dreadful acts.
Starting Friday, Todd and anyone else in the UK distributing or possessing certain types of choking, suffocation, breath play, strangulation and a bunch of other types of porn — even if it’s just recorded in the privacy of their homes and not for sale on a porn site — could face up to five years in prison. This is, predictably, already a huge mess for sex workers.
Adult creators watched platforms remove hundreds of their videos — even when the creators thought they were in compliance with the law. These creators say they were blindsided by the removals, since the content didn’t seem to violate the law at all. Creators are reporting one platform in particular, Clips4Sale, is purging content with little notice, “a precautionary measure,” with videos disappearing in the hundreds.
“Of course, we were all aware of the new Act coming in and prepared accordingly, but not for anything at this scale. We’ve had nothing since and they’ve been tweeting as normal,” adult creator Sophia Truee said. Clips4Sale launched in 2003 and caters heavily to fetish content. “It’s a huge blow to this area of the industry, and I can only hope things will be communicated soon. We, as creators, understand how difficult it is to be a content site in this current climate, but communication has not been prioritised,” Truee said. She noted this is happening right before the holidays, with Black Friday being one of the most popular times for creators selling content. “For many, this will be devastating, as over 20 years of the work will have just been wiped.”
Other news
Meta announced last week it is putting a planned update of its commercial terms of use on pause. The terms would have required business accounts to allow Meta to use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of Meta’s products. The new terms were initially set to go into effect on October 30, but after outcry from journalists and users who did not want Meta reaching far beyond Instagram and Facebook and into their websites to suck up their work as training data for its generative AI products, Meta announced it was pushing the change to November 20. Now, it is on hold entirely.
Archaeologists discovered the oldest direct evidence of psychoactive cannabis use in a Siberian tomb that dates back 2,800 years and was the site of human and horse sacrifices. During excavations of the tomb, a team found more than 1,400 cannabis seeds scattered around the remains of several Iron Age individuals, and even identified cannabinoids—including the active compound tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—in a person’s preserved hair. Though humans cultivated cannabis for many millennia before the Iron Age, this is by far the earliest clear-cut proof that the plant was consumed for its psychoactive effects, which have made it one of the most widely used drugs in the world today.
What it means
Creators making fetish content face a new reality where private recordings can lead to criminal charges. Platforms are removing videos to avoid legal risk, leaving long-term careers in jeopardy. Until the law is clarified, the safest path for those involved in these activities is to stop producing and distributing such material.
