Sex Questions from the Twittersphere: Why is Fisting illegal in Film?
By Dr. Carol Queen • Apr 8th, 2009 • Category: Blog, Carol QueenQuestion:
Why is it obscene/illegal to show fisting in adult DVDs in the USA? Will it ever become legal?
Nothing in US porn is de facto illegal except underage participants. But the law allows porn to be charged as obscene according to “community standards,” which are nebulous and changeable. So literally anything *could* be judged illegal if a jury said it was, and that’s why certain kinds of porn are presumed to be illegal in the US: either because it HAS been so adjudged, or because it probably could be, especially in conservative states/small towns. (These “possibly/probably obscene” things include sex with bondage or hitting; beasties; scat and watersports; and fisting… and it’s also a little-known and shocking thing that has been judged as obscene that tells you just how very socially inflected this all is: interracial hetero vanilla sex.)
So pornmakers mostly now err on the side of caution and omit these things. Some edgy pornmakers incorporate them; some get in legal trouble for it, and any of them *could*. Will this ever change? Well, community standards change a lot over time, and one current argument has it that on the Internet, community standards are different (and much more open) because the Internet itself is a community. But the real answer to your question is another question: Will the government ever treat porn without question as protected speech, and/or will prosecutors ever decide to stop going after porn? Until that answer is yes, fisting and its extreme-porn cousins will have to watch out.
Tweet tweet! –CQ
Dr. Carol Queen >> Carol Queen is a writer, speaker, educator and activist with a doctorate in sexology. First as an organizer in the lesbian/gay community, where she helped found one of the first gay youth groups in the United States, and later in the emerging international bisexual community, as a sex worker and a practitioner of alternative sexualities, she typically teaches and writes from her own experience and that of her communities even as she references academic thought on these subjects. See her website: www.carolqueen.com.
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