> > The possession of "extreme pornography", which includes scenes of simulated rape, is to be outlawed.
> Video footage of two consenting adults, acting out a scene, will be illegal to own. With this on the books, it seems a short hop to outlaw videos of simulated murder.
Even without such an extension, aren't there plenty of Hollywood movies which include "scenes of simulated rape"?
I'd forgotten all about Irreversable - I purchased the DVD, then later on sold it on eBay... does this now mean I'm a 'user' and distributor?
We'll have to see for sure, but it seems to suggest that the legislation only applies to videos that couldn't even get R18 (sex-shop only) rated - but I would have thought possession of those was illegal anyway.
There are a ton of films, legally classified as 18 in the UK, that have scenes that graphically depict simulated rape, torture, murder, and so on.
i always maintain that the classification is merely suggestions. I would propose that anything not classified should not be illegal to sell - just illegal to sell to minors (ie., same as the 18+ classification).
Forget "modern" cinema, they should go all the way back to banning stories coming from Ancient Greece:
> Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces, or rapes, Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta.
IIRC, the UK's existing pornography laws make a distinction between, for example, partial nakedness (page 3 of the sun - not regulated) and sexual nakedness (what you think it is - regulated, restrictions on who can buy, what a licensed shop is, etc). There is also a separate rating above 12, 15, 18, which classifies films as subject to pornography controls or not. Internet sites are completely unregulated compared to video tapes/DVDs, under these laws, which is why they're updating them.
I suspect that films (girl with the dragon tattoo springs to mind) would not be subject to it because they aren't presenting the rape as sexual; it is seen as a crime in the film, which isn't primarily a film about rape/sex (obviously I can't speak for all films.)
The grey area and line drawing are a problem with laws like this, though, as several people have pointed out - I am sure there are films (horrible ones that I haven't seen) that come close to glorifying rape, or depicting it as desirable/sexual - whether those would be part of the law would be up to either parliament to specify, or up to the courts to decide later in case law.
Most folks I know who have actually watched it think it's horrific (at least in parts). It was banned for a long time due (IIRC) to the fact that you could watch it 'straight' and see it as glorifying all sorts of stuff. Especially when you take into account that the second half of the film is about government conditioning and then un-conditioning our anti-hero, so that by the end he's once again able to commit atrocities.
There are tricky cases of defensible portrayals of sex involving children, e.g. Schlöndorff's adaptation of The Tin Drum (which was banned in Canada as child pornography), and narratives that document the child sex industry, but they are rare by comparison. With artistically and morally defensible portrayals of rape, the range is huge. sspiff mentions A Clockwork Orange; even Jeffrey Archer (former senior Tory politician) wrote a novel with a rape scene. I also recall that when Virginia Bottomley (another former senior Tory politician) was asked to name her favourite film, she named Hitchcock's Rear Window, which is quite voyeuristic, and Hitchcock has filmed what I would class as morally indefensible rape scenes. The idea that moral guardians go about forbidding various classes of transgressive art forms that they themselves admit to enjoying is quite ironic.
For the sake of having some sort of a list: Bandit Queen, Deliverance, and Leaving Las Vegas all have hard-to-watch, defensible, and narratively necessary rape scenes. The victim in Bandit Queen I think was supposed to be prepubescent. And didn't Slumdog Millionaire have a child rape scene?
In Bollywood (the Hindi equivalent of Hollywood in India) pretty much any mainstream commercial movie used to have at least one rape scene [1]. The formula had variations : villain tries to rape heroine and hero saves heroine, villain rapes hero's sister and hero takes revenge etc.
The BBC's censored cut of The White Queen includes a scene that would pretty obviously fit the bill, and while it's not explicit it's based on history and she would be classified as a child too.
> Video footage of two consenting adults, acting out a scene, will be illegal to own. With this on the books, it seems a short hop to outlaw videos of simulated murder.
Even without such an extension, aren't there plenty of Hollywood movies which include "scenes of simulated rape"?