sex in bondage porn? i'll be damned.

May 13, 2008 3:38 AM

What's a good resource for the history of laws governing BDSM pornography? [discussion, of course, potentially nsfw]

Barring a website, what can you tell me?

I noticed in my, um, research recently that somewhere along the line it became legal in the USA to show actual sex while a girl was all tied up (god bless 'em).

This made me all sorts of curious about the whole history, and specifically that change in law. I've tried searching google, but as you can imagine trying to find search terms for scholarly interests on the topic gets a little difficult.

posted by nadawi to law & government (6 comments total)

I didn't think it had become legal, but I am no expert (in the law at least). Are you sure the site that showed the act in question was US-based and legit?
posted by desjardins at 5:26 AM on May 13

i'm positive it's legit and us based - it's sex and submission, one of the offshoots of kink.com. they're based in san francisco. it's one of the main reasons my question bells went off. there's no way this would be released from them unless it was on the up and up.
posted by nadawi at 5:37 AM on May 13

"it's" = the video that made me realize the law must have changed at some point.
posted by nadawi at 5:38 AM on May 13

This is addressed in this article about kink.com that came out last year in the New York Times Magazine.

Surprisingly, the commingling of pain and sex, the very core of Kink’s business, has long been unnerving within even the porn industry itself. For decades, the conventional wisdom among mainstream porn producers was that mixing the two, specifically showing bondage and intercourse simultaneously, might invite an obscenity prosecution. “People assumed that it was in the federal obscenity statute, that there was some specification about bondage and penetration,” says I. S. Levine, a k a Ernest Greene, longtime video director and screenwriter in the San Fernando Valley. “It just became one of these things everybody believed.” Bondage, he adds, was typically only shown in films without any visible penetration and sometimes hardly any nudity. Even Kink waited until 2005 before daring to show a man having intercourse with a bound woman.
posted by suki at 6:33 AM on May 13

I'm pretty sure this is just the intersection of "porn is legal" (especially when produced in CA) and "bondage is legal." Miller test and all that.

That said, US v. Extreme Associates may have an effect...
posted by Tomorrowful at 6:35 AM on May 13

Suki— I.S. Levine? That's my boss!
posted by klangklangston at 11:01 AM on May 13