In the UK, Face Sitting Porn Might Land You in Jail

“I adore breath play. I love being strangled, suffocated and drowned, and I love strangling and suffocating others. Waterboarding: that’s my favourite,” Melissa Todd, a UK-based writer and sex worker, told me. “Many women do: it really isn’t only horrid men forcing us to do these dreadful depraved acts. Interrupting oxygen supply produces the most intense sensation of euphoria. I enjoy it in my private life, and I offer it in sessions too.” 

Starting tomorrow, she and anyone else in the UK distributing or possessing this type of content, 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. The maximum penalty for possession is “two years’ imprisonment for pornography that depicts strangulation or suffocation, or penetrative sexual activity between certain relatives,” according to the law, and “three years’ imprisonment for pornography depicting sexual activity involving a person who is, or is pretending to be, under 16,” with five years as the maximum penalty for publication of all of the above. 

Updates to the Crime and Policing Act go into force on November 6. The law criminalizes a list of sexual acts, including downloading or making choking and incest roleplay porn. According to the law, it will be a criminal offense in England and Wales to possess or publish porn that “explicitly and realistically” depicts strangulation or suffocation, penetrative sexual activity between people who “a reasonable person would think are related, or pretending to be related, in a certain way” and sexual activity between people where “a reasonable person would think at least one person is, or is pretending to be, under 16.” Sixteen is the age of consent in the UK. 

“You have to speak up for porn you don’t like, as well as the porn you do, because otherwise the government will keep censoring more and more depictions of acts they don’t fancy."

“The offences only capture pornography that shows people which appear, to a reasonable person, to be real,” the law states — whatever that means.

The rest of the law is similarly vague in defining what’s criminalized. The “guidance” on the law says: “We consider that strangulation generally means one person applying pressure to another person’s neck,” and “We consider that suffocation will generally mean depriving a person of air in a way that affects their ability to breathe. Unlike strangulation, this does not require pressure to the neck. It could, for example, involve covering someone’s mouth and nose or compressing their chest.” This could mean anything from relatively common acts like face sitting or pushing someone’s face into a mattress, to gagging and more extreme breathplay generally left to professionals. The law says it’ll be left to the courts to decide.

As the adult industry advocacy group Free Speech Coalition notes in its guide for performers and platforms, the government has said this content doesn’t need to appear life-threatening to count.