(Credit: Image from Flickr user Mike Coghlan; used with Creative Commons license)
Throughout my youth, there was a sex shop on Devonshire Road in Cambridge. The place was forbidding and tempting all at once with blacked-out windows and strident listings: SEX SHOP. ADULT MATERIAL. ROLE PLAY. As a young teenager, there was no question of going in. I imagined sanctions from the owner, my parents and even the police if I were to creep inside.
In 2000, when I was at last 18, two friends and I decided to visit the place. It was small, and the owner was the archetypal old-school sleaze merchant: in his 50s with a receding crew-cut and a huge belly, clad in a golf shirt and flannels. The first thing my friends and I noticed was that the shelves on the back wall were full of comics: Iron Man, Batman, Judge Dredd from floor to ceiling. I didn’t need to buy any porn (I had the Internet at home since ‘97), but I’d been an enthusiastic comic book collector since the age of eight, and some of these issues were from the late ‘70s. But there were no price tags on any of them, and they were covered in dust.
“They’re not for sale,” the owner said as I flipped through one. I remember him using that kind of peremptorily annoyed intonation, the “that’s-the-way-it-is-and-there’s-nothing-I-can-do-about-it” tone that is the default setting of the British jobsworth. The shop, he said, was officially, a comic shop; licensing laws demanded he stock comics. An application for sex shop license could cost anywhere from £700 to £25,000 — and that’s just to apply; if you’re not successful, you lose the money. Far simpler and cheaper to fill 51 percent of your shop’s floor space with exhausted funny books.
Apart from the comics, the shop sold a fairly unappealing mix of softcore VHS tapes and grimy sex aids. The sale of hardcore pornography was only legalized in the United Kingdom in 2002; before then, material depicting erect penises and penetration was completely illegal to sell, despite the ubiquity of hardcore porn easily available to U.K. Internet users.
While my friends looked at dildos and cockrings, I asked the owner how national newspapers often carried advertisements for hardcore porn videos.
“If you see an advert for a hardcore porn video, it’s the same as seeing an advert for heroin: It’s completely illegal,” he explained. “If you’re in the market though, let me know.”
We quickly made our excuses and left.
I felt slightly sorry for the guy. His business model was doomed: He could either legally sell softcore versions of the hardcore porn everyone was accessing for free online, or he could take risks and illegally sell the hardcore stuff — which, again, everyone was accessing for free online. There was also something oddly innocent about the sex shop, the way its wares were being outstripped by the Internet and its semi-adherence to the fussy, outdated rules of U.K. censorship.
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron
Recently, oddly plastic Prime Minister David Cameron announced that U.K. Internet providers would begin filtering pornography by default. The measures are being brought in quickly and without much discussion. By the end of next year, customers who want access to pornography will have to opt-in by specifically requesting it from their Internet Service Provider. Alongside the filtering, “rape porn” will also be banned with a new offense for possession of porn simulating rape.
The government’s aim seems to be to make material available online in sync with the laws that govern what’s currently available in licensed sex shops. But there are questions. For example: Films like Irréversible or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo feature violent rape scenes; will owning and watching these be illegal?
This “rape porn” ban follows a 2009 ban on “extreme pornography,” which Section 63 of the Obscene Publications Act defines as “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character” and depicting acts that are “life-threatening” or could cause "serious injury to a person's genitals, anus or breasts."
Last year, there were 71 prosecutions under obscenity laws. This man was taken to court and admitted to “having an odd sex life” under pressure from the prosecutor. His crime? Filming consensual acts — chiefly fisting and urethral sounding (sticking a pipe down your urethra and into your testicles; image search if you dare!) — between himself and others. In court, the jury were asked to consider not whether anyone involved in the acts filmed were injured, but whether they could have been injured.
Cameron’s new initiatives are being driven by recent public revulsion with two child murderers who were convicted over the summer, a man who murdered his partner’s granddaughter and a drifter who abducted and killed a small girl. (During the trials, police presented evidence that both men had regularly accessed violent pornography depicting rape from their computers.) There’s also been plenty of debate around the increasingly early sexualisation of children, with children as young as 11 viewing sexually explicit material online and young teenagers facing pressure from their peers to engage in sexual activity and record themselves doing so.
(Credit: Image from Flickr user Beeches Photography; used with Creative Commons license)
Last week, I revisited the sex shop in Cambridge: Turns out it closed in 2012. On the site now is Vinopolis, a boutique wine store. The owner, Nicolas Hall, says that people still occasionally come into the shop expecting smut, but step back out disappointed. “I still get DVDs and promotional stuff, bits and pieces,” he says.
Cambridge’s last surviving sex shop is Private on Chesterton Road. Private is neither gloomy nor seedy. Nestled between a post office and an optician, it’s freshly painted in a wholesome sky blue and white. The windows are shaded, but with white rather than black, and it’s surprisingly well lit inside. A smiling, attractive middle-aged woman welcomes me. A lone man browses, unashamed.
The material on sale is mainstream “R18” – restricted 18 – hardcore pornography, which is only for sale in licensed sex shops. Legally, R18 films can’t be purchased via telephone or online; you have to go to a sex shop in person to buy them. R18 material cannot depict any violence, coercion or physically damaging sexual acts.
The smiling woman is Debbie Brown, Private’s sales clerk. The shop’s manager, Lisa Bernard, tells me that the store has seen something of an uptick in business, which she attributes to the popularity of the Shades of Grey novel series. Sales of fetish lingerie and bondage aids have increased, and DVD and magazine sales have benefited too. Debbie thinks that people still enjoy browsing, choosing items they might not have stumbled across on the internet. Private should also benefit from the new pornography legislation.
“Lots of people’s partners don’t know they like to look at porn,” explains Lisa, “and there are also young guys who live with their parents. A lot of people won’t feel comfortable opting in.”
Certainly, the thought of being on a government database of affirmed porn users won’t appeal to many. Given the government’s poor record of maintaining privacy, the potential for blackmail and embarrassment have to be a concern. So quietly slinking off to the local sex shop — what had been a dying pastime — may be about to get a lot more popular.
Patrick Kilkelly writes about culture, travel and music. A Ph.D. candidate at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, he reads more about 19th century Korean grain tax reform than is healthy.
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