"You know what I'm about to do is illegal, right ...?"
There's a discussion going on over at kabale 's LJ on new anti-obscenity laws being proposed in the US and UK that are really damn scary (for example, equating S&M with bestiality). Go check it out.
Anyone who's seen the movie "Quills" will be able to give testimony to the immense power of the erotic written word. This stuff is powerful, dark, and affects people in a deep and profound way. It makes us think differently, look at people differently, analyse relationships differently - like all good art, well-written erotica changes our viewpoint and makes us think about questions of the human condition. It's not a benign art form; it's alive and it's powerful. And it SHOULD be; art SHOULD affect people and change people and make them think in new ways.
And some people are so scared of that power that they're trying to just legislate it away, as if by making it illegal they'd be able to make that part of the human psyche disappear.
Now, I believe that there's a lot of harmful and manipulative pornography in our culture today, and that it gives people warped views of the human body and human desire. Most of that stuff is in Playboy, where the body and is reduced to a plasticine version of its real self, and a woman's desires are reduced to "ohhh, harder!" and where human relationships are reduced to "ooh, you're a sexy stranger, let's have sex right now!"
The content isn't the issue - it's how the subject is treated. You can have a BDSM story in which a person is treated in a manipulative way for the cheap kicks of a selfish and loutish audience, or you can have a BDSM story in which the relationship points to something profound and deep about the human condition, about desire and control and freedom and love. The tying-up bit is morally neutral - it's whether you use it for cheap thrills or for literature that matters.
The people who are trying to outlaw this sort of thing are convinced that they can turn everybody into shiny sanitised robots with the signing of a bill. That it's much healthier to pretend these desires don't exist than to allow people to explore it and come to some sort of (hopefully) healthy, complex understanding of their own sexual psyche. It's the same with everything; these are the people who believe that if we don't give our kids books with sex or violence in them, our kids won't ever get the idea that sex or violence exist. They exist, and it's irresponsible not to give people the tools (stories, songs, images, philosophy) to deal with them.
By the way, if BDSM practice is illegal in the UK, why does Harmony on Tottenham Court Road sell whips and handcuffs and leashes and so on?
Yeah, I'm a Christian and a leftist and a slasher and an American living in London, so I'm concerned on a number of fronts ...