Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

am I being censored?

I just noticed today that many of my posts and one of my pages have been removed from this blog. I will try to rectify this but in the meantime be aware that many of my posts and pages could disappear over the next few days. Anyone who can give me advice on this feel free to comment.

These posts are valuable. The post about the Soho 'maid' Wendy - for example - is about of Soho history. My post about nostalgia for Liverpool and Soho is about Liverpool and Soho history. The information is not found anywhere else. I don't understand why they are violating 'Community Guidelines'.




Wednesday, December 15, 2021

my porn experiment

In my last post I wrote that Sara Pascoe is very fair on the subject of pornography but not so much on the subject of prostitution. The Oxford Professor Amia Srinivasan is the opposite though. She has written that internet porn sites control what people see, 'bringing their sexual tastes into conformity'.

"As Shira Tarrant, author of The Pornography Industry, observes: 'If you are interested in something like double oral, and you put that into a browser, you're going to get two women giving one guy a blowjob ... you're not likely to get two men or two people giving a woman oral sex' She adds: 'Online-porn users don't necessarily realize that their porn-use patterns are largely moulded by a corporation.'"

People who are anti porn will just believe this, as Amia seems to have done. I though decided to see for myself, and the results were quite interesting. I typed 'double oral' into Google and was presented with twenty images. I chose to look at images rather than videos because my wifi doesn't allow me to look at PornHub or the main video sites. I could have seen a tiny picture of each video in Google search but in my experience it's not so easy to assess the content of the videos from just a tiny pic or even from the title.

By the way, I have managed to circumvent this censorship. I have found a site which not only can I look at with my wifi but I can download videos from. It is called porntrex.com. You can't download from PornHub now, as I reported a few posts back. I have downloaded lots of videos featuring beautiful Japanese women. I don't have a thing for East Asian women, I have a thing for beautiful women: for some reason the most beautiful women appear in Japanese porn. I would love to interview Kotomi Asakura and ask her about her life.

Getting back to my porn experiment, eight out of the twenty pictures that I saw when I Googled 'double oral' were of two women and one man. Seven showed two men with one woman. Two of them were indistinct. One of them showed two gay men. One of them showed two men and a 'shemale'. One of them was two women giving oral sex to another woman.

And if you don't believe me, try it for yourself. You probably won't get exactly the same results but you can see that what porn critic Shira Tarrant wrote is nonsense. It isn't true that it's all the same. There is enormous diversity. Men's sexual desires aren't being 'moulded by a corporation'. What is presented has been moulded by people's desires. Heterosexual, homosexual, trans, cis.

They say that porn is ubiquitous in modern society. In one way it is, although I can't access PornHub. In another way it isn't, because it seems that so many people haven't looked at it. If they had, they wouldn't say the stupidest things about it. They are convinced that it is all violent. Society has become sexualized, so they say.

I wish I could show you all of the pictures but I don't want this blog to show pornographic images. I will show you the one where the two women give oral sex to another woman. You can't see anyone's genitals or breasts. You can see pubic hair though, some people believe that it's never seen in porn - people who have never seen it. Some people will be disgusted and horrified but I think it's quite sweet.

There's a film, Cinema Paradiso, where at the end a compilation of censored bits of films are shown. They are of people kissing and so on. It shows life, it shows joy, it shows passion.


Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Croydon Advertiser stops sex ads

In my previous post I said that I thought that the Croydon Advertiser had increased its prices for advertising, and this was why there were only a couple of sex ads in a recent issue and those were for a couple of escort agencies. Now I have learned that this newspaper has been forced to remove all sex ads. There is a blog post explaining what has happened.

The ban is supposed to be to reduce trafficking. However, if there are trafficked women in Croydon then why can't the police find them and rescue them? It's not going to make it easier to find trafficked women when there is no advertising. Where is the evidence that trafficking is widespread?

These sex ads weren't just for brothels and escort agencies, they were for independent sex workers too. They are going to suffer. They will have less work, less money, and may have to start doing things they don't really want to do, perhaps more dangerous things. The purpose of the ban seems to be to try and get rid of prostitution in any form.

Campaigners may think that prostitution requires advertising to exist. That is wrong. Prostitution can survive underground. It is already underground in the West African community. Driving prostitution underground will increase trafficking and make women more reliant on pimps. Some men who are denied access to willing independent sex workers would seek out these pimps.

There have been some posts about these issues on this blog.

Sadvertiser bows to pressure and drops brothel ads

Brothel ads are fine with me, says Croydon councillor
This post is quite interesting. It states what campaigning organization CCAT (Croydon Community Against Trafficking) believe.

CCAT “believe that allowing adverts for sexual services to be printed in local newspapers promotes and encourages the enslavement of women and children and fuels business and profits for traffickers and pimps.

“Now common front-page headlines about sexual attack and assaults on women, printed weekly in our local papers, cannot be disassociated from the advertisements for all kinds of sexual services printed in the back of the newspapers.”

CCAT believes “that the very base concept of ‘supply and demand’ for enslaved women and children is being perpetuated by this advertising”.


So CCAT thinks that women and children are enslaved because of prostitution. They think that violence against women is increased because of prostitution. They have no evidence for this. There is no research that shows this.

This post also gives the opinion of Brian Cooke chairman of Orpington Conservatives.

“You will never stop the sex trade. Being open and clear with girls in flats advertising legally is far better than being on street corners or driving them underground.”

I think that Brian Cooke has got it right.

When I go into Soho I pick up a copy of the free newspaper 'West End Extra' in Berwick Street. It has a 'Personal Services' section where there are lots of sex ads. I hope this newspaper will be able to continue without interference from prohibitionists.

I think that what has happened is that CCAT has been writing to other advertisers in the Croydon Advertiser and telling them the ususal rubbish about trafficking. CCAT may have suggested that these advertisers threaten to boycott the Croydon Advertiser, saying that they have to choose between them and us. If you don't remove the sex ads we will not longer advertise with you.

Most people think of trafficking as a some kind of immigration fraud, perhaps involving forged passports and people coming into the country hidden in the back of lorries. They think that women and children are being coerced and bought and sold by gangsters. Nearly all non-EU prostitutes in London have not been coerced but have chosen to join with an agency in their country of origin. They are no more trafficked that domestic or agricultural workers. I'm not saying everything is fine with them (or with domestic or agricultural workers), but their situation can only be improved with regulation. Before you can have regulation you have to have legalisation.

What I don't like about CCAT is that they are a dishonest organisation. They are dishonest in three ways. Firstly they use false statistics to back their claims. Secondly they pretend that all they want is to end trafficking and slavery for women and children (something we would all want) when what they really want is an end to all forms of prostitution. They are an odd assemblage of radical feminists, religious people and social conservatives. Thirdly they pretend that they give a damn about what happens to the women whose lives they affect. They don't care if the women are deported, if they are made poorer, or if they have to go deeper into a criminal underworld where they are more prone to violence.